I recently read a report in the New York Times ("A Bid to Overcome Patent Backlogs," Sept 23, 2002) about a plan to reform the US Patent and Trademark Office advanced by current commissioner James Rogan. I strongly support reforming the patent office, and Commissioner Rogan makes several good proposals to that end. For example, imposing fees for patent applications that make large numbers of claims is an excellent way to reduce the amount of unsupported claims made. However, I object to his proposal that there be a new $1,250 fee per application to pay for patent examiners. While the USPTO clearly needs additional funding to pay for more staff, levying this fee will tilt an already unbalanced system in favor of wealthy, corporate applicants rather than the independent inventor. One important goal of the patent office is to protect the "little guy" from the "big guy," in order to prevent the private inventor from being shut out of the market by a wealthier competitor. This additional fee would raise the cost of applying for a patent even higher from its already high cost. This would disproportionately hurt small inventors, like Arthur Battaglia of Santa Rosa, CA (recently featured in Inc. Magazine), inventor of geodesic protective sports gear, for whom the process is already expensive and difficult enough. It would barely register on the radar screens of large companies such as IBM or Sony, who receive several thousand patents per year between them. The net effect of a fee like this would go beyond simply increasing the USPTO revenues; it would tilt the balance even further towards large corporations at the expensive of the small business and private businessman by whom this country was built. As an alternate source of revenue, I propose that Congress cease the practice of taking 10% of USPTO revenues for other purpose. I also propose that the USPTO be able to levy punitive fees for grossly negligent patent applications, such as insufficient investigation of prior art. While these ideas may be effective in the short term in improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the USPTO, they do not avoid the need for a thorough and complete reform of the process, which I will write about at a later time. Thank you.
Sent to House Representative Lloyd Doggett, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, and (lame duck) Senator Phil Gramm:
I am writing you to express my strong opposition to the resolution giving President Bush the authority to attack Iraq. I cannot support the certain death of many Americans based on a vague possibility, and I cannot support America turning into a rogue state that uses military might to enforce its will over the world.
We are America, a nation founded on the principles of freedom, democracy, and right over might. We must take the moral high ground. That means that, even though Saddam Hussein is a demonstrably terrible man, we absolutely cannot make war to preempt a threat. Preemptive war has been used by tyrants and oppressors for time immemorial to justify waging war without cause, and though we may have cause, we cannot allow ourselves to use the same rationalizations. The noble end of removing another Stalin from power cannot justify the violation of an independent nation's sovereignty. We do not even have a trigger incident such as the Gulf of Tonkin. And after Iraq, when does it stop? There are so many nations that are just as threatening or more so than Iraq. Will this be the first in a series of wars to cleanse the world of threats to America? North Korea, Syria, Libya, Iran, Columbia, Uzbekistan, Sudan... the list is a very long one. Until Iraq does something to threaten us directly, I cannot support any action against them. Any other nation that used such a pretext to attack another would invite immediate condemnation from the United States government, and rightly so, as well as from other governments around the world.
Furthermore, I am not convinced of the President's sincerity in pointing to Iraq as a threat after the terrorist attacks on the United States. Attacking Iraq after September 11 would be like the United States attacking Brazil after Pearl Harbor. There is no logical connection between the two, and that the President is trying to use those terrible attacks to justify pursuing his pre-existing agenda against Iraq disgusts me. His father's failure to remove Hussein in 1991 is generally regarded as one of the great failures of his administration, and coupled with the assassination attempt on the elder Bush in 1993, I am convinced that this President cannot think logically and objectively where Iraq is concerned. This does not even address the administration's connections to the energy industry, an industry that has been salivating over Iraq's oil reserves for a decade. If we truly want to reduce the threat of terrorism, we must focus our attention not on Iraq, but on Saudi Arabia. With our oil money, they have supported fundamentalist Wahabi religious schools throughout the Middle East. This has won them the favor of the Wahabi clerics necessary to prop up their autocratic and undemocratic regime, widely regarded as a great abuser of human rights, and has had the effect of strengthening violent, fundamentalist Islamic movements opposed to America and the West. Most of the September 11 hijackers were Saudi. Iraq, on the other hand, has no demonstrated connection to any of the Al Qaeda attacks.
Support for a war against Iraq in the current administration is inconsistent, and that is telling. Neither the President nor the Vice President has served in the full-time military. Donald Rumsfeld served during a time of peace, and only became Secretary of Defense after the end of the Vietnam War. Condoleeza Rice, the National Security Advisor, also has never served in the military. In fact, the only top-ranking administration official who has seen real combat is Secretary of State Colin Powell, who is coincidentally the only top-ranking administration official who opposes a unilateral attack on Iraq. This should give us pause. Powell is the only one who truly knows how terrible war is. While the President or Donald Rumsfeld imagine a quick campaign lasting a matter of weeks and then the noble building of a democracy afterward, Colin Powell sees Army soldiers blown to bits on an Iraqi minefield. He sees Navy bombers destroying a school. He sees Iraqi torture of captured Air Force pilots. Colin Powell is reluctant, and he knows war. The others are eager, but all they know of war is from books and films.
For all these reasons and more, I strongly urge you to vote against the resolution giving President Bush the authority to attack Iraq. Iraq does not pose an immediate, direct threat to us, and has been cooperating in recent weeks. With so many other problems facing us, we cannot allow ourselves to be distracted by Iraq. The world is against an attack on Iraq. The facts are against an attack on Iraq. Morality is against an attack on Iraq. Thank you.
The following is the text of an email I sent to Lawrence Lessig yesterday:
Dr. Lessig,
I attended your discussion at SXSW here in Austin, but did not get a chance to suggest my idea for helping to reform copyright's greatest abuses. Basically it is compulsory licensing. When I buy a single copy of your work, I also buy a license to distribute a single copy of a derivative work, as long as I include your copy with it. So if I buy your CD, I can distribute a remix CD as long as I include your original CD with my remix, without having to seek further approval. For every one of my derivatives, I must buy and include one of your originals. We have the option of negotiating a lower price for the license to my derivative work, but you cannot charge more than what is charged at retail, and you cannot deny me the ability to build upon your work as long as I pay. I also want to emphasize that this should allow any retail purchase. If I get your CD legitimately from a used CD store for $5 instead of the $15 new, it still counts.
So what does this mean? If nobody wants to build on your work, you get exactly what you had before. If, however, it turns out that my derivative is at least 10% as popular as the original, all of a sudden you have the equivalent of a 10% increase in sales, without doing any extra work. Remixing is huge in the electronic music world, with many songs' remixes greatly surpassing the popularity of the original. If we could apply this to music (bedroom remixes), film ("The Phantom Edit" or the Utah video chain distributing "cleaned up" DVDs), short stories, poetry, or any other kind copyrighted media, the potential is vast. As a content producer, you have the advantage of other people testing out ideas. If there is potential in my derivative, you can offer me cheaper licensing terms to encourage higher sales, or to get a bigger chunk of the added revenue. If there is no added potential, there is no loss.
Another, more subtle benefit would come in the long term, when this is a more common way of working. If you expect that others will build upon your work, the onus is not nearly so great to provide a complete package. You don't have to provide pretty pictures in the liner notes, or a second disc of remixes, or get that Senegalese tribal drummer into the studio. You can put out a less-fully articulated expression because you don't have to be complete or authoritative. In that situation, your up-front investment can be considerably reduced.
One could even take this further and use creators of derivatives as a "farm team." In the electronic music world, a new, potentially hot talent can start out with remixes to prove their ability, and then move on to original works (or, given the low cost of home production, the reverse). The computer gaming world has been revolutionized by the success of the Counterstrike mod of Valve Software's Half-Life, a mod which was so popular that it was packaged in a retail box and sold on store shelves long after Half-Life itself had grown stale and irrelevant. The threshold for both publishers and creators is considerably reduced, because the latter can take baby steps into the field, while the former can audition candidates for hire with real portfolios and minimal investment. Perhaps the producers would even get into the habit of distributing the raw source material, such as individual, unmixed tracks, which would be even further lower the level of difficulty in producing a derived work. Like the GNU movement, this would blur the line between a producer and consumer.
Of course, I see several problems with this proposal, as I mentioned initially. If you can create derived works for a fee without other restrictions, there is less impetus to fix what is wrong with copyright in the US in the first place. I would argue that might not be the reality as this plays out. Once the big media publishers get into the habit of seeing their customers as potential co-producers instead of enemies, then their strident calls for copyright regulation would quiet. It would also open up potentially greater revenues for them while reducing their costs, taking the wind out of the financial argument for extended copyright.
The other problem that I see is with works that are subsidized or outright paid for with advertising. Since there is no retail price for those, derivative works under this system wouldn't be possible. It's also conceivable that big media would then embed advertising in some form into all works, just to make it impossible to create derived works. Given the revenue potential, I don't expect they'd be that short-sighted, but then, I used to work at Audiogalaxy and should know better.
The big picture here is that this system would separate money from creative control and eliminate much of the economic friction that exists in licensing today. This wouldn't eliminate that source of revenue, though, as you could always negotiate a cheaper license for a derivative work; in fact, it would often be in the best interest of the producer of the original to do so.
I feel the strongest part of this idea is that the cost for becoming a "remixer" is the exact same as the cost of being a consumer. Further, the copyright owner has no control over the derived work, but is still fully paid. If you have a flawed production of an essentially good idea, someone can realize it to its potential. Society at large benefits from the best expression of a particular idea. And the creativity of other producers is not stifled. I recognize that there are flaws with this idea, but if we waited until our ideas were perfect before revealing them to the world, they would never be revealed and they would never be perfect.
I especially like the phrase I coined to end the email. I feel so smrat.
I am writing you to express my growing frustration with our manned space program. The fantastic achievements of NASA in the Gemini and Apollo programs have long since faded from memory, overshadowed by the terrible failure that is the space shuttle program. The shuttle once had tremendous potential, but it is now clear that the program's costs far exceed its meager benefits. The vast majority of shuttle missions are simple freight-hauling, trucking satellites from the surface into low-Earth orbit. These jobs can be performed at a fraction of the cost using standard, unmanned rockets. Not only is the monetary cost less, but the danger is considerably less as well. Nowadays, a commercial satellite can be launched by private corporations or various other nations' programs, such as Russia, China, Japan, India, and the European Space Agency. The military has had its own launch vehicles for decades. Clearly, we no longer need the shuttle for this.
However, even if we launch satellites using unmanned rockets, we will still need the shuttle for the International Space Station. Due to spiraling costs and cuts in funding, the ISS project has been scaled back. The ISS is but a pale shadow of the grand vision it once was, with no plan to fulfill the original vision. The current crew is too small for the science that is the purpose of the station. Instead, they spend most of their time maintaining the station itself. To summarize the current US manned space program, the shuttle program continues because it is needed to supply the ISS, and the ISS exists because the shuttle needs something to do.
Faced with a federal budget deficit of $455 BILLION for fiscal year 2004, I believe the best option we have now is to simply cancel both programs. They serve no purpose and drain billions of dollars from the federal budget, money that is desperately needed elsewhere. The shuttle and ISS programs are albatrosses around NASA's neck. Note that all of NASA's scientific achievements over the last decade have been using unmanned spacecraft. The dream of manned space flight is a noble one, but at current funding levels, they are worse than nothing. With the current fiscal crisis, it would be irresponsible to increase funding to required levels, but it is also irresponsible to continue throwing away money like this. Low Earth orbit is no longer about science; it is about engineering. The expertise and knowledge are now available in the commercial sector, and the required funding is appearing. Instead of using NASA as an over-priced, short-haul freight company, let's free them to pursue meaningful science.
To this end, I urge you to introduce legislation that will cancel the shuttle and International Space Station programs. I recognize that both programs have strong backing, but I believe that the Columbia disaster earlier this year has made many Americans aware of the limitations of the shuttle. I want manned space exploration to continue, but the shuttle program is not exploration. Until we have the funds available to truly explore space, we should shelve these money-wasting efforts. Thank you.