The Informationist

Patent Reform

Yglesias piques my interest yet again! Today he wrote a brief piece about patent reform. I added my own two cents:

It’s tough to know how to best motivate innovation. Many recent observers have concluded that our current patent system is too strong. If that’s true, it’s a relatively new phenomenon. Not too long ago, the general consensus was that our patent system was too weak, and that it was hurting our competitiveness internationally. In the late ‘70s, Jimmy Carter set up a Domestic Policy Review committee to find the sources of our national malaise. One of its key recommendations was that we needed to strengthen our patent system. The Carter Justice Department ran with the idea, and in one of the few clean handoffs, the Reagan Justice Department finished the job.

That was 25 years ago. We need to fix the system again, perhaps in fundamental ways. The best bet would be to keep it where it is--with the ideological divide running orthogonal to partisan affiliation. While I don’t deny the benefits that the pharmaceutical industry enjoys under both the patent system and several of Bush’s domestic policies, I see this parallel as essentially coincidental.

Matt actually got back to me on that one:

Informationist: There was actually a surprising amount of Carter-Reagan continuity on a variety of issues related to the deregulation of industry, where a somewhat wacky coalition of Naderite consumer advocates and ideological libertarians relaxed a lot of New Deal-era rules that had become crusty with capture by incumbent industry players and so forth.

He’s right, of course. There’s always more continuity when we change parties than anyone might like to admit. Still, economic policy continuity between these two administrations was slim. The inclusion of innovation policy continuity in what was a relatively small set remains noteworthy.

Meanwhile, it seems that TPMCafe generates a fair amount of traffic, and that people are paying attention. Yesterday’s posts both earned responses as well as user ratings (whose utility I question). Best news of all, Henry Farrell chimed in, promising a review of Digital Phoenix on “Crooked Timber” within the next few weeks or so.

Seems that Crooked Timber is a leftish philosophy blog. He repeated his promise there, while pointing back to Yglesias’s entire discussion and some interesting followups.

All of which leave me with a question and an observation. The question: Let’s see how they take to basic informationism. The observation: Blogs lead to new blogs as the network grows. The pattern that I outlined in Digital Phoenix seem to explain the blogosphere. My comments to Gillmor are looking good as I accumulate data.

Posted by Bruce Abramson from on 06/03 at 04:48 PM in The Not-Quite-Yet Information Economy