During the second half of the 19th century, the world's biggest economies endured a series of brutal recessions. At the time, most forms of reliable economic knowledge were organized within feudal, patrimonial, and tribal relationships. If you wanted to know who owned land or owed a debt, it was a fact recorded locally—and most likely shielded from outsiders. At the same time, the world was expanding. Travel between cities and countries became more common and global trade increased. The result was a huge rift between the old, fragmented social order and the needs of a rising, globalizing market economy.
To prevent the breakdown of industrial and commercial progress, hundreds of creative reformers concluded that the world needed a shared set of facts. Knowledge had to be gathered, organized, standardized, recorded, continually updated, and easily accessible—so that all players in the world's widening markets could, in the words of France's free-banking champion Charles Coquelin, "pick up the thousands of filaments that businesses are creating between themselves."
The result was the invention of the first massive "public memory systems" to record and classify—in rule-bound, certified, and publicly accessible registries, titles, balance sheets, and statements of account—all the relevant knowledge available, whether intangible (stocks, commercial paper, deeds, ledgers, contracts, patents, companies, and promissory notes), or tangible (land, buildings, boats, machines, etc.). Knowing who owned and owed, and fixing that information in public records, made it possible for investors to infer value, take risks, and track results. The final product was a revolutionary form of knowledge: "economic facts."
The patent system is an example of one of these "public memory systems," which has facilitated transactions in intangible (exclulsionary) rights.
The focus of de Soto's attention is on the financial services industry, and in particular on how innovation in financial services has destabilized and undermined the consistence of public memory systems. On his view, this is a root cause of our ongoing recession:
Over the past 20 years, Americans and Europeans have quietly gone about destroying these facts. The very systems that could have provided markets and governments with the means to understand the global financial crisis—and to prevent another one—are being eroded. Governments have allowed shadow markets to develop and reach a size beyond comprehension. Mortgages have been granted and recorded with such inattention that homeowners and banks often don't know and can't prove who owns their homes. In a few short decades the West undercut 150 years of legal reforms that made the global economy possible.
Go ahead and click through to read the whole piece. His is profound insight. Note one earlier link on BS to a similarly thought provoking piece by de Soto.
What about the patent system? Has the patent system undergone a similar destruction of economic facts over the last twenty years?
Not really. More the opposite seems to be true, in fact. At least since the Federal Circuit was established, and especially lately since patent office records worldwide are now available online, the patent system has never functioned more effectively.
And yet, even with all of these improvements, it seems to me that the patent system has not yet been able to provide enough "economic facts" for the market to transition from litigation to transactional norms in handling the allocation and reallocation of patent rights. In effect, there has been no destruction of economic facts within the patent system because the patent system never created economic facts to begin with.
The production of "economic facts" in the sense that de Soto describes should be the ultimate goal of any patent reform. We have seen many incremental and even discontinuous leaps in that direction over the past few decades. But we are not there yet.
Problems with ascertaining title and encumbrances on title are foundational to any economic facts about patents. The systems for handling these economic facts with respect to real property and even copyright are more highly developed than they are for patents, even though title goes to the very root of how patents are valued now because problems with standing can result in zero returns to enforcement.
All of the issues that have been addressed lately, including Therasense yesterday, will help move us incrementally closer to a world in which patent rights transact without litigation. But a focus on the creation and maintenance of a "public memory system" -- a source of "economic facts" about patent valuation -- will get us there quicker.
At the end of the day, valuing patent portfolios is not more complex than the valuation of collateralized debt obligations, currency derivatives, or interest rate swaps. The difference is that those intangibles have (or at least had) a foundation of "economic facts" to facilitate transactions.
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