EUPACO Report on Benefits and Costs of the Global Patent Paradigm

Date:  Wed, 2007-06-13

Dr. David E. Martin June 13, 2007

Social Contingent Liabilities and Synthetic Derivative Options: Benefits and Costs of the Global Patent Paradigm – an article by Dr. David E. Martin, CEO, M·CAM, Inc. and Fellow, Batten Institute, Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Virginia.

Abstract: At the turn of the 20th century, the emergence of efficient transoceanic and transcontinental commerce gave rise to central banks and gold standards enabling the industrial economy. At the dawn of the 21st century, we face the realization that the tangible economy and its attendant modes no longer can be represented or financed using the convention of the “balance sheet.” Value and risk are now the exclusive domain of the intangible and the asymmetric. Presaged with the collapse of the 2001 WTO debates in Doha, heralded with the recent global stock market multiple personality disorder, and against the growing drumbeat of currency strain, global finance is about to experience the collapse of the tangible, industrial market paradigms and the emergence of the intangible, asymmetric risk capital era. Public policy makers, economists, patent offices and financial institutions are all viewing this transition with relative opacity, limited by their commitments to incumbent models.

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