Interesting argument from law professor Jonathan Masur, in his paper Patent Inflation:
Abstract:
For more than two decades, the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) and the Federal Circuit have exercised nearly complete institutional control over the patent system. Yet in recent years their stewardship has been widely criticized, largely on the basis of two particular failings. First, the PTO grants significant numbers of invalid patents, patents that impose substantial costs on innovative firms. And second, over time the Federal Circuit has steadily loosened the rules governing patentability, allowing ever more patents over a greater range of inventions. This Article argues that both of these modern trends may be attributable in whole or in part to the asymmetric institutional relationship between the PTO and the Federal Circuit. If a patent applicant is denied a patent by the PTO, she can appeal that denial to the Federal Circuit. However, if the PTO grants the patent, no other party has the right to appeal. Accordingly, the PTO can avoid appeals and reversals, both of which are costly in monetary and reputational terms, simply by granting any patent that the Federal Circuit might plausibly allow. Because the PTO will grant nearly any plausible patent, the vast majority of rejected applications that are appealed to the Federal Circuit will concern boundary-pushing inventions that are unpatentable under current law. Occasionally, a particularly patent-friendly panel of Federal Circuit judges will elect to reverse the PTO and grant a patent that the Agency has denied. The Federal Circuit’s decision will create a new, inflationary precedent. The boundaries of patentability will expand slightly, as this new precedent exerts influence on the other circuit judges. And as the Federal Circuit’s conception of what may be patented expands, the PTO will similarly inflate its own standards in order to maintain an adequate margin for error and avoid denying a patent that the Federal Circuit is likely to grant on appeal. Patent law will thus be subject to a natural inflationary pressure.
Seems plausible to me. And not completely dissimilar to the way the FDA has an incentive to deny approval to new drugs if there is any chance it might be harmful: people who die from an approved drug give the FDA bad press. But you never see the victims of denials of a given life-saving drug. Masur quotes one scholar with a somewhat related observation about the FDA:
FDA regulators care about their own professional reputations and the reputation of the agency because these reputations may influence their career prospects in and out of government.
Interesting new model from Ed Bott (seems similar in some ways to one of my own publishers, Quid Pro Books, who published my Louisiana Civil Law Dictionary). Love their lack of DRM in their epub files. Reminds me a bit of Louis C.K.’s success with his recent video sales. And iTunes sells DRM-free songs and does well.
I am a writer. I make my living helping people use technology to become more productive.
My first book appeared in bookstores back in 1995, when the World Wide Web was still shiny and new. I’ve been writing books steadily since then, always with traditional publishers, always following the same basic model.
I still believe in books. The web might be the best option for finding a specific answer to a specific question, but there’s nothing like a well-written, carefully edited book to help you understand a new technology or quickly master a new product.
The trouble with the traditional publishing model is that it hasn’t changed much in the last 15 years, despite the revolutionary changes in technology we’ve seen during that time. Traditional publishers still start with a print edition and eventually get around to digital formats. That model has to change.
That’s why I’ve joined a new company, Fair Trade Digital Exchange, as a founding author and partner and why I’m leaving traditional publishing behind.
It’s the first shot in what I am confident will be a revolution in tech publishing.
We’re “digital first” for a reason.
Technology changes at breathtaking speed these days. One of the advantages of a digital-first approach is that we can produce smaller titles with a smaller price tag, and get them into the market quickly, while print-first publishers are still arguing over proposals.
My first book for Fair Trade DX, Ed Bott’s Windows 8 Head Start, is practically a case study in the difference between the two publishing models.
With a traditional publisher, I would start writing when the first beta appeared. Four to six months later, my co-authors and I would have a finished, fully edited manuscript. After two more months of post-production and printing, that 1,000-page book would finally be available for sale.
By contrast, the first edition of Ed Bott’s Windows 8 Head Start, based on the Windows Developer Preview released in September at Microsoft’s BUILD conference, is already fully tech-checked, professionally copy-edited, and available in every popular digital format. (You can buy the EPUB version at our website, get it for your Kindle at Amazon.com, or download it to your Nook from bn.com.) The first edition is 130 pages. I’ll have an updated, expanded edition within weeks after the beta is released. And I’ll update and expand that book again when the final version is released to manufacturing.
Our digital-first process lets us work fast, update quickly, and stay relevant. If you’re an early adopter, you can follow along with those early editions and have a genuine head start on the competition by the time the final product is released. If you prefer to wait for the final edition, you’ll still have a head start of weeks or even months compared to competing products from traditional publishers.
At Fair Trade DX, authors are 50/50 partners.
I’ve been fortunate to work with many fine publishing professionals through the years. We’ve shared a long list of successful titles together, but those successes have always been on the publisher’s terms. They keep 85-90% of the revenue; the author gets 10-15%.
That split made sense in a print-first world. After all, it costs a lot of money to print books by the thousands and ship them around the country, and there’s always a risk that the booksellers will return those copies if they don’t sell.
Digital publishing changes that cost structure completely. There’s no manufacturing cost for e-books, distribution uses web servers instead of trucks and warehouses, and there’s no risk of returns.
But publishers still insist on keeping their traditional revenue split with authors when they sell a book in digital format. That doesn’t seem fair. Which is why we’ve changed the split to a straight 50/50 for revenue on an author’s work.
At Fair Trade DX, we share the responsibilities and the rewards. Authors are the subject-matter experts. We provide professional development, editing, proofreading, cover design, and translation into every popular digital format. Not to mention the tricky details of placing titles where readers can find them.
This arrangement allows Fair Trade DX to publish titles that might never get considered by a traditional publisher because they’re too small. And it allows authors the chance to make a living without having to spend time mastering self-publishing tools. Instead, they can do what they do best—write.
And best of all: there’s no DRM.
At Fair Trade DX, we hate copy protection as much as you do. For titles aimed at IT pros and computer professionals, it’s especially annoying and counterproductive. If you buy a new title, you probably want to read it on your Kindle, your iPad, your smartphone, at least two PCs and a Mac, and eventually on devices that don’t even exist today.
We say, go right ahead. Our titles have no restrictions on the number or type of devices you can use them on. In other words, we trust our customers to do the right thing.
Why now?
We’ve been asking traditional publishers to make these sorts of changes for years, and every time we asked, they said the time wasn’t right. They always seem to have a reason to keep doing things the way they’ve always done things.
So finally we got tired of waiting and decided to get it done ourselves. That’s why we founded Fair Trade DX.
If you’re looking for our first wave of computer books, you can find them at our online bookstore. If you’re a technology expert and you’d like to talk to us about how Fair Trade DX works and how you can submit a book proposal, we’re ready to listen.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday made it a crime to play without permission the music of a Russian composer who’s been dead for 58 years. A 6-2 ruling pulled the works of Sergei Prokofiev out of the public domain, requiring orchestras who have been legally using his music for free to begin paying fat royalties to some estate. As this heavy-handed decision came down, the public began to fight back against the congressional push to further tighten the screws of copyright law.
High-profile websites like Google and Wikipedia asked visitors to call and urge their congressmen to reject the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). These bills would give the attorney general authority to declare nondomestic websites as “infringing” and shut them down. The public outrage at the idea of Big Brother messing with the Internet swamped Capitol Hill phone lines. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was forced to issue a tweet of retreat. “In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday’s vote on the Protect IP Act,” said the Nevada Democrat.
Members of Congress had been promoting these bills at the behest of Hollywood. Motion-picture and record studios have always feared the march of technology. In 1976, Universal and Disney sued Sony to try to stamp out the videocassette recorder. In 1999, the industry launched lawsuits to stop peer-to-peer file-sharing software and music downloads. Tinseltown has been wrong at every step. Once they resigned themselves to adapt to the market place, studios made billions on sales of videotapes and music downloads.
Last night I appeared for two hours on FreeTalkLive (1-22-12 show), with hosts Mark Edge and Stephanie. We discussed intellectual property and SOPA. (Audio)
SOPA and PIPA are (almost) dead. Now can we talk about the law that already exists?
By Mark P. McKenna|Posted Friday, Jan. 20, 2012, at 4:59 PM ET
Opposition to the Protect IP Act (“PIPA”) and Stop Online Piracy Act (“SOPA”) reached a fever pitch this week, following a coordinated effort by a number of technology companies and technology-related websites that included a day-long Internet “blackout” in protest of the proposed bills. And the opposition seems to have been remarkably successful, with the White House announcing its opposition to the bills and so many senators and representatives—including many former co-sponsors of the bills—withdrawing their support over the last few days that both the Senate and House have shelved consideration of their respective bills.
Thank goodness. These bills are terrible policy and they have very serious constitutional infirmities. Among other things (and there are many other things), these two bills empower the attorney general to have entire websites taken down based only on application to a court and an ex parte hearing (meaning a hearing at which the defendant is not present), flagrantly violating the Supreme Court’s prior restraint doctrine. They also allow courts to order Internet service providers to stop recognizing sites deemed “dedicated to infringing activities” in these ex parte hearings (of which there is no apparent opportunity for review). This remedial approach presents a clear threat to the Internet’s architecture and, according to the country’s top cybersecurity experts, greatly increases security and privacy risks. These and other problems have been wellcovered, and I will not belabor them here.
This New York Times opinion piece investigates the question of whether the color red can be trademarked and enforced. The op-ed is right in drawing attention to the absurdity but wrong in calling for a comprehensive package of legislation for fashion. How about a free market instead?
P.S. I would add the cool image from the NYT story but these days who knows anymore what might get you arrested at gunpoint?
“When we feel the heat, we see the light.” ~ Senator Everett Dirksen
On Wednesday, January 18, the forces of liberty gained a major political victory over the entrenched meddlers in Congress. The owners of a handful of popular Internet sites joined together to protest SOPA/PIPA. They blacked out their sites and provided information on the threat to Internet liberty this bill posed.
Before the day was over, a majority of our elected representatives were doing a superb imitation of the captain of the grounded Italian cruise ship. They abandoned ship as fast as he did, and for the same reason. (Note: the reason was not that they had slipped and fallen into the lifeboat, then to be carried to safety against their will.)
A few weeks before, the Senate version of the House’s SOPA (Stop Online Piracy ACT) bill, called PIPA, was unanimously passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee. PIPA stands for the Protect IP [Intellectual Property] Act. It was non-controversial at the time. It was on a well-greased skid to passage.
Let us not be naive. SOPA/PIPA is a payback for to the entertainment industry’s generous support of PACs and campaign donations. For a list of who got how much, click here.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) did object. He was not on the committee. He vowed to filibuster PIPA. So, Harry Reid announced that he would push it through. He vowed to introduce a 60-vote cloture motion to limit debate. Senator Reid said he would schedule the debate on January 24. There is a Website called Unanimous Consent. It tracks the fast-track bills. Here was its assessment on December 23. [continue reading…]
The government seems determined to turn out the lights on the digital age. And this is with or without SOPA or the other bills that were only this week shouted down by the global digital community on Blackout Wednesday. The very next day, after support for that legislation collapsed after an impressive mass protest, the FBI and the Justice Department demonstrated that they don’t have to pay any attention to all this silly clamor. Congress, legislation, polling, debates, politicians, the will of the people — it’s all a sideshow to these people.
The FBI and Justice Department, on their own initiative, shut down megaupload.com, the biggest of thousands of file-sharing sites online, and arrested four of its top officials. The FBI is hunting down three others who seem to be on the lam. They all face extradition and 20 years in prison. As part of the sweep, the feds issued 20 search warrants and arrived at individual houses in helicopters. They cut their way into houses, threatened with guns, confiscated $50 million in assets and outright stole 18 domain names and many servers.
And what is the grave crime? The site is accused of abetting copyright infringement, that is permitting the creating of copies of ideas expressed in media. No violence, no fraud, no force, no victims (but plenty of corporate moguls who claim, without proof, that their profits are lower as a result of file sharing).
Megaupload had millions of happy users. It was the 71st-most-popular website in the world. Only 2% of its traffic came from search engines, which means that its customer base was loyal and collected through the hard work and entrepreneurship of site owners. For its users, it was a wholly legitimate service. For the owners, their profits were hard earned through advertising.
But the government saw it differently. And contrary to what many people believe, the already-existing law permits the government to do pretty much whatever it wants, as this case shows. The government relied on a 2008 law to make criminal, instead of civil, charges. A newly created IP task force is the one that worked with the foreign governments to seal the deal.
In the end, it was a presentation of exactly the nightmare scenario that anti-SOPA protesters said would happen if SOPA had passed. It turns out, as the deeper realms of the state already knew, that all of this was possible with no congressional action at all. Congress doesn’t need to do anything. We can watch the debates, go to the polls, elect people to represent us and perform all the rest of the rituals of the civic religion, but none of it matters. Power is here, active, oppressive, in charge and permanent, regardless of what you might believe.
Might it be that some of the users’ shared content on Megaupload was copyright protected? Absolutely. It is nearly impossible not to violate the law, as shown by SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith’s own campaign website, which used an unattributed background image in technical violation of the law. The leading opponent of piracy might himself be a pirate!
But the trendline with Megaupload was clearly toward using the space to launch new artists with new content — not piracy, but creativity. As Wired.co.uk wrote, this crackdown:
“came shortly after Megaupload announced music producer Swizz Beatz — married to Alicia Keys — as their CEO. They had rallied a whole host of musicians, including Will.i.am, P. Diddy, Kanye West and Jamie Foxx to endorse the cloud locker service. Megaupload was building a legitimate system for artists to make money and fans to get content.”
What‘s this all about? It is some powerful corporate lobbyists trying to prevent the emergence of an alternative system of art and music delivery, one powered by people, rather than merely the well connected.
The Internet’s great glory is its seemingly magical capacity for distributing information of all sorts universally unto infinity. The idea of the state’s regulations on information — instituted by legislators in the 19th century — is that this trait is deeply dangerous and must be stopped. So it is inevitable that the powers that be will try to shut it down; copyright enforcement is only the most-convenient Taser of choice.
This is the battle for whether the digital age is permitted to exist in an atmosphere of free speech, free association, free enterprise and real property rights or whether it will be controlled by government in conjunction with aging media moguls from monopolistic corporate oligarchies. The lines are clearly drawn, and the battle is taking place in real-time.
Example: Within minutes after the officials of Megaupload were arrested, a global hacker group called Anonymous shut down the Justice Department’s website and the sites of the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, Universal music and BMI — the major lobbying forces in Washington for restriction and reaction against the Internet.
In another stage of the great battle over information freedom, the Supreme Court, on the very day of the SOPA protests, handed down a decision that could have a devastating effect in the months and years ahead. It permitted the re-copyrighting of works that are already in the public domain so that the domestic law accords with the international law. If that sounds like no big deal, consider that many local orchestras have already changed their season lineups to remove some major works from their repertoire because they can no longer handle the licensing fees.
It’s hard to know what to call this but cultural masochism.
Regardless of how the legal struggles turn out, a culture of rational and irrational fear has gripped the Web. I’ve noticed this growing over the last months, but just this week, it has become worse, to the point of paranoia, and even mania. The successful protests against SOPA ended up only causing the censors to redouble their efforts, and the message is getting out: Almost everything you want to do online could be illegal.
A small sample of what I mean… Just this morning, I received the following email: “BBC Four recently broadcast a stunningly beautiful documentary called God’s Composer (Tomás Luis de Victoria), hosted by Simon Russell Beale. A friend in Rome sent me a link to it, but I’m not sure I’m free to share it. Have you seen this documentary? It is stunning both visually and musically.”
Not free to share a link? What? To be sure, I don’t know whether he intended to send me to the BBC or some other site that is hosting an additional copy of it. Regardless, this is what it has come down to: a belief that every email is traced, every site is monitored, every act of individual volition on the Web could be a crime, every website is vulnerable to an overnight takedown, every domain owner could be subject to arrest and jail.
The battle between power and freedom dates to the beginning of recorded history, and we are seeing it play out right before our eyes in the digital age. It’s as if at the beginning of the Bronze Age, the leading tribal chieftain made smelting ore illegal; or if at the transition from iron to steel, the ruling elite put a cap on the temperature of refining ovens; or if at the beginning of flight, some despot declared the whole enterprise to be too risky and economically damaging to the industry that depended on land travel.
In the current version, the issue of “intellectual property” is at the forefront of this battle. The first most people heard of this was on Blackout Wednesday, when Wikipedia went black. This is a foretaste of the future in a world in which power achieves victory after victory, while the rest of the world cowers with fear in darkening times.
I’m not big on videos over a minute long, but this one really lays out the war on sharing that underlies bills like SOPA (and its predecessors COICA, ACTA, and the DMCA). Some excerpts:
SOPA and PIPA…want to raise the cost of copyright compliance, to the point where people simply get out of the business of offering it as a capability to amateurs….
In order to fake the ability to sell uncopyable bits, the DMCA also made it legal to force you use systems that broke the copying function of your devices…they also made it illegal for you to try to re-set the copyability of that content. The DMCA marks the moment where the media industries gave up on distinguishing between legal and illegal copying, and simply tried to prevent copying through technical means….
PIPA and SOPA are round two. But where the DMCA was surgical – we want to go down into your computer, into your television set, your game machine, and prevent it from doing what they said it would do at the store – PIPA and SOPA are nuclear. They’re saying we want to go anywhere in the world and censor content.
If you’re trying to explain the issues regarding SOPA to someone else, try showing them this. Yes, it’s 14 minutes, but still much more concise and comprehensible than anything I could accomplish in a much longer conversation.
I was a guest today on the Liberty Underground Radio Show on the 1787 Radio Network, discussing IP for about 25 minutes. The reason they invited me on was the hosts, in discussing SOPA and PIPA in the Dec. 31, 2011 show (hour 1, starting about 10 minutes in), had a dispute about IP. Although the main host questioning me was on the fence about IP, he was open-minded, fair, and civil, and I think he moved a bit in the anti-IP direction by the end.
The show has a podcast (feed) and my segment was on the second hour, starting at about 25:25 (audio).
I believe in days past, say, before the Internet, IP was bad but it was not even in the top 20 or 30 of harmful state policies. But nowadays I believe it is in the top six most evil and harmful state laws, institutions, and policies:
war;
the Fed/central banking/fiat money;
government schools;
taxation;
the drug war;
intellectual property.
IP is extremely insidious because, unlike the drug war, tax, or war, it is held out as a type of property right. Thus, in its name, the state can spy, fine, and jail, or even enlist private citizens to enforce these laws on their own behalf, as mini-state agents. Truly, we are becoming an IPolice State.
And if we divide them out, copyright, I am now convinced, is significantly worse than patent, for reasons given in Patent vs. Copyright: Which is Worse?:1
Over the years I have vacillated on this issue. But I am becoming convinced that copyright is worse than patent, for the following reasons:
Length. The patent term is about 17 years, while copyright usually lasts over 100 years (life of author plus 70 years).
Trends. Copyright law keeps getting worse,2 while patent law has been basically the same for a while now, and in fact has slightly improved–in recent years it’s more difficult to get injunctions; and the recent patent reform law, the America Invents Act, actually added a general prior commercial user defense, the first significant legislative improvement to patent law … ever.3
Taxation versus Censorship, the Police State, and Regulation of the Internet. The patent system imposes costs of at least $100 billion a year, by reducing innovation and competition.4 So it basically acts like a tax. It’s bad, it impoverishes us, it slows things down. But it’s just another tax.
The copyright system, by contrast, besides imposing untold billions of cost on the economy, consumers, and artistic creation, and distorting the entire domain of creative works, is also being used as an excuse by the state to increase its surveillance, warrantless searches and seizures, punitive bans of people from the Internet without due process, censorship, cutting off websites accused of piracy, and control and regulation of the Internet and related technologies. As the Internet is one of the most significant tools ever to emerge to help people battle the state and communicate and learn and spread ideas, this is very chilling. In the name of stopping copyright piracy, the state is trying to squash mankind’s greatest anti-state weapon.5 Taxes are bad, but killing or restricting the Internet is just horrible. Copyright is worse.
[I go back and forth. I now think patent is worse because it does more actual harm to the human race, but copyright is also harmful because it threatens Internet freedom, one of our most powerful tools to fight the state.] [↩]
The writing has been on the wall for a long, long time, but now it’s finally official. Harry Reid has announced that he will not move forward with PIPA and Lamar Smith has announced the same thing about SOPA. Both are listed as “delayed” and there’s always a chance that they will come back in some form (potentially even nastier), but hopefully those on Capitol Hill have learned a big lesson about trying to mess with the internet… and what happens when you cut backroom deals to help one industry at the expense of the public.
Mike Masnick has this interesting post up today at Techdirt:
Crowd Cheers Loudly As All Four GOP Candidates Say No To SOPA/PIPA
from the national-issue dept
It really was just a few weeks ago that a Hollywood lobbyist laughed at me (literally) when I suggested that SOPA/PIPA might become a national issue during the Presidential campaign. As he noted, copyright issues just aren’t interesting outside of a small group of people. My, how things have changed. After this week’s protests made front pages and top stories everywhere, it’s not all that surprising that the candidates at the latest GOP debate were asked their opinion of the bills… and all four came out against them. Of course, this seems to fit with the new GOP positioning that they’re the anti-SOPA/PIPA party (so sorry Lamar Smith…). Mediaite has the video:
Masnick quotes each of the four candidates’ responses to the question. I provide them below, with “translations” provided by my friend Daniel Coleman for the three statist candidates:
Gingrich: “You are asking a conservative about the economic interests of Hollywood? I am weighing it and thinking fondly of the many left wing people that I am so eager to protect. On the other hand, you have so many people that are technologically advanced such as Google and You Tube and Facebook that say this is totally going to mess up the Internet. The bill in its current form is written really badly and leads to a range of censorship that is totally unacceptable. I believe in freedom and think that we have a patent office, copyright law and if a company believes it has generally been infringed upon it has the right to sue. But the idea that we have the government start preemptively start censoring the Internet and corporations’ economic interest is exactly the wrong thing to do.”
Translation: I joke about using power to hurt people who disagree with me on policy. But seriously, folks, this bill got way too unpopular for me to be able to support it. I think you need the powers of this bill vested differently so that it won’t cause as much of an outrage.
Romney:“The law as written is far too expansive, far too intrusive and far too threatening of freedom of speech and information carried across the Internet. It would have a depressing impact on one of the fastest growing industries in America. I care deeply about intellectual content going across the Internet and if we can find a way to very narrowly go after those people who are pirating especially those offshore. But a very broad law that gives the government the power to start saying who can pass what to whom, I say no and I am standing for freedom.”
Translation: I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. But once this whole to-do about SOPA has had its 15 minutes of fame in the media, slightly reword the act and I’ll support it.
Paul:“I am one of the first Republicans to oppose this law and so glad that sentiment has mellowed up here as Republicans have been on the wrong side of this issue and this is a good example on why its good to have someone who can look at civil liberties … freedom and the Constitution bring people together.”
Santorum:“I do not support this law and believe it goes too far. But I will not agree with everyone that there isn’t something that should be done to protect the intellectual content of people. The internet is not a free zone where anyone can do anything they want to do and trample the rights of other people. Particularly when we are talking about entities off shore. The idea that the government has no role to protect the intellectual property of this company, that’s not right. The idea that anything goes on the Internet? Who has that idea. Property rights should be respected.”
Translation: I basically don’t have a problem with this law, but it would be suicide to admit it. I mean, people have way too much freedom online: do you know what people are saying my name means on the internet?
Santorum was the worst and creepiest. He is bugged by freedom and the Internet. As Masnick said:
But, really the most interesting part of what happened was not the candidates answering the question, but the audience’s response. When John King asked the question and gave a brief explanation of SOPA/PIPA… he also mentioned that CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, supported the bill… and the crowd booed loudly. When the candidates — particularly Gingrich and Paul — made their claims, the crowd cheered loudly.
Update: here is Santorum apparently endorsing SOPA or something like it, and regulation of the Internet and restriction of Internet freedom in the name of child pornography and piracy.
Posted by Lew Rockwell on January 19, 2012 12:36 PM
The heroic founder of Khan Academy–“learn almost anything for free”–explains these two State power grabs on behalf of corporatist pressure groups. (Thanks to Steve Bartin)
The Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF) is dedicated to building public awareness of the manner in which so-called “intellectual property” (IP) laws and policies impede innovation, creativity, communication, learning, knowledge, emulation, and information sharing. We are for property rights, free markets, competition, commerce, cooperation, and the voluntary sharing of knowledge, and oppose IP laws, which systematically impede or hamper innovation. IP law should be completely and immediately abolished.
We provide news commentary and analysis and scholarly resources from our unique pro-property, pro-market, pro-innovation perspective.
, or 
The government seems determined to turn out the lights on the digital age. And this is with or without SOPA or the other bills that were only this week shouted down by the global digital community on Blackout Wednesday. The very next day, after support for that legislation collapsed after an impressive mass protest, the FBI and the Justice Department demonstrated that they don’t have to pay any attention to all this silly clamor. Congress, legislation, polling, debates, politicians, the will of the people — it’s all a sideshow to these people.
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