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Wednesday, October 11, 2023
Apples And Oranges: The US Patent And Trademark Office Combined Copyright And Trademark And Nothing Good Will Come Of That
Techdirt: Last week I found myself assigned to speak on a “streaming piracy” panel that had gotten bolted onto an event otherwise focused on trademark counterfeiting, despite the latter being a completely separate legal issue connected with a completely separate legal doctrine.
This article is about a panel on copyright and trademark, and how the government is increasingly wanting to conflate the two. I believe that trademark law is a good legal protection to make sure people are getting the right product, but I don’t really support patents. I believe that knowledge should be freely shared, and that price competition is good for a free market, and benefits the creators of the work. Jonas Salk didn’t patent the polio vaccine, instead choosing to release it to the public domain, and it was one of the most successful medical innovations of all time. Today, companies like Johnson and Johnson are raising the price of bedaquiline, which is a lifesaving medicine for tuberculosis, a disease which is entirely curable. Tuberculosis only impacts those from poor or marginalized communities, and so by Johnson and Johnson retaining a patent on it, they’re genuinely killing people who need access to lifesaving medication, if only the market could compete to lower the price. I also really don’t like how the only person silenced after their time ran out was a woman. She clearly had very articulate ideas about conflating patent and trademark infringement, and it's incredibly uncomfortable that she was the only person who was cut off when their time ran out.
I never consciously thought about trademark vs. copyright before this article, but laid out in the article I can clearly understand the difference. I will say I had difficulty understanding where exactly the author was going during the article, but that was mostly because I assumed from the title that the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) was trying to combine them on a policy level. Instead, the article is about a roundtable that the USPTO hosted on anti-counterfeiting that anti-piracy was seemingly tacked on to. I think that both of these are topics that should be talked about, but I also I understand that they are very different and treating them as similar will only lead to more confusion at best. As the author mentioned as her final point, I hope that conversations surrounding both of these topics will include public opinion and not just that of policymakers.
2 comments:
This article is about a panel on copyright and trademark, and how the government is increasingly wanting to conflate the two. I believe that trademark law is a good legal protection to make sure people are getting the right product, but I don’t really support patents. I believe that knowledge should be freely shared, and that price competition is good for a free market, and benefits the creators of the work. Jonas Salk didn’t patent the polio vaccine, instead choosing to release it to the public domain, and it was one of the most successful medical innovations of all time. Today, companies like Johnson and Johnson are raising the price of bedaquiline, which is a lifesaving medicine for tuberculosis, a disease which is entirely curable. Tuberculosis only impacts those from poor or marginalized communities, and so by Johnson and Johnson retaining a patent on it, they’re genuinely killing people who need access to lifesaving medication, if only the market could compete to lower the price. I also really don’t like how the only person silenced after their time ran out was a woman. She clearly had very articulate ideas about conflating patent and trademark infringement, and it's incredibly uncomfortable that she was the only person who was cut off when their time ran out.
I never consciously thought about trademark vs. copyright before this article, but laid out in the article I can clearly understand the difference. I will say I had difficulty understanding where exactly the author was going during the article, but that was mostly because I assumed from the title that the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) was trying to combine them on a policy level. Instead, the article is about a roundtable that the USPTO hosted on anti-counterfeiting that anti-piracy was seemingly tacked on to. I think that both of these are topics that should be talked about, but I also I understand that they are very different and treating them as similar will only lead to more confusion at best. As the author mentioned as her final point, I hope that conversations surrounding both of these topics will include public opinion and not just that of policymakers.
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