Innovation Policy Post

CCIA President & CEO Ed Black has written to the Senate opposing S.23, the Patent Reform Act of 2011. The bill has been marked up by the Senate Judiciary Committee and is scheduled for a floor vote this afternoon.

The bill raises a number of concerns for the tech sector. The proposed move to a first-to-file offers no provision for prior users and raises the prospect of a stampede to file patents, which would further increase the 1.2 million application backlog at U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Although similar to a draft circulated spring, the bill has new section designed to eliminate patents on tax planning, but the Committee has held no hearings on this issue, and it would appear to validate existing tax planning patents as well as other patents on legal compliance.

Today marks the launch of an initiative, the Fan Freedom Project, focused on consumers’ problems with restrictive paperless ticketing – the practice of using electronic ticketing to control or take away entirely consumers right to resell or transfer tickets which they have purchased.

In the wake of the government ordered shutdown of Internet access in Egypt recently, Washington policymakers are debating various scenarios involving “regulation of the Internet.” The consensus seems to be that government should not be able to act as a gatekeeper or shut off Internet access. In the U.S., dominant private companies also have the ability and commercial incentive to act as gatekeepers, but so far for the most part they have not. That’s the way Americans like it. The Internet itself has never been regulated here, although the underlying local cable TV and telephone access services were regulated until 2005.

Today’s New York Times features a peculiar editorial titled ‘Would the Bard Have Survived the Web?’, by Authors Guild representatives Scott Turow, Paul Aiken, and James Shapiro in advance of tomorrow’s Senate Judiciary hearing on targeting websites engaged in IP infringement. The column proposes the counterfactual notion that Shakespeare could not have survived in the age of the Internet. (Nevermind that Shakespearean theatre seems to be doing quite well.) It is even more peculiar to point to Shakespeare as evidencing the need for any given modern copyright law, since the playwright’s death predated the 1710 Statute of Anne – the first ‘modern’ copyright law – by nearly a century.

Over the past few years there has been a tendency, especially by those in the financial press, to play it fast and loose with economic jargon.  Buzzwords replace actual understanding of issues and the fourth estate transmits these so-called truisms to the public.  This can be highly misleading, and often it proves dangerous, especially if these fallacies take hold inside the Beltway or in Brussels. 

When it comes to innovation, people often think of a research lab as the setting for new inventions or perhaps more recently the college dorm room or garage. But a new study by scholars including noted technology innovation professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management Eric von Hippel finds that most innovation is happening on kitchen tables and garage workbenches.

Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) says she plans to re-introduce legislation that would grant the President broad authority over swaths of Internet infrastructure to confront a “cyber emergency.” The re-emergence of this legislation, coinciding with the five-day Internet blackout across Egypt, has come under criticism this week.

Egypt’s Internet shutdown has raised concerns about that happening in the U.S. more easily if the “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act” is enacted. Some say the legislation gives our government an “Internet kill switch,” but the bills’ backers dispute this assertion.

CCIA submitted comments to the Department of Commerce January 28th in response to the green paper they released in December entitled "Commercial Data Privacy and Innovation in the Internet Economy." We applaud the Department of Commerce for undertaking the large task of addressing the complex and important issues surrounding consumer privacy and innovation on the Internet. The green paper raised thought provoking questions and insights that showed the long hours that must have gone into its production. We hope that our comments, along with all the rest of those received, will help the Department of Commerce as it moves forward with its work.