Originally Posted By: tahir
No I'm not joking. I believe we in the UK usually fail in extracting maximum value from our IP, it's kind of endemic, pointing maybe to the way that we run our educational and research institutes.

Or to something cultural. I think there's something ingrained in Britain that's very similar to the Swedish idea of lagom; this pitched-as-comedy but actually very insightful psychological analysis calls it cosiness, but I think it's talking about the same thing. A lot of British people get genuinely embarrassed at the idea of being very notably good at something.

Quote:
Europe's first cherry bred for timber, I asked what royalties were being generated, they said they didn't charge any on it.

That particular issue -- applying IP laws to living organisms -- is contentious in its own right, though; perhaps even in the US. Even if information doesn't necessarily want to be free, trees do. The only places where this very splendid work strikes a wrong note to me, are the ones where the author describes the patenting in industrialised countries, of drugs derived from traditional rainforest medicines, as "exploitation" but implies that it's not the patenting itself that's wrong, but that the patents aren't owned by the forest tribespeople.

Peter