In 2012, the US Chamber of Commerce put out a report claiming that intellectual property is responsible for 55 million US jobs—46 percent of private sector employment. This is a ridiculous statistic if you merely stop and think about it for a minute. But the fact that the statistic is ridiculous doesn’t mean that it won’t continue to circulate around Washington. For example, last year Rep. Marsha Blackburn cited it uncritically in an oped in The Hill.
In a new paper from Mercatus (here’s the PDF), Ian Robinson and I expose this statistic, and others like them, as pseudoscience. They are based on incredibly shoddy and misleading reasoning. Here’s the abstract of the paper:
In the past two years, a spate of misleading reports on intellectual property has sought to convince policymakers and the public that implausibly high proportions of US output and employment depend on expansive intellectual property (IP) rights. These reports provide no theoretical or empirical evidence to support such a claim, but instead simply assume that the existence of intellectual property in an industry creates the jobs in that industry. We dispute the assumption that jobs in IP-intensive industries are necessarily IP-created jobs. We first explore issues regarding job creation and the economic efficiency of IP that cut across all kinds of intellectual property. We then take a closer look at these issues across three major forms of intellectual property: trademarks, patents, and copyrights.
As they say, read the whole thing, and please share with your favorite IP maximalist.
Sherwin Siy, Vice President of Legal Affairs at Public Knowledge, discusses emerging issues in digital copyright policy. He addresses the Department of Commerce’s recent green paper on digital copyright, including the need to reform copyright laws in light of new technologies. This podcast also covers the DMCA, online streaming, piracy, cell phone unlocking, fair use recognition, digital ownership, and what we’ve learned about copyright policy from the SOPA debate.
Richard Brandt, technology journalist and author, discusses his new book, One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.Com. Brandt discusses Bezos’ entrepreneurial drive, his business philosophy, and how he’s grown Amazon to become the biggest retailer in the world. This episode also covers the biggest mistake Bezos ever made, how Amazon uses patent laws to its advantage, whether Amazon will soon become a publishing house, Bezos’ idea for privately-funded space exploration and his plan to revolutionize technology with quantum computing.
On Forbes today, I look at the phenomenon of memes in the legal and economic context, using my now notorious “Best Buy” post as an example. Along the way, I talk antitrust, copyright, trademark, network effects, Robert Metcalfe and Ronald Coase.
It’s now been a month and a half since I wrote that electronics retailer Best Buy was going out of business…gradually. The post, a preview of an article and future book that I’ve been researching on-and-off for the last year, continues to have a life of its own.
For CNET today, I have a long analysis and commentary on the “Stop Online Piracy Act,” introduced last week in the House. The bill is advertised as the House’s version of the Senate’s Protect-IP Act, which was voted out of Committee in May.
It’s very hard to find much positive to say about the House version. While there’s considerable evidence its drafters heard the criticisms of engineers, legal academics, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, their response was unfortunate.
Engineers pointed out, for example, that court orders requiring individual ISPs to remove or redirect domain name requests was a futile and dangerous way to block access to “rogue” websites. Truly rogue sites can easily relocate to another domain, or simply have users access them with their IP address and bypass DNS altogether. Continue reading →
For CNET this morning, I offer five crucial corrections to the Protect IP Act, which was passed out of committee in the Senate back in May.
Yesterday, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, co-chair of the Congressional Internet Caucus, told a Silicon Valley audience that the House was working on its own version and would introduce it in the next few weeks.
Protect IP would extend efforts to combat copyright infringement and trademark abuse online, especially by websites registered outside the U.S.
Since Goodlatte promised the new bill would be “quite different” from the Senate version, I thought it a good time to get out my red pen and start crossing off the worst mistakes in policy and in drafting in Protect IP.
The full details are in the article, but in brief, here’s what I hope the House does in its version:
Drop provisions that tamper with the DNS system in an effort to block U.S. access to banned sites.
Drop provisions that tamper with search engines, indices, and any other linkage to banned sites.
Remove a private right of action that would allow copyright and trademark holders to obtain court orders banning ad networks and financial transaction processors from doing business with banned sites.
Scale back current enforcement abuses by the Department of Homeland Security under the existing PRO-IP Act of 2008.
Focus the vague and overinclusive definition of the kind of websites that can be banned, limiting it to truly criminal enterprises.
Last November, I penned an essay on these pages about the COICA legislation that had recently been approved unanimously by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. While I praised Congress’s efforts to tackle the problem of “rogue websites” — sites dedicated to trafficking in counterfeit goods and/or distributing copyright infringing content — I warned that the bill lacked crucial safeguards to protect free speech and due process, as several dozen law professors had also cautioned. Thus, I suggested several changes to the legislation that would have limited its scope to truly bad actors while reducing the probability of burdening protected expression through “false positives.” Thanks in part to the efforts of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), COICA never made it a floor vote last session.
Today, three U.S. Senators introduced a similar bill, entitled the PROTECT IP Act (bill text), which, like COICA, establishes new mechanisms for combating Internet sites that are “dedicated to infringing activities.” I’m glad to see that lawmakers adopted several of my suggestions, making the PROTECT IP Act a major improvement over its predecessor. While the new bill still contains some potentially serious problems, on net, it represents a more balanced approach to fighting online copyright and trademark infringement while recognizing fundamental civil liberties.
POLITICO reports that a bill aimed at combating so-called “rogue websites” will soon be introduced in the U.S. Senate by Sen. Patrick Leahy. The legislation, entitled the PROTECT IP Act, will substantially resemble COICA (PDF), a bill that was reported unanimously out of the Senate Judiciary Committee late last year but did not reach a floor vote. As more details about the new bill emerge, we’ll likely have much more to say about it here on TLF.
I discussed my concerns about and suggested changes to the COICA legislation here last November; the PROTECT IP Act reportedly contains several new provisions aimed at mitigating concerns about the statute’s breadth and procedural protections. However, as Mike Masnick points out on Techdirt, the new bill — unlike COICA — contains a private right of action, although that right may not permit rights holders to disable infringing domain names. Also unlike COICA, the PROTECT IP Act would apparently require search engines to cease linking to domain names that a court has deemed to be “dedicated to infringing activities.”
For a more in-depth look at this contentious and complex issue, check out the panel discussion that the Competitive Enterprise Institute and TechFreedomhosted last month. Our April 7 event explored the need for, and concerns about, legislative proposals to combat websites that facilitate and engage in unlawful counterfeiting and copyright infringement. The event was moderated by Juliana Gruenwald of National Journal. The panelists included me, Danny McPherson of VeriSign, Tom Sydnor of the Association for Competitive Technology, Dan Castro of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, David Sohn of the Center for Democracy & Technology, and Larry Downes of TechFreedom.
I was quoted this morning in Sara Jerome’s story for The Hillon the weekend seizures of domain names the government believes are selling black market, counterfeit, or copyright infringing goods.
The seizures take place in the context of an on-going investigation where prosecutors make purchases from the sites and then determine that the goods violate trademarks or copyrights or both.
Several reports, including from CNET, The Washington Post and Techdirt, wonder how it is the government can seize a domain name without a trial and, indeed, without even giving notice to the registered owners.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.