Why I'm Glad Toronto "Lost" the Olympic Games

Among many other reasons, we're thankfully spared this lunacy.

And while we're talking about protection of intellectual property rights, Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, observes:

...it has become increasingly clear that excessively strong or badly formulated intellectual property rights may actually impede innovation – and not just by increasing the price of research. Monopolists may have much less incentive to innovate than they would if they had to compete. Modern research has shown that the great economist Joseph Schumpeter was wrong in thinking that competition in innovation leads to a succession of firms. In fact, a monopolist, once established, may be hard to dislodge, as Microsoft has so amply demonstrated. Indeed, once established, a monopoly can use its market power to squelch competitors, as Microsoft so amply demonstrated in the case of the Netscape Web browser. Such abuses of market power discourage innovation.

[Technorati tags: olympics | intellectual property | innovation]