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more on Tech: A 'hostile environment' for US natives????
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 9 May 2005 07:03:46 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: Bob Drzyzgula <bob () drzyzgula org> Date: May 8, 2005 8:49:58 PM EDT To: David Farber <dave () farber net> Cc: Ip <ip () v2 listbox com>Subject: Re: [IP] more on Tech: A 'hostile environment' for US natives????
On Sun, May 08, 2005 at 06:01:29PM -0400, David Farber wrote:
From: Greg Skinner <gds () best com> [for IP] gep2 () terabites com wrote:And more to the point... just which professions here in the USA do you feel are NOT going to subjected to this sort of (crushing!!!!) outsourcing pressure? And do you think that the US economy can survive on those alone, whatever few they are?I don't know much about the fields of medicine or law, but it seems that despite people from outside the US being hired to do those type of jobs in the US, US doctors and lawyers have not seen the type of job losses that US computer professionals have. A major difference between the practice of law and medicine vs. software engineering (for example) is that you need to get a license to do the prior two on a professional level.
For IP, if you like. Another difference is that, to a large degree, law and medicine are much more about providing a direct service to clients and patients. A significant amount of computer programming is done for product development, wherein the output is something that can be packaged up and repeatedly sol^H^H^H licensed to the general public. Even in the case of contract programming, the intent often is to create a program that can repeatedly be used within an organization and, beyond a certain simple level -- a couple thousand lines of code, perhaps -- there probably isn't much reason why the coding itself needs to be done locally. Medicine and law are much more dependent on personal contact with each individual patient or client on an incident-by-incident basis. It's hard to imagine how one would outsource a pediatrician or neurosurgeon. Radiologists, perhaps, and we all know that is being done. And medical tourism is of course a growing industry, but this is more "foreign competition" than "outsourcing". In law, there is a great deal of regional specialization, which I suppose -- not that I know much about this -- could make it difficult to achieve much economy of scale. Perhaps some back-end legal services -- research, document preparation, etc -- could be outsourced, but I doubt that is where the money is in the legal profession. Moreover, I would argue that medicine and law are much more akin to where the money is supposed to be in open-source programming: In providing support services, local customization and implementation, planning, consulting, etc. While it is perhaps true (and unfortunate) that some of our elected officials turn a good profit from making new law under contract to the wealthy, that is not how it is supposed to work, and certainly once the law exists there is no money involved [1] in licensing the law itself. When a lawyer successfully argues a case in a new way, the legal precedent is simply part of the record that can be used by everyone; the lawyer (or his employer) can't expect to buy a new Porsche with royalties on a patented or copyrighted argument. The legal profession generally is set up to help people *use* the law, and most doctors are there to *practice* medicine, not to create new medicine that can packaged up and sold to the public [2]. Medicine and the law are simply the tools that are used by these practitioners to help their customers, much as open source software is used by large numbers of programmers and consultants to help theirs. This sort of one-on-one, case-by-case, personal attention is, I expect, almost impossible to outsource effectively. But perhaps I'm just naive. --Bob Drzyzgula [1] Yes, there are publishers who make money selling annotated copies of the law, but it is the annotations they are selling -- they can't really sell the law itself. Sort of like Red Hat "selling" Linux. [2] Historically, when a doctors and medical researchers report successful new treatments in medical journals, other doctors have generally been free to use those treatments. While the report may be copyrighted by the journal or author, the treatment itself has typically been considered to be in the public domain. As I was writing this I discovered that in recent years there has been some controversy over medical process patents. Apparently a law was passed in 1997 protecting doctors against patent infringement claims. From http://www.physiciansnews.com/law/1097meyers.html "Public Law 104-208, signed by President Clinton on September 30, 1996, denies patent owners the right to enforce patents covering medical or surgical procedures that do not involve patented drugs or devices. Patents on medical and surgical procedures performed on a human body, organ cadaver, or even on an animal used in medical research or instruction relating to the treatment of humans, are now unenforceable." I do not know if there has been any back-peddling on this law, or how it works out in practice. Pharmaceuticals are, of course, another story. ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- more on Tech: A 'hostile environment' for US natives???? David Farber (May 06)
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