It turns out that widespread stealing of copyright-protected material by universities and the education sector generally isn’t cheap after all. Universities bloat their payrolls to feign fairness. My article in the Financial Post is here.
Richard C. Owens: The U.S. outsources control of drug prices to Canada: weird!
Drug reimportation by the US is pretty silly, and harmful to Canada. Not that we don’t deserve it. My op-ed here.
2020 Hindsight
Here’s my piece for the National Post, reflecting on the lessons of 2020.
Can Canada Innovate?
Canada has a profound cultural resistance to innovation, and reinforces that through counter-productive policies. Health care is one of the least innovative fields, and Canada does all it can to keep it that way. My recent op-ed in the Financial Post is here.
Universities need to stop stealing
Universities, and others in Canada’s education sector, have decided Canadian authors should work for free. Universities do not want to have to pay for the books and publications they use to teach, so they just stopped, claiming wholesale theft is actually “fair” in accordance with the Copyright Act (Canada), in spite of the Federal Court and the Federal Court of Appeal telling them they are wrong. Now the whole mess is in the hands of the Supreme Court of Canada, whose decisions on copyright are typically unpredictable and wrong. The government desperately needs to act, if it cares for creators at all. My Financial Post op ed is here.
Global Trade and Intellectual Property Alliance Intellectual Property Principles
I helped draft–and aver!–these principles of intellectual property protection.
COVID’s Two Solitudes
The conditions facing the public sector during the pandemic are so severely different than those facing those who they serve that they are institutionally incapable of making sound policy decisions, or even of creating processes to inform those decisions. My Financial Post op-ed is here.
More bad ideas in drug price regulation
The federal government persists in putting forward ideas to make drugs less available and Canadians sicker. Now the US is upping the ante with ideas of its own. My Financial Post op-ed here.
Should we give it away?
Drug and medical device firms are giving stuff away in the face of the pandemic. Why? My latest op-ed is here.
Free Market Road Show
Online discussion of the impact of the pandemic on intellectual property rights. The recording can be found here.