IPI Policy Blog

In an interview with Fox Business Network's Maria Baritormo in Davos, U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry said the U.S. is now the world's top oil and gas producing nation. "The U.S. is not just exporting energy, we're exporting freedom."

“We’re exporting to our allies in Europe the opportunity to truly have a choice of where do you buy your energy from. That’s freedom. And that kind of freedom is priceless.”

"There's no strings attached when you buy American LNG," Perry added. 

This is an important point, and we couldn't agree more

With tax reform having just become law, economists are trying to project the effects on the U.S. economy. Such calculation in a highly complex, dynamic economy is at least as much art as science but one trend seems clear -- the job market will continue to tighten. Some economists are predicting that unemployment will drop to 3%, nearly matching the lowest average unemployment rate on record (2.93% in 1953). But there are jobs and then there are good jobs—which will these new jobs be? A study by NDP Analytics provides some insight. It’s the intellectual property-intensive industries that will be driving the growth and creating the types of jobs and careers that people want.

I’ve done a lot of work on the role of intellectual property in trade agreements, so when nuttiness makes its way into the mainstream, I tend to notice.

If you’re interested in some of the work I’ve done on IP and trade, here’s a little:

• In 2014, during the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) discussions, I spoke as a panelist at a Cato Institute event. The panel was pretty much stacked 3:1 against me, and I think I held my own pretty well. It’s one of the more fun things I’ve done in policy in the last couple of years.
• Why Intellectual Property Should be Included in Trade Agreements

Anyway, recently, the anti-copyright coalition Re:Create’s Executive Director Josh Lamel wrote an op-ed in “The Hill” claiming creative industry calls for modern, strong copyright provisions in NAFTA that reflect lessons learned about internet ills since the DMCA was enacted in 1998 “would cripple the creative economy and the internet economies.”

To support his bizarre and counterintuitive assertions, Lamel relies on dubious claims and ends-driven research. To help everyone see through Re:Create’s artifice, I set the record straight below.

On Dallas-Fort Worth’s NBC 5 Lone Star Politics, Dr. Merrill Matthews reacts to the back and forth in Congress over health insurance subsidies and Medicaid block grants to the states in the latest effort to repeal Obamacare. Matthews also discusses what a workable health care reform plan would look like in Texas. Video begins at 11:24. 

After sending out my 29 tweets on local control, which were all theory, I sent out these 14 specific implications of coming to understand that local control is a false doctrine:

That was all theory. Now, implications (1/14) #txlege

The state can limit the ability of municipalities to tax, including property taxes and sales taxes (2/14) #txlege

I'm working on a paper in which I lay out all my arguments against the idea that local control is some kind of sacred government principle, and that states have no right to pre-empt local governments from doing pretty much whatever they want to do.

I had hoped to have the paper done before the start of Texas' special legislative session, but I had hoped to have it finished before the start of Texas' regular legislative session back in January, too, and that didn't happen either.

So I decided to post some of the most important points last night in a series of Twitter posts. But since Twitter must be the stupidest platform for lengthy, organized arguments, I'm posting them here in this blog as well.

This post contains the 29 tweets that lay out the general argument. In a second post I'll list the 14 additional tweets that lay out some implications of the argument.

1. [begin local control rant] #txlege

Today the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) issued a significant ruling overturning Canada’s harmful “Promise Doctrine,” which was a completely novel and ill-advised standard Canada has been using since 2005 to overturn patents on innovative pharmaceuticals and biologics.

Canada’s Promise Doctrine, wholly invented in Canada and finding no basis in domestic or international patent law, turns out to not have even been consistent with Canada’s own Patent Act, according to the Supreme Court, which stated that “The Promise Doctrine is incongruent with both the words and the scheme of the Patent Act.”

Instead of simply granting a patent based on a non-obvious and useful inventive step, the Promise Doctrine insisted that a drug must be able to meet the nearly impossible test of predicting exactly how the product will be useful and then living up to that standard at the time the patent is applied for. This means that a court could be highly subjective in determining that a given patent did not live up to that standard at a time long after the patent was granted, which Canadian courts have been doing, invalidating 26 patents over the last decade based on this faulty Promise Doctrine.

The US Chamber has an excellent statement on the ruling, and Philip Stevens and Mark Schultz at the Geneva Network have a great explanation how the Promise Doctrine (now defunct) threatened innovation in Canada and beyond.

Canada’s Supreme Court apparently understands the importance of not weakening patent protection. Unfortunately, the US Supreme Court seems determined to go in the opposite direction, which is why Congress is beginning to contemplate new legislation to strengthen patent protection in the US.

In an interview with WIBA and WISN host Vicki McKenna, IPI’s Dr. Merrill Matthews discusses the problems consumers face trying to price out healthcare services and products. Matthews is author of a new publication with CMPI’s Peter Pitts, “Selective Transparency.” Audio begins at 18:43. 

There's a new proposal from Republicans for a replacement for Obamacare. What's in it? Can it pass? The WBAP Morning News asked IPI resident scholar Dr. Merrill Matthews.

Save the date to join us for IPI's annual World Intellectual Property Day Celebration on Tuesday, April 25 at the Reserve Officer's Association (ROA) Building on Capitol Hill in Washington DC.

We are proud to announce we will be featuring featuring Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and WIPO's Deputy Director General of Patents and Technology John Sandage. 

United Nations bureaucrats want to mess with Texas.

The UN High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines recently recommended weakening intellectual property protections that drive and sustain biopharmaceutical innovation. Panelists hope their proposals will make it easier for foreign companies to create knock-offs of treatments researched, developed, and manufactured in America and distribute them around the world.

The Panel's misplaced focus on intellectual property resulted in a series of damaging recommendations that would suffocate medical innovation and stunt economic growth in Texas and across the nation -- all without helping patients one bit. Patents and other intellectual property protections are not barriers to access to medicines. The vast majority of treatments on the World Health Organization's Essential Medicines List are no longer protected by patents, yet millions of people around the world do not have access to them.  

Innovation is expensive and risky. Bringing a new drug to market takes an average of a decade and costs roughly $2.6 billion.[1] Additionally, only one out of every 5,000 promising compounds makes it out of the lab and through clinical trials to receive FDA approval. And just twenty percent of approved drugs ever turn a profit.[2]

Strong IP protections allow inventors to profit from their rare successes by restricting copies for a limited amount of time. That's essential, especially given that these companies need to earn back not just the development costs of the successful drug, but of all the ones that failed too.