Monday, November 4, 2013

Chen Shuibian's Green Silicon Island Dream

The following is a graphic I put together to illustrate President Chen's "Green Silicon Island" campaign theme. Chen's embrace of environmentalism along with his actual election in 2000 marked a transition for the environmental movement in Taiwan. Prior to this, concern over the environment also meant opposition to the government. Following Chen's election and his appointment of environmental activists to the Taiwan Environmental Protection Agency and a few other environment-oriented agencies, environmentalists were presented with somewhat of a dilemma. Though they held key positions, they did not have the power to change the structural position of the DPP government nor to greatly influence DPP economic development policies. The DPP for its part, headed a government that never held a majority in the legislature and, slammed by an economic crisis and threats by Taiwanese companies to move to China, soon found itself beholden to the same industries as the KMT had been (but without the KMT's influence). Environmental concerns were, again, pushed to the back burner and activists found it difficult to mount resistance to a party that they had grown close to.

On building a Green Silicon Island, excerpt from Chen Shui Bian's Presidential Inauguration Speech, May 20, 2000:


"Today, facing the impact of the fast-changing information technologies and trade liberalization, Taiwan's industrial development must move toward a knowledge-based economy. High-tech industries need to be constantly innovative, while traditional industries need to undergo transformation and upgrading. […] Apart from consolidating our democratic achievements, promoting government reforms, and raising economic competitiveness, the new government's foremost objective should be to adhere to public opinion and implement reforms, so that the people on this land can live in more dignity, more self-confidence and better quality. […] The government will have to bring up solutions for all issues relating to the people's lives, such as social order, social welfare, environmental protection land planning, waste treatment, cleaning up rivers and community-building. It will also have to implement these solutions thoroughly. At present, we need to immediately improve social order and environmental protection, which are important indicators of the quality of life. Building a new social order, we will let the people live and work in peace and without fear. Finding a balance of ecological preservation and economic development, we will develop Taiwan into a sustainable Green silicon island."


The graphic uses, in part, creative commons licensed (or public domain) photographs from the Wikimedia Foundation (Formosan Map), Wade Brooks (flickr, LED bulb), yellowcloud (flickr, microchip), Photo Mojo Mike (flickr, solar panels), and james4765 (flickr, LED chips on board). Check out Ho Ming Sho's 2005 and 2010 works for more on the changes in Taiwan's environmental movement following Chen's election:

Ho 2005: Weakened State and Social Movement: The Paradox of Taiwanese Environmental Politics after the Power Transfer

Ho 2010: Environmental Movement in Democratizing Taiwan (1980–2004): A Political Opportunity Structure Perspective



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Friday, September 27, 2013

NATSA 2012 Talk on Patents and the Taiwanese LED Indutsry

I just found a video of a talk I gave at the University of Indiana-Bloomington for the North American Taiwan Studies Association's 2012 Conference on Patents and the Taiwanese LED Indutsry. There are links to videos of all of the 2012 panels on NATSA's facebook page. I've edited this clip to include only my own talk and subsequent discussant remarks from Derek Sheridan (Brown University) and Joseph Wong (University of Toronto). There is a bit of background buzz, but all most all of talk is audible on the recording.

Monday, July 1, 2013

Property as Process: Nakamura's '839 Patent Family and What it Suggests about a Patent's Relationships to Time

A few months ago, I was doing some research into a particular LED patent issued to Shuji Nakamura (and assigned to Nichia Chemicals, his Japanese then-employer). This was one of the early blue LED patents (GaN, not ZnSe) and it played a role in Nichia's dramatic rise to Big 5 status in the LED industry. The patent is especially interesting because of how far it traveled (not that this is necessarily uncommon for patents nowadays). The first diagram below illustrates the connections between the '839 patent as found within the USPTO database. The patent was brought over from an original set of Japanese patent applications and therefore claims priority back to those JP applications (blue rectangles) for the various portions of its claims. Through a series of divisionals (based on the decision by the USPTO examiner that the claims in the US application actually refer to more than one "invention"), the original application resulted in a total of 8 US patents with the last one issuing in 2004.
 Zooming out from the USPTO perspective, however, we can see that this was not the extent of the patent's travels. By looking into the patent via the JPO, KPO, and the EPO's patent family search tool, we see the relationship between the original Japanese applications (along with the 5 patents they resulted in) as well as the 2 EU (taken into 2 German) and 4 Korean patents in its family.
 Finally, instead of taking the set of patents in a structural-style map, we can also see them over time in a way that gives insight into when Nichia's patent practitioners were working on which parts of this set of applications. The process viewed in this way reminds us how difficult it is for a patent that travels this far to be dealt with by a single patent practitioner. From the time of the first application (let alone the original technological work) in 1992 to the issuance of the final patent in its family in Korea in 2006 much had changed in Nichia. Nakamura, for instance, had long left the company for UC Santa Barbara, been sued by the company for trade secret theft, and won his own lawsuit over Nichia's failure to pay him adequate compensation for the value his technological work had brought to them.
Part of the take away from all of this is that we need to understand "property" not just in terms of what is owned or claimed, but also in terms of time. Patents especially are a sort of property with a very strange sort of relationship with time. Moreover, this is more than the difficulty of figuring out for certain when a patent's term is up. When I would ask my patent engineer informants how you could tell if a patent was a good one or not, they jokingly told me that you don't know until you use it in court, and win. Then how do you know if it has value? Well, you don't know that until it is used and upheld again. While the issuance of a patent (in most cases) means that the patent has already under gone (and passed) an examination to prove that it is "new," the interpretation of the patent law (in the US especially) may change several times over the course of the patent's life as the Supreme Court (or the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit) attempts to hone its guidance on what can and cannot be patented (and on a whole range of related rules and procedures). The value of a patent is thus predicated on a conditional future where it gets used and gets upheld. Yet, in the courtroom, the testimony that is most important for its validity (and thus its having or not having any value at all) is focused on a reconstructed past point in time where the technology was "invented" and the court's evaluation of the "state of knowledge of the art" at that time. Within itself, then, the patent references both past and future even as the process of claiming it may still be ongoing in jurisdictions in other parts of the world. Property is a process, not a state and understanding it takes time.
 


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Friday, March 22, 2013

Mapping Taiwan's LED Industry

A diagram of past lawsuits and public cross-licensing activities within the global LED industry as it relates to Taiwanese LED companies (circa 2011). Taiwanese firms are represented in pink. Selected ownership relationships are represented by overlapping edges or more roughly by relative positions. Sources included numerous news releases and Satoshi Ookubo's previous compilation at Nikkei Electronics Asia, http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/HONSHI/20061130/124754/.


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TIN Anthropology

anthropological musings on property, piracy, materiality, and knowledge