The Huffington Post Opinion: Time to Stop America’s Innovation Decline, by Ken Blackwell
This post originally appeared in The Huffington Post on April 6, 2017.
On Thursday, President Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping – a meeting many observers expected to be tense given the situation in North Korea, as well as each leaders’ commitment to strengthening their respective countries’ positions in the world. The President and his team are no doubt also aware of China’s moves to supplant the US as the leader of innovation and even patent protection. Unfortunately, this ambition coincides with our own actions to weaken patent protection in America.
Since our founding, America has led the world in invention and risk taking. This largely stems from the fact that our founders wrote patent rights into our Constitution and extended the idea of property rights to include ideas, not just physical property. It is one of the concepts that separates us from many other nations, particularly China, and made us the global leader in innovation.