On April 17, several generations of experts gathering at American University law school to remember, retell and relive highlights of 25 years of public interest advocacy around copyright and information access, and to look ahead – all with a focus on the unifying guidance of library advocate Prudence Adler, known to all as “Prue.”
[W. Nicholson Price] Abstract: Patent law tries to spur the development of new, better, innovative technology. But it focuses much more on “new” than “better” — and it turns out that “new” carries real social costs. I argue that patent law promotes innovation that diverges from existing technology, either a little (what I call “differentiating innovation”) or a lot (“exploring innovation”), at the expense of innovation that tells us more about existing technology (“deepening innovation”). Patent law’s focus on newness is unsurprising, and fits within a well-told narrative of innovative diversity accompanied by market selection of the best technologies. Unfortunately, innovative diversity brings not only the potential benefits of technological advances, but also costs: incompatibility between different technologies; a spread-out, shallow pool of knowledge; and the underlying costs of developing parallel technologies that aren’t actually better. These costs matter.