Letters to the editor

Readers write in about Sarah Palin, the US Postal Service, Ayn Rand, and patent reform.

Yes, we can get along

I read with appreciation your recent commentary “Palin’s populism may sell books, but it won’t rebuild GOP.” What is noteworthy about my confession is that I am a liberal. It is not an exaggeration to say that I was overjoyed with the election of Barack Obama

My community in Minnesota is more or less evenly divided politically. Yet we manage to live peaceably enough and sometimes even cross party lines and become friends.

Patrick N. Allit’s commentary helped me to believe, if just for a moment, that the Republicans he was speaking of might be men and women who could find common ground to solve the problems of the day with liberals like me. 

My ardent wish is that a leader will emerge who will do this for us. In fact, I believe he already has.

Liz Kelly

Marine on Saint Croix, Minn.

US mail and jobs

In regard to the editorial “Best wishes for the postal service”: The US Postal Service does have the problems indicated in the editorial, but as many people do, the editorial attempts to compare the postal service to the private delivery companies, which is misleading. 

The work of delivering mail to every address in the US six days per week has been refused by private carriers who can choose what areas they wish to serve, and deliver to far fewer addresses. 

There is a big difference in delivering packages from a truck to a few addresses and delivering letter mail by foot to every address. Also there are many postal regulations that must be followed for different classes of mail.

The US Postal Service is a service industry, not a manufacture industry, so the labor costs are high. 

There is truth that the unions are inflexible, but management has been as well. 

In the 17 years I delivered mail, I cannot recall any concerted action by management to find out from their line workers where they were losing money and running into overtime. 

Often the management directives caused more overtime, and even failed to take into account that mail carriers work outdoors exposed to weather. 

Blaming one party for all the financial costs is not going to solve the problems.

I find it ironic, at a time when the media quote statistics on the gap between rich and poor growing and the loss of jobs, that the unions are blamed and a five-day delivery week is proposed. 

That means some letter carriers would lose their jobs. 

Shouldn’t the question be, why aren’t all laboring Americans enjoying fair pay and benefits such as exist in other nations?

Shelley Scott

Retired US Postal worker

Bellflower, Calif.

What good does selfishness do?

In regard to Debi Ghate’s opinion piece “Celebrate Thanksgiving the Ayn Rand way: Thank yourself;” The “spectacular cities, enormous wealth,” and “cars, houses, and vacations we enjoy” in our affluent country are major contributors to the vast environmental devastation currently ravaging the earth. The author’s encouragement to “take pride in being rationally selfish” is the foundation of much of our social breakdown. This “me first” attitude sets up a competition at all levels, from interpersonal to international, which causes so much of the world – including parts of the US – to live in poverty, fear, and violence.

To think no further than “to selfishly and proudly say, ‘I earned this’ ” as our expression of gratitude on Thanksgiving, saps the world of sorely-needed love, compassion, and help, and takes us ever-further down the road of separation between the haves and have-nots. 

I respect that the Monitor tries to provide a broad and unbiased range of thought, but I have to wonder what you hoped to accomplish in publishing a piece with such a materialistic, atheistic, and selfish bent.

Holly Godfrey

Burlington, Vt.

Reform, but don't destroy, patent law

In their commentary, "The patent system: End it, don't mend it," David K. Levine and Michael Boldrin propose wiping out centuries of Anglo-American legal heritage in intellectual property (IP) rights because they don’t like some features of the current American patent system. This radical proposal is based on an erroneous understanding of patent law’s history and the economics of innovation. It would be akin to tearing down a house because the hot water heater broke.

The Founders explicitly recognized the advantages of using intellectual property rights national in scope to replace the state-granted rights that existed under the Articles of Confederation. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 43 “[t]he utility of [the IP clause] will scarcely be questioned. The copyright of authors has been solemnly adjudged, in Great Britain, to be a right of common law. The right to useful inventions seems with equal reason to belong to the inventors. The public good fully coincides in both cases with the claims of individuals.”

There is no question that patent law provides critical incentives for innovation. Without the potential economic rewards and ability to facilitate commercialization patents provide, who would invest the millions of dollars needed for the development of new drugs, medical equipment, and medical devices? It is thus patent-driven innovation that creates the drugs that Messrs. Levine and Boldrin claim are locked away from the world’s poor. It would be sadly ironic if an effort to provide access to essential medicines by eliminating patent rights destroyed the system whose incentives yielded those medications. 

Levine and Boldrin also misunderstand the point of the Constitution’s IP Clause. The issue the IP Clause settled was not whether there should be patents and copyrights, but which government would provide them. The expensive litigation the state IP system had spawned in the 1780s persuaded the Founders to adopt a national system. Even Thomas Jefferson, initially the Founder most skeptical about intellectual property, quickly changed his views and played a prominent role in the early development of American patent law. The system worked: Americans were inventing and patenting at a rate that astonished European observers within a few decades of the first patent act.

While the heart of the incentive provided by patents is restricting others from using an inventor’s invention, this right to exclude is limited in time and scope. As a result, it balances rewarding early innovators and enabling later ones to create improvements. Patents’ limited scope means they rarely provide their owners with an economic monopoly as there are almost always viable substitutes. Nor are patents “simply a ticket to lifelong litigation against a giant,” as only 1.5 percent of patents are litigated. 

Patents also provide more than incentives for innovation. Recent studies of start-up companies reveal that patents can play an important role in securing venture capital, capturing revenue through licensing, and enhancing reputational value. And patents serve as coordination tools among private parties, thus preventing many of the problems Levine and Boldrin identify.

For example, in information technology and life sciences, patent holders engage in considerable licensing activity, privately solving the problem of access.  A recent National Academies of Science survey concluded that in both ‘‘the number of projects abandoned or delayed as a result of technology access difficulties is reported to be small” and that few investigators had to “revise their protocols to avoid intellectual property complications or pay high costs to obtain access to intellectual property.’’

Patent law can undoubtedly be improved. But destroying widely held and valuable property rights in pursuit of short-term gains would truly be a case of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Neither the American economy nor the world’s poor could afford such an ill-conceived up-rooting of rights deeply embedded in Anglo-American jurisprudence.

Craig A. Nard

Professor of Law, Case Western Reserve University

Cleveland, Ohio

Andrew P. Morriss

Professor of Law & Business, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Urbana, Ill.

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