While the United States continues to weaken its patent laws, Singapore is taking a different path. Singapore has just announced that it is developing a plan to be an Intellectual Property Hub, according to Channelnewsasia.com. They believe that intellectual property is a key part of the global economy and they want their country to be primed to take advantage of this trend. According to the article:
With well-developed legal and financial systems and a workforce comfortable with science and technology, Singapore is poised to ride on this trend. Still, the country has a small domestic market, but Singapore can get around this by becoming Asia’s IP Hub.
A spokesman for this initiative stated:
Mr Shanmugam said: “The committee will recommend strategies to develop Singapore as a marketplace of choice to transact IP, and attract international firms and professionals who provide IP transactional services. For example, licensing and brokerage. The committee will also incentivise the creation, management and exploitation of IP in Singapore.”
While Singapore is trying to encourage IP transactions our government and intellectuals are trying to kill them by disparaging inventors as trolls. The article also explains that Singapore will grow its court system in tandem with the growth of it intellectual property. They are focusing on training judges who are experts in patents. In the US we cannot even fully fund the Patent Office and now there is an effort to sideline the ITC, which is one of the few courts with real patent expertise.
Singapore’s emphasis on technology and intellectual property has vaulted it past the United States in per capita income. Singapore ranks third in the world with a per capita income of $59,936, while the US lags with a per capita income of $48,147. Singapore’s per capita income keeps growing, because they are focused on the only thing that makes people wealthier – increases in our level of technology. In the United States we have a President and his economic advisors telling us that we will get wealthier by consuming more, or by transferring more wealth from productive people to people on welfare, or by giving free money to the largest Wall Street Banks and large corporations. If the US does not wake up it is likely that Singapore will have double the per capita income of the US by 2020 (see chart).