Spencer asked me to comment on a story I would normally find prohibitively boring. He has bravely defied the corporate behemoth that employs him by questioning whether today’s Supreme Court decision, which favored Microsoft in its patent dispute with AT&T, is actually destructive of intellectual property rights.
It is, of course. The case was basically this: Microsoft (ahem) appropriated some AT&T technology that turns your voice into digital code and implanted it in Windows, a blatant violation of U.S. patent law for which Microsoft has already paid massive damages. At issue was whether patent protections could be extended to – and thus additional damages collected for – the Windows PCs manufactured overseas. The Court decided 7-1 that they could not, leaving AT&T extraordinarily and understandably pissed.
To my (admittedly untrained) eye, the decision was the legally obvious one. American patent law rules America, “but does not rule the world” - if Microsoft behaves badly outside U.S. jurisdiction, there's just not much the Feds can do about it. Spencer is quite right, though, that this decision poses a salient threat to intellectual property rights in the brave new global economy. Urged on by pharmaceutical companies, the U.S. government has been pressing the world for more comprehensive IP regulation, largely to no avail – indeed, it’s just one more of the many ways the world is slowly chipping away at American hegemony in guerrilla retaliation for our recent foreign policy.
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