IPI Policy Blog

The new unemployment numbers are out and the best we can say is, well, actually there isn’t much good we can say. The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the economy added 169,000 jobs last month, but that’s about 10,000 lower than may economists were predicting.

Unemployment fell from 7.4 percent to 7.3 percent, which looks god initially, but that’s because so many more Americans quit looking for work.

When President George W. Bush took America into Iraq to invade the country, overthrow its government and install a new one more to our liking, he provoked a major crisis on the center-right regarding foreign policy; i.e., what should be our governing principles for such military intervention. Bush’s policies were, undeniably, a departure from any recent past calculus by Republican presidents.

[It’s important to note that Bush’s attack on Afghanistan did not cause consternation on the Right. We were attacked by a foe being provided safe harbor and resources by Afghanistan. All of the wealth and treasure that should have been directed at the Taliban and al-Queda in Afghanistan were misdirected at Iraq in the opinions of many conservatives.]

Conservatives like principles by which to make our decisions. We’re uncomfortable making emotional decisions, and we’re uncomfortable simply defending whatever “our guy in the White House” wants to do or, for that matter, we’re uncomfortable simply opposing whatever “their guy in the White House” wants to do. We value principles, intellectual consistency, and putting country above party. We know that, ultimately, military involvement overseas is always going to be a judgment call, but we want to feel good about how the judgment was made.

But such principles have been hard to come by in recent practice. For better or worse, the crisis in Syria and the opportunity for congressional debate has created a chance for conservatives to think through how such decisions ought to be made.

The Dallas Fed put out a very interesting paper (PDF) in July in which they try to quantify the damage done by the 2007-09 financial crisis. Don’t go looking to this paper to find anything about the “cause” or “roots” of the crisis, or how to get out of it, or whether the right policies were followed, etc. No, they’re just trying to quantify the costs to the economy, which is valid and interesting in itself.

They come up with some astonishingly large numbers. Without going into enormous detail here (you can read the paper yourself if you have an appetite for enormous detail), they find that the cost of the financial crisis is at least 40-90% of a full year’s (2007) economic output for the United States. I say “at least” because, after they have figured in a few other factors they believe are valid, they conclude that “what the U.S. gave up as a result of the crisis is likely greater than the value of one year’s output.”

That’s between $6 trillion and $14 trillion lost, or the equivalent of $50,000 to $120,000 for every U.S. household. Now it seems big.

Associated Press reporter Martha Mendoza writes how a promised satellite patent office for tech giant Silicon Valley—the top region in the world producing patents—is being denied thanks to sequestration cuts, despite the fact that patent offices are funded through patent fees, not taxpayer dollars.

It’s time once again for us to delve into the logical fallacies of Mike Masnick. Previously, we dealt with Mike committing the bifurcation fallacy. In today’s installment, it’s Mike committing the logical fallacy of begging the question.

Mike has often broadly asserted that one of the many sins of copyright is that it is used to facilitate censorship. So anytime any proponent of copyright points out how copyright facilitates the creation and distribution of speech, and thus is a friend of free speech and the First Amendment, Mike is quick to retort something like “How can anyone claim with a straight face that copyright supports the First Amendment when it is so often used for censorship!”

Like he did here, for instance.

Perhaps no other area of innovation is more critical to protect than pharmaceuticals and medical technology. But a piece today in Forbes by Eli Lilly's CEO discusses how a trend in Canadian courts may be threatening drug innovation by invalidating therapies and medicines already in use by patients on a wide scale.

Lechleiter writes:

“Canadian courts have arbitrarily created – and retroactively applied – a standard for what is ‘useful’ under Canadian law. Applying the ‘Promise of the Patent Doctrine,’ the courts have set a standard found in no other developed country, and one that is more or less impossible for an innovative pharmaceutical company to consistently meet.”

I hate to bring back up the topic of net neutrality, since those of us who worked on the issue for a decade are pretty much sick to the teeth of it, and we're all enjoying a brief respite from net neutrality as we await the results of Verizon's court challenge of the FCC's authority to impose net neutrality rules.

. . . (ahhhhhh)

But I can't help but point out that, in the current retransmission dispute between Time Warner Cable and CBS, somehow CBS has managed to turn the major concern of net neutrality proponents on its head.

I was talking with a lady, who is probably in her late 50s, when she told me she was going to start looking for a different job. See, she’s a teller working in the branch of one of the country’s largest banks, and the bank is making some cutbacks, turning its full-time tellers into part-timers (at some branches anyway).

I asked the next question, but I was pretty sure I already knew the answer: How many hours was the bank willing to let her work? Under 30, she said, which just so happens to be ObamaCare’s dividing line between those who must be covered with employer-provided health insurance and those who don’t.

Not going to do a full dissertation on the topic, but the term "patent troll" is being thrown around quite a bit too broadly these days. For many, ANY non-practicing entity is, by their definition, a patent troll.

We think this is ridiculous. There is nothing wrong with an entity simply being in the patent business. Whether or not some entity is a "patent troll" should be determined by their behavior, not simply by their business model.

What brings this to mind? Noticed a patent application published by USPTO on July 25th, filed by Intellectual Ventures. If you're in the business of inventing things and filing patent applications, you are not a patent troll.

Why did I happen to notice? Well, the application has some very prominent names listed as inventors, including Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold. Those are names that stand out.

I'm probably going to regret the title of this blog post, not because I'm afraid to say that Mike Masnick committed a logical fallacy, but because he commits logical fallacies so often that I should reserve this title for a SERIES of blog posts . . . 

[Note: Title edited]

Anyway, a few weeks ago I did a blog post on the House IP Subcommittee's second hearing of the new copyright review process, this one themed copyright and innovation.

My main point was that there was actually very little criticism of the copyright status quo during the hearing, but you can read that blog entry for yourself.

My blog post aroused the ire of Mike Masnick over at TechDirt, which they often do (and which frankly isn't hard to do). But the nature of Masnick's complaint about my post was truly amazing, as Masnick made really obvious logical fallacies in supposedly rebutting my points.

This item is from a few weeks ago, but Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) had a good piece in The Hill where she calls for stronger IP enforcement action by the administration.

An excerpt:

Who is going to take the U.S. seriously if we continue to deny a performance right for sound recordings as the rest of the developed world already does? We’re in a league with North Korea, Iran and China that still fails to recognize these rights. Will other countries take advantage of U.S.-based innovation if we aren’t willing to take reasonable actions against foreign-based rogue websites that threaten U.S. health and safety?

We continue to allow 25 percent of all Internet traffic to go to illegal rogue websites. It helps criminal enterprises thrive but it kills American business and hurts consumers. Creators benefit from the certainty of consistent and strong enforcement.

The story so far, told through a series of links in chronological order:

1. Senator Durbin's letter of intimidation to IPI
2. Wall Street Journal editorial on Durbin's letter
3. Chicago Tribune editorial on Durbin's letter
4. Cato Institute's reply to Senator Durbin
5. IPI blog entry on the Durbin episode
6. IPI letter replying to Senator Durbin

So IPI went out on a limb on the sequester. We wrote a paper praising the sequester and explaining that the sequester represented the mildest down payment on the kind of spending restraint that is necessary if we have any hope of setting our fiscal house in order. We created charts to explain just how small the sequester restraints were. We blogged and gave speeches and did TV and went on the radio to sell the sequester. We got coverage in print media. We did our part--we more than did our part.

And we were right.

Check out Steve Moore's piece in today's Wall Street Journal.

The $150 billion budget decline of 4% is the first time federal expenditures have fallen for two consecutive years since the end of the Korean War.

If you want to know what political intimidation looks like, this link will take you to a PDF of the letter sent to IPI (and allegedly over 300 organizations) about their support of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

I'm not going to excerpt any language from the letter in this blog entry, because you just have to read the entire thing.

Durbin's office probably made a major mistake sending this letter to think tanks like IPI (and the Cato Institute), because we don't cow to things like this--in fact, we see them as opportunities to point out political intimidation. The letter was reallly designed for corporations who are members of ALEC, to make the occupants of the executive suite call up their government affairs office and ask what the heck Company X is doing with this organization that generated a letter from a U.S. senator. It's subtle but strategic intimidation of free speech and freedom of association, and IPI intends to respond along these lines.

The Obama administration has steped in, ignoring the law it passed, to fix a problem of its own making. It has decided it can continue paying the lion's share of the health insurance premiums for Hill staff being forced into the health insurance exchanges.