Given the sudden rush of interest on patent reform, with two excellent pieces today referencing Irwin Jacobs’ recent talk here at Heritage, I thought I’d provide a link so you can see it for yourself. Enjoy.
March 2007
The patent system “has overall worked very well in encouraging innovation and, particularly in our case, in allowing us to grow to a significant company,” remarked Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Mark Jacobs at the Heritage Foundation last week. To many, the patent system works too well. Our present system awarded a patent for a garbage bag [...]
In my latest column on GigaOM, I speak to the meteoric rise of “patent reform” as an issue for Washington lobbyists. As Tim Lee points out in his latest entry, it isn’t always clear that patents=innovation. Irony note: it is Verizon — not Vonage – that is a member of the Coalition for Patent Fairness, [...]
Links to this Drug Enforcement Administration page are traversing the blogosphere, along with instructions not to submit phony tips. Submitting phony tips would be improper and unwise, especially if you are doing so from an IP address than can be linked back to you. You wouldn’t want to interfere with the federal government’s ever-growing usurpation [...]
A very sensible video editorial from Walt Mossberg: I agree with Mossberg that we need “a law written from the perspective of the consumer and the internet, rather than strictly from the perspective of the copyright holders.” But I think Mossberg is lumping together two things that it might be better to keep clearly distinct: [...]
TLF’s Adam Thierer yesterday posted about the “Other America” — the part that just doesn’t give a hoot about broadband. But get ready for another shocker: there are also some that don’t care about over-the-air television. This was pointed out by the ever-quotable Gary Shapiro — chief of the Consumers Electronics Association — at a [...]
I testified in Congress yesterday, at a hearing on the REAL ID Act in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia. My testimony is here. An issue that I sought to highlight comes from studying the REAL ID regulations carefully: [...]
From Greg Costikyan of Manifesto Games, on DRM and information. From the “creators are getting screwed” genre, but makes some interesting points regarding the need of creators for DRM even if the intermediaries (distributors, marketers) are taken out of the game. The “creators are getting screwed” genre is a subset of the larger argument that [...]
Mike Masnick warns that the future of VoIP is in jeopardy: You have to wonder how many times fans of the patent system have to repeat the mantra that “patents encourage innovation” before they can actually believe it. There continues to be new evidence on nearly a daily basis of patents doing the exact opposite [...]
In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Cyren Call Chairman Morgan O’Brien and Frontline Wireless Chairman Janice Obuchowski each had a letter to the editor responding to my March 13th op-ed about first responder communications. I’d like to take up just a few sentences to respond. O’Brien writes that I “audaciously misrepresent[ed]” Cyren Call’s proposal, but does [...]
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