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[阅读小分队] 【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障8系列】【8-12】经管

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发表于 2012-10-3 20:26:22 | 显示全部楼层 |阅读模式
猴老大黄金周去岛上嗨皮了~我来代班发阅读~特地挑了老大喜欢用的Becker-Posner blog上的文章,可是文章稍微有点难度,所以今天的速度不太好做,大家加油~
【速度】
Do patent and copyright law restrict competition and creativity excessively? Posner
【计时一】
I am concerned that both patent and copyright protection, though particularly the former, may be excessive.
To evaluate optimal patent protection for an invention, one has to consider both the cost of inventing and the cost of copying; the higher the ratio of the former to the latter, the greater the optimal patent protection for the inventor. The ratio is very high for pharmaceutical drugs. The cost of inventing a new drug, a cost that includes the extensive testing required for the drug to be approved for sale, is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, yet for most drugs the cost of copying—or producing an identical substitute—is very low. And so the ratio of the first to the second cost is very high, making it hard for the inventor to recover his costs without patent protection (and for the additional reasons that the present value of the revenue from sale of the drug is depressed because of the length of time it takes to get approval, and that the effective patent term is truncated because the patent is granted, and the period patent protection begins to run, when the patent is granted rather than, years later, when the drug can begin to be sold).
Pharmaceutical drugs are the poster child for patent protection. Few other products have the characteristics that make patent protection indispensable to the pharmaceutical industry. Most inventions are inexpensive, and even without patent protection, or any other legal protection from competition, the first firm to invent a product usually has significant protection from competition in the near term. The first firm gets a headstart on moving down his cost curve as experience demonstrates ways of cutting costs and improving the product. And the public is likely to identify his brand with the product, and keep buying it even after there is competition, and at a premium price. Moreover, many new products have only a short expected life, so that having 20 years of patent protection would confer no real benefit—except to enable the producer to extract license fees from firms wanting to make a different product that incorporates his invention.
【357】

【计时二】
When patent protection provides an inventor with more insulation from competition than he needed to have an adequate incentive to make the invention, the result is to increase market prices above efficient levels, causing distortions in the allocation of resources; to engender wasteful patent races—wasteful because of duplication of effort and because unnecessary to induce invention (though the races do increase the pace of invention); to increase the cost of searching the records of the Patent and Trademark Office in order to make sure one isn’t going to be infinging someone’s patent with your invention; to encourage the filing of defensive patents (because of anticipation that someone else will patent a similar product and accuse you of infringement); and to encourage patent “trolls,” who buy up large numbers of patents for the sole purpose of
extracting licensee fees by threat of suit, and if necessary sue, for
infringement.
The problem of excessive patent protection is at present best illustrated by the software industry. This is a progressive, dynamic industry rife with invention. But the conditions that make patent protection essential in the pharmaceutical industry are absent. Nowadays most software innovation is incremental, created by teams of software engineers at modest cost, and also ephemeral—most software inventions are quickly superseded. Software innovation tends to be piecemeal—not entire devices, but components, so that a software device (a cellphone, a tablet, a laptop, etc.) may have tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of separate components (bits of software code or bits of hardware), each one arguably patentable. The result is huge patent thickets, creating rich opportunities for trying to hamstring competitors by suing for infringement—and also for infringing, and then challenging the validity of the patent when the patentee sues you.
【293】

【计时三】
Further impediments to effective patent policy in the software industry include a shortage of patent examiners with the requisite technical skills, the limited technical competence of judges and jurors, the difficulty of assessing damages for infringement of a component rather than a complete product, and the instability of the software industry because of its technological dynamism, which creates incentives both to patent and to infringe patents and thus increases legal costs.
The pharmaceutical and software industries are the extremes so far as the social benefits and costs of patent protection are concerned, and there are many industries in between. My general sense, however, bolstered by an extensive academic literature, is that patent protection is on the whole excessive and that major reforms are necessary.
Turning to copyright, I note first an interesting contrast with patent law. Although there are some industry-specific differences in patent law, for the most part patents are “one size fits all,” so far as length of protection and criteria and procedures for the grant of a patent are concerned. In contrast, copyright protection tends to vary considerably across different media. For example, when recorded music came into being, instead of providing it with the same copyright regime as already governed books and other printed material, Congress devised a separate regime tailored to what were considered the distinctive characteristics of music as a form of intellectual property. Patent law could learn from that approach.
【237】

【计时四】
The problem of copyright law is less acute than the problem of patent law, partly because copyright infringement is limited to deliberate copying; patent infringement does not require proof even that the infringer was aware of the patent that he was infringing. Nevertheless, as in the case of patent law, copyright protection seems on the whole too extensive. Granted, with modern action movies often costing hundreds of millions of dollars to make, yet copiable almost instantanteously and able to be both copied and distributed almost costlessly, the need for copyright protection is comparable to that in the pharmaceutical industry. At the other extreme is academic books and articles (apart from textbooks), which are produced as a byproduct of academic research that the author must conduct in order to preserve his professional reputation and that would continue to be produced even if not copyrightable at all. It is doubtful that there is any social benefit to the copyrighting of academic work other than textbooks, which require a lot of work and generally do not enhance the author’s academic reputation and may undermine it.
The most serious problem with copyright law is the length of copyright protection, which for most works is now from the creation of the work to 70 years after the author’s death. Apart from the fact that the present value of income received so far in the future is negligible, obtaining copyright licenses on very old works is difficult because not only is the author in all likelihood dead, but his heirs or other owners of the copyright may be difficult or even impossible to identify or find. The copyright term should be shorter.
【276】

【计时五】
The next most serious problem is the courts’ narrow interpretation of “fair use.” The fair use defense to copyright infringement permits the copying of short excerpts from a copyrighted work without a license, since the transaction costs of negotiating a license for a short excerpt would tend to exceed the value of the license. The problem is that the boundaries of fair use are ill defined, and copyright owners try to narrow them as much as possible, insisting for example that even minute excerpts from a film cannot be reproduced without a license. Intellectual creativity in fact if not in legend is rarely a matter of creation ex nihilo; it is much more often incremental improvement on existing, often copyrighted, work, so that a narrow interpretation of fair use can have very damaging effects on creativity. This is not widely recognized.
The need for reform is less acute in copyright than in patent law, but it is sufficiently acute to warrant serious attention from Congress and the courts.
【168】


【越障】
[attachimg=624,351]107361[/attachimg]
President Chavez has promised to use earnings from Venezuela's oil exports to fund further social programmes
Social spending central in Venezuelan election
By Paul Moss BBC News, Caracas, Venezuela
It is big enough for her whole family, with three bedrooms and two bathrooms.
And Elsie is in no doubt about who she has to thank for it.
"Hugo Chavez," she says, without missing a beat.
So does she think he will he win Venezuela's Presidential election on 7 October?
"Yes! Yes!" she says, with a combination of excitement and hope.
If the man Venezuelans call "El Comandante" does win another six years of power, it will be down to the millions of voters such as Elsie, people who regard themselves as beneficiaries of the Chavez administration.
[attachimg=304,405]107362[/attachimg]
The promise of better housing for the poor is a vote winner in Venezuela

Spending oil earnings
Elsie's new home is at Cacique Tiuna, one among hundreds of new public housing developments.
The projects, which are known as "las misiones" or missions, make up just one kind of many social projects introduced since President Chavez came to power in 1999.
There are also health-care and education missions for millions of Venezuelan people who never received such benefits before.
Such programmes have been central to President Chavez's policies while in office, and they now form the cornerstone of his election campaign.
His promise is simple: to use the money Venezuela gets from selling oil to fund more social programmes for the future.
"This is the very first government that is using that resource to solve social troubles and empower poor people," says Rafael Antolinez, a pro-Chavez economist.
"There is a rich class that always governed here in Venezuela. This finished when Chavez took power."

Treated like a god
Gilberto Ban, who has spent the past 10 years working on various community projects in Venezuela's slums, also used to see things that way, and he used to believe the bold claims made of the misiones.
Until recently he considered President Chavez a fellow fighter in the war against poverty.
But no longer.
"eople treat Chavez like a god," he says. "There are people here who say first god, and then 'mi commandante''
"He can lie, and people accept this."
Mr Ban's complaints are not only related to honesty and egos.
President Chavez, he insists, has become so obsessed with his image as a saviour of the poor that the actual content of his social programmes is not receiving enough attention.
"The misiones are responses to immediate problems," he says.
"They are not programmes structured to resolve [challenges that relate to issues such as] health, education, work and housing."

Economic diversification
A similar message is touted by Henrique Capriles, the opposition candidate in this election.
Mr Capriles says he will continue the misiones if he is elected - it would be a brave candidate not to such a promise these days.
But he insists that he could run them more efficiently and effectively.
The opposition also has a stark warning about the way the Chavez administration is running Venezuela's economy.
"It increased our dependency on oil," says spokeswoman Sary Levy.
"And when you depend on the price of only one product that you export, you are very vulnerable."
The Chavez government has failed to develop other sectors in Venezuela during a period when it could have been done, she says.
"You have to push the rest of the economy, to diversify."
Such mainstream economic themes continue to be batted backwards and forwards in the election campaign here.

Television access
And as polling day gets closer, the debate is also getting nastier.
Some people have accused the Chavez administration of lacking transparency in its oil dealings, and suggested some government members and officials may be corrupt.
And there have been repeated complaints that opposition politicians have limited access to the media.
In his role as president, Mr Chavez can insist that television stations broadcast his speeches whenever he feels he has something important to tell the nation.
The opposition say they get just three minutes a day of television advertising, and this they have to pay for.
But Mr Capriles is also feeling the heat.
By promising a more capitalist road to prosperity, he faces the charge that he is a stooge for multi-national businesses, particularly those from the United States.
Mr Capriles is so anxious to dispel this America-friendly image that he refuses to give interviews in English, even though he is a fluent speaker.

Post-election uncertainty
But Venezuelan citizens have their own immediate concerns about this election, rather more concrete than the niceties of political debate.
Many have been stocking up on food and other supplies because of fears that there could be civil unrest when the election result comes in.
The consensus is that a decisive victory for either side would be respected, but a close-run outcome could lead to disputes and perhaps confrontation.
Those on the receiving end of President Chavez's largesse during the past 14 years may not take kindly to seeing a new face in the presidential palace.
And parts of the army stand accused of being unquestioningly loyal to the current president, rather than to his office.
Yet if Mr Capriles does claim victory, his own supporters will accept nothing less than a total transfer of power.
Polling day will mark the end of the election contest, but what comes next is far from certain.
【874】

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发表于 2012-10-3 20:47:21 | 显示全部楼层
1’56”
1’23”
1’06”
1’21”
54”
4’24”
发表于 2012-10-3 22:05:13 | 显示全部楼层
先占了再说,今天忙到晕,明早再看吧。…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
晚了一天,回来补上。
2:44
2:24
2:06
2:15
1:21
越障副标题已经把文章分的很清楚了,就没有写结构。6:01
发表于 2012-10-3 23:22:13 | 显示全部楼层
辛苦LZ了!

2‘25“
1'59"
1'24"
1'46"
58"
越障 5‘09“
发表于 2012-10-4 09:24:58 | 显示全部楼层
发表于 2012-10-4 10:10:14 | 显示全部楼层
morning~~thanks a lot......

1.44
1.56
0.58
1.33
0.47
3.59  president camplaign
发表于 2012-10-4 10:54:49 | 显示全部楼层
好东西,谢谢!
发表于 2012-10-4 11:38:11 | 显示全部楼层
好文!精力好不集中。。。


2:25
2:24
1:56
1:49
1:12

5:45
发表于 2012-10-4 12:12:42 | 显示全部楼层
thx~~~
02''05
02''00
01''07
01''30
00''58
part 2,3完全走神了 TAT

obstacle:05''23
the passage is about a imminent president election in one African country.
the previous president, E, has been in power for 14years and treated as a god rather than a politician by people.
During his period, he used the monry earned by exporting oil to improve the health and education problems.
And if he could be re-elected, he will continue his programs more effiectively.
However,there are some opposite views that E's policy depends on oil so much and there might be corruption in the office.
Meanwhile, E's rival argues that they are not as easy as E to be accessed by the media.
the relationship between E and US is also controversy.
The result is uncertain but most of the people serviced E might feel unease to accept their new president.
发表于 2012-10-4 16:24:07 | 显示全部楼层
2'31
2'09
1'48
1'49
1'10

5'39
今天越障还好,速度看了两边才理解全。速度仍然是150w/m。

The article is about Venezuelan's presidential election.
1, Chaves is highly welcomed by the poor people in Venezuelan. Because he spend the money they get from selling oil to build apartment for poor people.
2, But he is increasingly be taken as God, which is not a good trend according to people with opposite opinion.
3, Other candidates criticize Chaves on ecnomic diversity. they also think other program on enducation and health should be carried on.
4, As the election day approach, the campain is getting hot.
5, The risk is after the election. there are worry about if the opposite candidate win, the power transfer would be a problem.
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