 Hello everyone. I'd like to welcome you today to the 10th annual undergraduate economics debate presented by the Department of Economics and the Undergraduate Economics Club. I'm Zach Baers, a junior political science and economics major and I will be your moderator today. I hope you find the debate engaging and the evidence convincing and informative. This afternoon these students will be debating the motion intellectual property is necessary to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. In support of the motion is the team of Mel Abdul Mutalib, class of 2017, Aaron Cooper, class of 2015, Victor Padachak, class of 2014, and Stephanie Staudenmeier, class of 2015. Against the motion is the team of Martin Gall, class of 2016, Jonathan Lab, class of 2015, Keith Malat, class of 2015, and Andrew Randall, class of 2016. I'd also like to introduce our judges. We have returning Bill Troy, class of 1976, uh, Lisa Deforge, class of 1987, uh, James Santucci, class of 2013, and James Keller, class of 1985. The rules of the debate are as follows. First, the team in support of the motion arguing in favor of intellectual property protection will have 15 minutes to present their argument, followed by the team in opposition. This time is divided equally among the three members of the team. We will have a five-minute period of deliberation for each team, followed by rebuttals. During the rebuttals, the team in opposition will send up members first, three members for three minutes each, followed by the team in support. Then the judges will be able to ask questions. Um, for each question, the teams will have two to three minutes to deliberate, and then a member of the team in support will give a two-minute answer, followed by the team in opposition, reversing the order for each question. Um, the judges will then have five minutes to deliberate, followed by the announcement of the winner and closing remarks. Without further ado, we can begin with the team in support. Uh, good afternoon to the judges and fellow audience. Uh, for today's debate, under the motion of intellectual property should be the protection of intellectual property is necessary to promote the progress of science and useful arts. We in the affirmative argue in the advocacy of the motion under three premises, which is number one, reasoning under Perlani's perspective, number two, economic impact of intellectual property, and number three, the practicality of intellectual property. Before we move on to my first point, which is reasoning under intellectual property, I would like to define the motion word by word. And the two terms that I feel needs to be stressed on in this debate is intellectual property and science and useful arts. We define intellectual property as a work or invention that is the result of creativity, such as manuscript or design, to which one has rights and may apply for a pattern, a trademark, copyright or trade secrets. Essentially, it is the ownership of ideas and control over tangible or visual representation of the aforementioned ideas. And science and useful arts, we believe as a 19th century term, and we acknowledge its constitutional origins. For this, we follow the Supreme Court's definition of science and useful arts of which under Golan Russell Holder, they have defined it as a form of knowledge or learning and manufactured craft. Therefore, ladies and gentlemen as whole, we define this motion as a legal or any form measure with the intention of preserving any creative work of which one has applied for copyright, trademark, trade secrets or patents to help support and encourage a continued qualitative improvement of knowledge and manufacturing craft. Now, beloved audience, I believe we should move on to my point, which is reasoning under Kalpalani's perspective. As the basis for my argument, I believe change under Kalpalani's perspective is initiated under the state to produce a competitive capitalist economy. This implies economically fictitious commodities such as land, labor and money will subordinate the subsistence and substance of the economy into the market. This therefore establishes a market society which occurs when society decides to maximize their own utility as well as when price is adjusted according to the market. Kalpalani believes that this creates unsustainability as the market society causes dislocations in the market. Under the double movement, where the economy tries to separate from society, we see social protectionism to be necessary in the state society. Therefore, historically, since we know that this industrial revolution has shown downsides where the poor have been transgressed in terms of their health, their financial stature and their abilities, we know historically that social protectionism is necessary as the capitalist economy and the free economy will cause others without protectionism to be marginalized. Now similarly, since intellectual property is seen as a fictitious commodity and is highly regarded as a fictitious commodity, which can be defined as any non-labor produced goods that are bought and sold similar to any other commodities, we believe intellectual property is necessary. In this theory of embeddedness, which we could see that the economy is not separate from political institutions and any other institution, we know intellectual property must be protected to avoid repercussions of the industrial revolution for two factors, morality and utility. And under this, we could see the John Lockean assertion that morality is important to help us in promoting science and useful arts, which will at the end of the day help us in our progress. On top of that, protection is necessary for the basis of utility as people will be more satisfied with the production of goods. We understand that intellectual property as the patent of office, as the U.S. patent and trademark office has shown us, allows for greater production and without intellectual property, we understand that there will be under production of goods. For this, we believe that monetarily and socially intellectual property is important to be protected. Thank you. My predecessor had spoken of, I will be talking about how the intellectual property rights are necessary for the growth and sustainability of mankind. Over the past two centuries, according to Wolfe, world population has grown six fold since before that. During this time, world GDP has also grown almost 50 fold and GDP per head has grown almost 10 times. In these two centuries alone, we have had growth that has been exponential and it's been faster than any other growth that we have ever seen in human kind. In numbers, as you can see here, in 1800 years, world GDP only increased several hundred billion dollars from year one BCE to 1800. However, in the past two centuries, world GDP has increased from 175 billion to well over 70 trillion in today's dollars. So the question that we're left with here is, how is this growth to be accounted for? How is it possible that in two centuries, we are able to produce so much capital and have so many gains? And the answer is one simple world, capitalism. The introduction of Enlightenment era thinking during the 1700s served as the moral basis under which capitalism was able to be constructed as an economic system. This basis also prompted the introduction and the growth of the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution helped to bring a world production to an alarming speed hitherto unseen anywhere. And through this, it helped raise the standard of living by providing new jobs and new forms of income for people throughout the entirety of the world. In these past two centuries, humankind has made more scientific, technological, and intellectual breakthroughs than ever before. Capitalism and the underlying idea of intellectual property rights on which capitalism is based serve as the primary causes for all of the growth that we have experienced. Capitalism is a system that rewards people via profit. You are able to market the ideas that you come up with and you have the potential to turn them into money. People are incentivized to produce because of this profit motive. People work for their own benefit. This incentive that is given to people under this capitalist system is only protected because of intellectual property rights. People are inherently rationally selfish and they will seek to do work that is of greatest utility to them. Whatever maximizes their own utility and their own happiness is the work that they will engage in. And if they cannot work for their own benefit, they will not work. Under intellectual property rights, people are able to come up with ideas and use them and claim them as their own and then attain the highest utility possible from these ideas. It is the protection of these rights that guarantees that the ideas that a person is able to come up with is theirs and that they can use it to make a profit. Without intellectual property rights there is no profit motive to be had and without profit motive that means that the entirety of the capitalistic system is doomed to failure and the lack of a capitalistic system essentially calls for a vastly deaccelerated process and motion of human advancement. So in summary, intellectual property rights have brought wealth and prosperity to all of mankind at different rates but nonetheless the prosperity is undeniable and the rate at which we have increased prosperity levels over these past two centuries have been far greater than any other rate that we have ever seen in the entirety of human history. Without intellectual property rights, none of this could have been possible and if intellectual property rights were to be taken away the growth of human progress would be lost entirely. Thank you. Welcome again. My name is Stephanie. Now that my partners have clearly demonstrated and performed the, now that my partners have clearly demonstrated the usefulness and importance of IP for growth in our American economy, I would like to get right into the statistics and IP's placement in this U.S. economy. So recently a study was published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Economic and Statistics Administration that resulted in some really interesting facts about U.S. relationship with IP. What they discovered was that in 2010 40 million jobs were reliant on IP protection. These IP intensive industries made up 25 percent of the U.S. workforce. These people, oh I'm sorry, these jobs actually accounted for 35 percent of that year's total GDP, gross domestic product. Now what is the difference between a non-IP intensive worker and an IP intensive worker? IP intensive workers make on average $300 more a week than the non-IP intensive worker. Now this statistic comes because these people are blossoming in innovation. As Obama himself put it, IP is representative of the leading edge of the U.S. economy and the ingenuity of the American people. It is creating something instead of just copycatting. I'd like to talk about one of the most important IP intensive industries, U.S. e-commerce. E-commerce touched over $230 billion this past years with a 13% growth rate. Now the Internet is a business war hog. Without nowadays and stuff, the consumer is not restrained to the store. We can Google and compare. Location doesn't matter anymore. This is an incredible force for competition, but even Google would not be, even Google would not exist without IP protection because internet-based businesses, if you try to create a website and make an internet-based business, what is protected under IP? Well, your web content, your name, your logo, everything. So without IP, what would happen to this giant economy? Well, we would have a million people ripping each other's content consistently, and this would result in a lack of organic filter for Google search engines or anything like that. So what you have then is that a million people are copying each other's websites, and then this will result in a horrible difference between the barriers to competition with the rich and the poor. Because if you think about it then, without an organic filter trying to create an internet business competitively, you would only have the amount of money you put in the sponsors. This is incredibly detrimental for the poor in this economy. Now many argue against IP because they say that without IP it would be a free market, but I'd like to reiterate this fact. Logically this doesn't make sense. And for example, many of the people use as an example against IP, the fashion industry. This is an effort in changing industry, but if you think about it, how hard is it to become a stylist because this is ever changing? Leading name brands are taking these stylist ideas and running with it. So we have these crazy things like game shows like Project Runway and all this other stuff to become a stylist. It's a barrier to competition that you can't get over if you are not a name brand. So what would happen to each of these economies that are based off IP, this 35% of global domestic product? Without IP what would happen to it? Well, I would say that there are many mistakes with IP. Many examples of misuse and all of that. But the majority is protected under it and it protects the majority of the businesses and I'm not really sure if there's a better option. I'm not as tall. I'm Keith and today our team is going to be arguing the side of the opposition. When the founding fathers crafted our country's constitution, one of their goals was to set the foundation for an economy that would be both innovative and dominant. One of the ways they set out to achieve this goal was Article 1, Section 8 Clause 8. It gives Congress the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts by granting authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective works for a limited period of time. The intentions of the men who signed the constitution and therefore approved this clause were honorable. They wanted to ensure that inventors would have a period of time to monetize their original ideas. The thinking was that if inventors were not granted this right, other people could simply take their ideas and reap the benefits of their use without incurring the costs of their creation. This would reduce the incentive to invent and therefore less people would do so. As a result, the rate of innovation would lower, productivity would be dampened and the country's full potential for economic growth would not be realized. This was the thinking of the crafters of our constitution and it was the basic outline argument outlined by the opposition today. Today we must look at the patent paradox. Is this system that is great at rewarding individuals simultaneously helping add to the entirety of our human intelligence? Is the notion that granting somebody exclusive rights to knowledge warranted by its supposed benefits? We argue that it is not. I would first like to demonstrate that intellectual property rights are not only unnecessary to promote progress but that sometimes by willfully declining the legal protections patents guarantee you, innovation can actually be driven. Sometimes patent holders voluntarily share their ideas as a form of market research, an interesting trend that is being employed by large American shoe manufacturers. Designs for shoe models are being deliberately released into the black market. If Reeboks and Adidas are being pirated and Nike's new model is not, they know that it requires further development before they release it into the legal marketplace. Now this benefits both the company and consumers and drives innovation in the footwear industry. And it may seem trivial to discover consumer preferences towards sneakers but it is not outlandish to imagine the same strategy being used in industries with more of a scientific focus. If this is the case intellectual property rights are not only unnecessary to promote scientific innovation but their absence can actually encourage it. The American patent system as we know it today has repeatedly created economic inequalities and inefficiencies. Intellectual property rights incentivize rent seeking which is the process of manipulating political situations and regulatory institutions to increase one share of already existing wealth without actually creating any new wealth. This is inefficient because it entails devoting resources to an outcome that does not increase the overall size of our country's economy. One example of this is patent trolling which is the process of purchasing patents at low cost and either selling them for high prices or using them to launch legal claims against infringing firms. Institutions that participate in trolling do not develop technology or sell products but instead they derive most of their revenue from filing legal claims. The reality is that patent trolling happens all the time. Over the past few years the number of patent trolling cases has increased in both absolute terms and as a percentage of total patent cases filed. Since 2012 litigation with patent trolls has accounted for over half of the total patent cases. When there is rampant patent trolling it both undermines the purpose of intellectual property rights and creates economic inefficiency. Based on research conducted by professors at the Boston University School of Law in 2011 American businesses incurred 29 billion dollars in direct costs from patent trolling litigation. To put this into perspective American businesses spend about 250 billion dollars annually on research and development. This means that the cost of defending against patent trolls is equal to over 10 percent of annual investments in R&D. There's a huge opportunity cost here. The money that is being devoted to these frivolous lawsuits can instead be spent in ways that actually add value to a business such as product creation and improvement bettering customer experiences and building new factories or more efficient machinery. In today's business world patents have become coveted financial assets. Corporations participate in bidding wars on key patents that will drive revenue growth and increase profitability. Small companies do not have the resources to make attractive offers to patent trolls so all of the most valuable patents end up under the control of companies such as IBM and Apple. This is creating monopoly situations as the biggest companies are the only ones who have the patents they need to make the best products. The reward is the right to block out competitors, lower output, and overcharge consumers. The downfalls of the current patent system were not unforeseen by the men who created the infrastructure for it. Thomas Jefferson warned that grants of this sort can be justified in very peculiar cases only if at all the danger being very great that the good resulting from the operation of the monopoly will be overbalanced by the evil effect of the precedent and it being not impossible that the monopoly itself in its original operation may produce more evil than good. It seems as if the fears harbored by our founding fathers have become a reality. Good afternoon. My name is Andrew Randall forgive me if this gets a little loud. Today the United States is in the thick of an era of patent extremism with this extremism comes an increasing trend toward longer lasting patents protection of abstract ideas and an increasing effort by corporate conglomerates to keep small innovators out of competition. As there is no substantial evidence that increasing intellectual property rights proves direct causation to increase innovation we must come to the realization that intellectual property rights are not necessary rather they have facilitated a system so robust and nebulous that patents have surpassed their threshold of effectiveness and have entered a downward slower trend toward a failed system. Barry Schwartz and Adam Grant of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania elaborate on this idea explaining that there is a point where positive phenomena reach inflection points that watch their effects turn negative. What Schwartz and Grant have discovered is that every beneficial input or resource or advantage whether it be money happiness justice or protection of intellectual property eventually becomes problematic and ineffective. Schwartz and Grant simplify this idea to the elementary statement entitled their work too much of a good thing. This is precisely with the protection of intellectual property rights has become too much of a good thing. Throughout this debate is imperative that we understand that my partners and I are here today to articulate the fact that the status quo is not a be all end all solution to promoting the sciences and useful arts rather patents have become the bane of the United States economic advancement. Derek Kana Forbes elaborates stating Madison obviously warned that all monopolies including copyright must be guarded with strictness angst abuse. Abuse is precisely what we have seen the estimated total number of defendants sued by patent trolls more than tripled from 834 in 2007 to 3401 in 2011. Furthermore according to a study by the United States government accountability office regarding infringement lawsuits the overall number of defendants increased from 2007 to 2011 by an astonishing 129 percent. Look no further than Silicon Valley to see patent extremism at its finest. According to William F. Miller of the Silicon Valley edge during the 1990s the portion of the valley's workforce in the research and design was 10 percent a full two and a half times the national average. Logically with the future of job creation resting many of these startup companies the United States ought to uphold a system to protect these companies ironically the system that we've created has done the opposite. The intellectual property rights that we put in place to promote innovation for small companies has shown little success. In fact increased intellectual property laws have not spurred a surge in innovation or research and design. Rather many large firms have decided to harvest patents as a defensive strategy. An empirical study of patenting in the U.S. semiconductor industry showed that many firms use patents more as a horizontal strategy rather than to gain market value from rival firms and assist them in obtaining favorable terms and cross licensing negotiations. Lester C. Thurlow of Harvard Business Law review explains why this is problematic for software-related companies many of which reside in Silicon Valley. He writes, companies such as Intel have big legal budgets to defend what they think is their property but they also are accused of aggressively attacking what others think is theirs in order to create uncertainties time delays and high startup costs for their competitors. The end goal of companies like Intel is to keep disruptive innovation out and they do so by abusing intellectual property rights and using law as an instrument of destruction for startup companies. The GEO explains that the cost of defending one patent infringement lawsuit which excludes any damages awarded was from $650,000 to $5 million in 2011. PMEs are more willing to bring lawsuits based on broad interpretation of their patent claims because they cannot be countersued for patent infringement since they do not produce a product. Essentially intellectual property rights have become a win-win for large corporations who work with PMEs and a Berlin Wall for small companies. A company named V-Lingo epitomizes this story. Mr. Phillips, the head of V-Lingo, worked for three decades to program a speech recognition software similar to what we've seen with Apple's Siri feature. Unfortunately Mr. Phillips was bought abroad to court and he won yet regardless according to the New York Times the suit had cost $3 million and the financial damage was done. Mr. Phillips small company was crushed by this and as he explains we were on the brink of changing the world and before we got stuck in this legal muck. If we look to the GEO's analysis of where the most patent infringement claims are filed we see that most cases occur on the west coast of California and more specifically Silicon Valley. Mr. Phillips story is not an anomaly. The same story is happening for all sorts of startups across the country. Disruptive innovation is the touchstone of economic advancement in regards to today's economy. Unfortunately due to intellectual property rights companies similar to Mr. Phillips are being crushed by patent protections from PMEs and the calomits that work with them. Our focus on intellectual property rights has become so rooted, so rooted in protecting everything under the sun that it has manifested itself into a broken system that keeps the powerful on top and the innovators out of the question. So much so that startup companies typically stay as far away from patents as possible. Michael J. Muir expands on this saying just 24 percent of patent startups, 24 percent of venture-backed startups had any patents within five years of receiving financial. Judges today we must look at the overarching goal of this resolution. Please make a vote today for future B-lingos and more importantly the future of America's economy. Thank you. Good afternoon. Today we are grappling with the idea of intellectual property rights and whether the purpose is still relevant in modern society. Some may say we have touched upon the most conceivable outcomes of a world with such laws but I offer that we have yet to truly ask ourselves the largest and most fundamental question that is the keystone to this entire discussion. The question is what type of civilization do we want to become? Are we merely profiteers who are blinded by our own ambitions or are we a group of beings who together can build a truly wonderful world? I argue that we strive to be the latter but through action we are the former. The pharmaceutical industry is a strong example of this particular reality. The pharmaceutical industry is understandably tied to the discussion about intellectual property rights. Patents have traditionally been a way to incentivize companies to find research and development. However intellectual property protection in the pharmaceutical industry has repeatedly created negative outcomes for the people who are supposed to be beneficiaries in medical research. Pharmaceutical companies regularly report huge profit margins regardless of their claims that patents are absolutely necessary to ensure their survival. What intellectual property rights in the pharmaceutical industry have brought about is a monopolistic market that effectively prevents financially strained individuals from receiving the care that they deserve. In April of 2013 the Supreme Court heard a case brought against the molecular diagnostic company Myriad Genetics. The association molecular pathology filed suit challenging the validity of Myriad's patenting of two genes they had isolated. The genes sometimes contain mutations that predispose women who carry them to breast cancer. Information contained within these genes can be used to improve breast cancer detection prevention techniques. Since Myriad had patented the genes other companies could not test their patents could not test their patents or patients for them. Before the case was brought to the Supreme Court intellectual property rights created a situation that prioritized corporate profits over the health of our country's citizens. Myriad ended up losing the case and numerous medical providers now offered the genetic test. Sometimes though the negative outcomes brought about by intellectual property rights have a longer lasting effect. In 1980 the court case Diamond versus Chakrabarty ruled that genetically modified organisms could be patented. Shortly thereafter a Harvard University biologist was granted a patent for a mouse that had been genetically modified to be susceptible to breast cancer. The mouse proved to be a useful way to examine the effects of breast cancer and test different treatment options. Any other private researcher who wants to use the genetically modified mouse for his or her own research must first pay large royalties to Harvard. These royalties are often in the millions of dollars. Even though these patents were issued in the late 80s Harvard continues to garner payments from researchers who wish to improve the quality of breast care cancer patients receive. This is undoubtedly stymied in the progress of medical research. Pharmaceutical companies downplay the negative externalities that are brought about by their intellectual property rights while at the same time overstating the importance of patents as assets. Is it so far fetched to imagine a world in which medical research is driven not by promises of executive compensation but by working towards the goal of bettering the lives of our fellow human beings. Research funded by the National Institute of Health has led to huge advancements in the fight against cancer heart disease and other illnesses. NIH funded research has led to nearly 100 Nobel prizes. This type of scientific research was not incentivized by promise of executive rights over their findings. In fact the incentive was just the opposite. The men and women who have made these advances in the field of medicine hope that their ideas are not proprietary. They hope that their ideas are copied as much as possible so that their positive effects can be far reaching. Time and time again the legal protection of intellectual property rights has created economic inequalities and inefficiencies dampening economic innovation. Is it possible that the concepts on which the edifice of intellectual property rights was built need to be reconsidered? Based on the repeated failures of the current system it is evident that the intellectual property rights are not not necessary to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. Thank you. Hi again at this point both teams will have five minutes to deliberate and then the team in opposition will send up three members for three minutes each for rebuttals and the team in opposition will have nine minutes to rebutt. Thank you. Okay the first thing I'd like to address is when you put up a chart of GDP growth in America over time and there was an exponential growth at one point and I think this was in the second speech you said that this had to be attributed to something and then you logically concluded that because it has to be attributed to something it must be attributed to the creation of intellectual property rights. I think to attribute all or even most of our country's economic growth in the past two or three hundred years to intellectual property rights is a slam against the creative industrious people who make our economy move. We have incentives other than monetary gain when we create and innovate. We have open source software which is an example of such things people do not make money off open source software rather they see a current technology that they think they can improve so they do so and then they release it for the public to consume without demanding any compensation. Also I think to attribute the growth to IP rights ignores historical components globalization is a big reason for the GDP growth. We've had new markets that we've never been before able to tap into so now we have consumers all over the world who have the opportunity to use American goods and services. Also the internet is a big reason for the GDP growth which is tied into globalization and the internet itself was actually not created out of financial incentive it was created by the government originally as a military strategy and in another speech I'd like to address one more thing you said that a beginner's game is no easy game without intellectual property rights and this tied into when they were talking about e-commerce companies having a hard time if intellectual property rights did not exist but in fact they suffer with intellectual property rights. Time and time again patent rolls target these small software companies who are producing software that falls under the scope of some abstract idea they've patented so the way that the patent rolls approach the situation is they understand that small businesses don't have a lot of capital or equity so what they do is they force small businesses to agree to a settlement that is less than the amount of money it would take them to fight it in court even if they will win so a small business could be approached by a patent troll and they know that if they went to court and spent two million dollars on legal fees they would win but their business would collapse instead it makes more sense to give the patent troll two hundred thousand dollars take the blow and continue to fight for survival so to suggest that without intellectual property rights small companies and e-commerce companies would suffer i think ignores the reality of what's actually going on thank you i'm going to give a general roadmap i'm just going to flow through all of their overarching arguments which was the carapalangi argument about how a better society and also financial growth is related to patents and also how there's a blossoming of innovation due to patents so let's begin first with the carapalangi argument and they basically said that because of patents they're calling for a better society and that a better society comes from these patents because it protects people and they aren't victimized like innovators aren't victimized however let's look on the opposite side of that and see how people are actually victimized by it on the one hand you have these smaller companies that can either go to court for patent infringement and lose all of their company or just be bought out by these bigger companies on the flip side look at medicine and say i was there was a case where one man patented a gene that um actually did tested for too many false false positives with um birth defects but another company used it and with two other studies they found that they could track down syndrome however then he brought them to court and because of this he's suing them for every nine dollar fee for every nine dollar fee that this test was run in every single hospital so if that actually if he does win in court the cost will more than double to figure out someone has down syndrome so flip that argument now moving on to exponential growth let's look to tim woo of uh columbia law and he says that we've had three decades of astonishing software innovations like the lotus one two three spreadsheet netscape's browser or google search and the patent is responsible for absolutely none of it so what they're trying to relate is all this exponential growth of patents but really you can take patents completely out of the question because these big like some of these software companies even the big ones have acknowledged that they didn't need patents to actually spawn any of this innovation like it would have happened regardless basically the patents have for software companies which is the biggest growing industry right now it's been a failed experiment in innovation policy and an expensive one now let's move on to the fact that they say that there's more blossoming in innovation well if this was true let's look to the fact that michael j mure as i brought up in my speech before states that just 24 percent of ventured back software startups had any patents at all within five years of receiving financing so just as we brought up with the sneakers point many companies are forgoing to even getting patents in the first place because the cost of getting them is a dozen outweigh the benefits of having them in the first place now let's move on to their final point that says that everything would be copied well my argument to this is yes well this really though the only strong like argument that they have for this is that the only companies that really benefit by copyright are ones like disney because if you look at the sunny bone i'm making mouse act of 1998 all this act did was focus on large companies who hold royalties after the author musician or artist is gone and copyright keeps literary music works unavailable because large corporations like disney want to keep a few titles protected to do so the protection has to be extended to all works essentially holding protected work hostage because license and fees are too expensive basically what we've shown today judges is that yes i intellectual property rights might have been something that we need in the past but if we look to the status quo in the future of america where economy is going they are obviously a detrimental factor to our economy they're so detrimental to the smaller startup companies it's basically stifling innovation flip everything that are flip everything our opponents have said and flip it on to our side because we have shown through this entire debate why not having intellectual property rights will bring more innovation and or not necessary thank you hi guys i'm martin i haven't had a chance to talk yet uh and i'm not going to invoke the uh poignée con debates uh well let me start off uh the internet is a very interesting thing uh just as andrew talked and uh not just the internet but you uh sorry stephanie um you made it seem as uh the economy is dependent on copyright it's dependent on intellectual property it it's 40 million jobs 25 unemployment sorry 25 of all employment 35 percent of the gross domestic product but how do we know any of that is actually dependent on intellectual property it's uh basin industries that using the intellectual property but that is not the same thing um you i'm going to quote you internet without ip is internet without economic functionality amazon will disagree because it's i mean it's a retail store and they don't depend they give you physical goods it's not intellectual property and they are making a lot well actually they're not making that much money right now but they don't really know as well maybe someone does um you said there's a lack of a better option um their innovation can come from a variety of sources and from most of human history it happened uh without any need for patents and uh i think we kind of already addressed that there are ways to create competitive spirit and resolve and potential innovators without bestowing the right to hold a monopoly sometimes all it takes to promote innovation is recognition government non-profit and academic organization such as the national institute of health the bill the bill and melinda gays foundation or the noble prize to give one time cash uh prizes to innovators uh creating something rather than copycanning that's another quote that you gave and i think that human human beings uh always will have art will always have signs of some sort because human beings want to explain how the world around them is and getting rid of ip might mean the end of for-profit big budget hollywood films but that does not mean that's the end of film it's the end of uh any kind of research or anything like that and um uh and what about the people who uh actually physically create the goods rather than just the ideas good afternoon everybody i'm erin i also have not spoken yet uh i have a few small things to get out of the way before going into the myriad example that they had brought up um the idea that larger companies are using intellectual property as a club against smaller companies to try and protect the things that they have done this is an idea saying that businesses are doing what businesses do because that's what business does the idea that businesses are trying to protect the things that they have done is the thing that any person would do and certainly the thing that any business should and does do in addition you had mentioned last year there was 3900 uh intellectual property cases that had brought to court that doesn't exactly sound like something that is extremism at this point if you look at the thousands upon thousands and palm thousands of cases that actually go through the american judicial system going to the myriad system where the company had patented the ideas of bracket one and bracket two which is the genes that they were looking for in women to detect breast cancer what they had patented was not an idea they had patented something that was part of the human genome that's not an idea that is something that depending on like personal preferences was come up by either a creator from religion or science that was not a personal creation and the fact that these medical companies and these pharmaceutical companies do what they are doing again that is a question against the judicial system not against the idea of ip and the protection that it offers it has nothing to do like you're questioning the idea that the system is broken not the idea is broken thank you and you with our bottle here um so i'd like to address uh first some of uh clarifying what i said about internet-based business because i don't think that my competitors here really understood so when you create a website as in when amazon created its page the page that you go to you are putting in a ton of effort in coding and in writing your content in providing descriptions for those products that they even sell all of which are covered under ip protection if we did not have this protection then we would have people copying amazon as in an entirely new site that is identical to amazon why else wouldn't they do it it's a successful business and if that is legal it's money to be made right um so also the stats that were provided were from an economical and statistical study um by the u.s patent and trade office and ip intensive industry was defined as industries that would lose profit without ip now i'd like to address one of the problems with my opponents uh argument here they talked about a lot of um patent infringement cases which went up exponentially in these past years right well this has gone up um along with the demand for ip in general um wipo the world uh intellectual property organization actually released a conference uh recently um where larry curry said that the demand for ip has gone up immensely now we have patent infringement cases going up ip demand going up and innovation going up all of these things are completely correspondent to each other meaning that if anything that argument would mean that we should in uh um we should add more intellectual property rights we should improve upon it and and push it more for innovation and um to match the demand so i'll let victor talk now so i'll try and keep this short and sweet so throughout this entire debate uh your arguments have been centered entirely on the problems that the u.s patent system has had with preventing economic progress and we could i will say that yes there are probably problems that the u.s patent system has created and continues to create today however the problems that we experience in today's world are not indicative of saying that all of intellectual property rights as an institution should be completely discarded yes there have been abuses of the system but again this is of the system as we have it created today changes can be made and probably should be made but this is again no way to say that intellectual property rights themselves should be gotten rid of as well your argument really hasn't provided a single real reason against intellectual property rights themselves only against the faultiness of the u.s institution as we have it today in addition you had argued that uh intellectual property rights for an individual is not necessary to protect the growth of human progress and i would like to counter by saying that intellectual property rights are basic human rights each human has the right to life liberty property in the pursuit of happiness and intellectual property rights are just like any other kind of property what's the difference between property that's created with muscle and property that created with the mind it seems to be exactly the same to me slaves didn't have the right to the products of their labor and as a result they didn't have the rights to their life and to liberty and so by taking away intellectual property rights are getting rid of them you are essentially taking away basic human rights on which all other human rights are predicated because the right to life and liberty cannot exist without the basic rights to your own property so in conclusion not only has your argument missed the point of what we are debating today but some of the points that you make are essentially questioning the necessity of basic human rights now we have a question and answer period from our judges um i requested the judges ask their questions here from the podium so that all of you can hear it and the camera picks it up as well um after each question is asked both teams will get one minute to deliberate and then be able to deliver a two minute response since we ended with them we will start with a team in opposition i guess i gotta adjust this again hello so just a point of information i actually know him jeff bezos and yeah they do a lot of trademark work big time in fact i think they own the trademark to the shopping cart itself um back in i met him first in 1995 okay here's a question uh and this is for group two would you explain how a company would get a return on investment when they've been involved with a 10 to 12 year development and testing cycles such as pharmaceuticals um and also would you explain the cost of a drug going down when in fact a lot of the resistance is probably some of the medical system doesn't want to pay for those tests and it won't be reimbursed by insurance so two parts on the pharmaceutical side all right two to answer the question uh while not having intellectual property would have dramatic effects on the structure of how we get research done and i encourage you to think of it an alternative mindset of uh ways you can compensate research uh well an alternative model to how research should be done you can fund research you can through government you can fund research to through grants you can fund research by a lot of means it does not have to be through a private company uh perhaps you can uh give a grant to a private company but ultimately the the research does not need to be done by a company and could be encouraged by government um an idea is that what if all drug pharmaceutical uh factories everything like that they're all generic there is no um uh brand drug but the actual research who create to innovate drugs comes from different sources and that's public so the actual like uh factory behind it physically making the drugs can be private and the funding for research can be public so i have a i have one question for each side um we'll start with the pro side um um one of the important historical events in the history of intellectual property for you was the united states industrial revolution uh to the extent that that was largely based off of stolen factory plans from england to what extent do you think it could be attributed to intellectual property protection and for the con side um you mentioned that there is a tripling of patent trolling from 2007 to 2012 uh the question is was there an institutional change in that period that led to this sort of behavioral change and if not to what extent can intellectual property be blamed and to what extent do you think we need a different explanation uh to jamie's question i say touche but the way it worked out with the british idea of the factories they were these large full-scale heavy machines that were untenable and something for our fledgling economy something that was not something that we could manage what happened was when we went in there and we took the idea we had to completely change it to actually modify it to our smaller more rural societal standards so yes the idea was certainly copied and i can promise you other countries also stole that idea and the idea being able to generate new ideas comes from the ability to reference other people's ideas certainly i will not you have me on that sir but the modification of the idea is not something that we're talking about that is what the thing the intellectual property protects that modification to something that is more suitable to a new environment and allowing that to be fostered that is what how it was created thank you to answer your second question as far as like an institutional change i know what actually has happened is opportunity was recognized um working and what's been going on is we're trying to work it out of the system but we needed to really define the scope of what has been patented because there's just way too many abstract ideas and that's what allows um that's what allows trolling to happen in on such a large scale and i mean honestly the only three things that were actually the three rights we have are life liberating the pursuit of happiness not property so i mean those things kind of need to be defined and protected and i think with those in mind we can use those ideas to protect that so thank you that's a question there's a lot of pressure on me uh-oh better be a good one next year there you go okay so i have a very simple question for both groups i don't know which one to answer first if you own property do you have to hold on to it or can't you rent it through a process of what's called royalties or licensing fees i think the best example is very simple mcdonald's mcdonald's offers franchises worldwide they don't build all their stores they simply say use our model and you can make money but it's all your investment and i'm i just like each team to think about why aren't royalties part and licensing part of this discussion why would a company simply hoard all of its intellectual property thank you it's like we met here before uh to the question that was asked and in the very brief amount of time that we had to think about it i mean yes of course i i we the idea of intellectual property you have the uh you have the ability to buy a home and you can sell that home you can buy a home and you can rent that home if you come up with an idea and you patent that idea and someone else has the resources to actually make that idea flourish and actually help not only you by benefiting by making it much cheaper that actually overcoming that wall actually getting it out there is more it is exactly your right to actually make sure that your property goes where you choose it to go and that just goes back to the idea that you have you have the rights to everything that you either thought up or purchased and making sure that that is actually preserved is something that needs to happen first of all um licensing has been a part of intellectual property rights for a very long time and it seems intuitive right you don't have to buy a whole patent a business can make a much smaller expenditure and use it for the time that they need it and then they don't have to hold on to this expensive piece of paper um when teslo is actually creating alternating current um he patented he licensed his intellectual property to westinghouse so we have seen it time and time again but i would argue that in the current system it still creates exclusionary situations because a lot of times patents licensing fees are very high and small businesses still can't afford it and there are also sometimes other political factors involved that informally prevent small businesses from being able to license intellectual property so it is a very good idea and concept and it has worked many times but uh other times it creates exclusionary situations and uh perpetuates monopolies now the judges will have five minutes to select a winner um while we present the t-shirts and certificates to our debate participants so as to quick note um we've been doing this for 10 years and i just want to applaud the club and also the faculty for sponsoring this for the past 10 years it's always been a real pleasure to come up here and hear such wonderful arguments on both sides so applaud everybody i'd also like to say this was one of the best prepared groups we've seen in all these debates over the many years it was good data it was good analysis going back and as a former member representing the university of the debate union back of the 70s again the 70s not 76 sounds a little bit better um really did well really followed the format well really well prepared and so i really do appreciate that as well this is always the hardest part but overall our judgment was for and everybody did a great job thank you to thank everyone for coming out uh any undergraduates in the room stick around we've got a dinner and an award ceremony right down the hall everybody everybody can stick around great okay i'd like to thank our debaters of course um our judges bill troi lisa de forge james santucci and james keller and first the department of economics the undergraduate economics club and all of the alumni who came out for today's alumni advisory board meeting so thank you all this is the end of our debate have a great night