Canadian Business Law Journal Calls Book "Interesting and Engaging"
In recent review in the Canadian Business Law Journal (Vol. 44), Teresa Scassa calls Math You Can't Use: Patents, Copyright, and Software by Ben Klemens "interesting and engaging" and "an important contribution to the debate over the appropriate means to protect the fruits of the innovation economy." Scassa goes on to describe the unique perspective Klemens adds to this discussion.
Klemens's mathematical background, combined with his ability to express complex propositions with clarity, free from excessive technical jargon, leave him well placed to make a unique contribution to the development of policy in this area.
In Math You Can't Use, Klemens discusses the intellectual property issues regarding software from the perspectives of law, computer science, mathematics, and economics. He explains that patent laws are intended to apply to physical machines. Software, on the other hand, is quite different and should not be treated as just another machine. As a solution, he outlines how copyright could be more effectively implemented to protect the rights of software developers without unnecessarily hampering innovation. Ultimately, he concludes, it is up to Congress to determine how software should be protected.
Ben Klemens is a guest scholar at the Center on Social and Economic Dynamics at the Brookings Institution, where he writes programs to perform quantitative analyses and policy-oriented simulations. He also consults for the World Bank on intellectual property in the developing world and computer-based simulations of immigration policy.
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