[Ip-health] Slate on prizes and CLs

[Amy Kapczynski]

--
[ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]

Slate commissioned a series of articles on how a new administration
could fix the Bush administration's worst mistakes.  Tim Wu did the
piece on technology, which has lots of interesting bits -- but two
parts of particular interest, on CLs and prizes.

<snip>
=95 Fix international tech policy. The president has broad powers to
set U.S. international tech policy, and the next president can act to
do so quickly. As with the FCC, the president has the chance to staff
the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative with some of the best and
brightest; he or she should also appoint a worthy successor to
"Internet ambassador" David Gross in the State Department. The
president can also act to reverse a few of the uglier policy
practices that have crept in.

Here's a leading example: Today, the United States=97at the request of
the domestic drug industry=97continues to sanction poorer nations for
trying to make available low-cost medicines for their citizens. For
much of the 1990s, the drug industry and the U.S. government insisted
that the sale of affordable generic AIDS drugs in African nations
would be bad for innovation and global health. Under heavy pressure,
the Clinton administration in 1999 swore it wouldn't punish poorer
nations that break patents to sell cheap AIDS drugs, and Bush pledged
to respect that policy. But as recently as last year, the United
States was pressuring Thailand to abandon its efforts to provide
cheaper AIDS drugs to its citizens=97even though Thailand had followed
WTO rules in doing so.

U.S. backsliding in this area is indefensible and creates plenty of
bad international karma. The next president should declare early on
that the United States will no longer put trade pressure on
developing countries using WTO-compliant means to make medicine more
affordable.

...


In addition to patent reform, over the last decade economists have
urged limits to the patent as a tool of encouraging invention. More
economists think there needs be a greater role for "innovation
prizes"=97prizes for beneficial inventions that, for one reason or
another, the commercial patent system doesn't seem to do a good job
of encouraging. Examples are renewable-energy technologies or
treatments for diseases in developing countries. If we can afford to
put a price on the head of Osama Bin Laden, why not one for inventing
a malaria vaccine?


<snip>
----------

http://www.slate.com/id/2187740/

Slate Magazine
fixing it
Tech Policy
Jump-starting our tech policy.
By Tim Wu
Posted Tuesday, April 1, 2008, at 8:09 AM ET

Perhaps the only thing that's actually improved over the last eight
years under President Bush is technology (if not tech policy). In the
sense that Nixon presided over an age of great films like The
Godfather, the Bush era was also the age of Wikipedia, search
engines, YouTube, and Facebook. But the Bush system of benign neglect
can only go so far, leaving plenty to fix as soon as the next
president takes office.

Here are a few suggestions for things we can fix right away:

=95 Appoint a broadband czar. Most people in technology will tell you
that the leading problem today=97the one thing sinking all boats, so to
speak=97is the broadband last mile, the final connection between people
and the Internet. Since 2000, computers have become faster, hard
drives cheaper, and free e-mail better, but for the vast majority of
Americans, Internet access remains clunky. Same goes for wireless
broadband (cell phones with good Internet access), which is arriving,
but slowly and expensively. These facts limit what everyone in the
tech and media industries can imagine as effective new products. They
are also beginning to put the United States at a disadvantage as
compared with nations in Asia and Europe that have invested more.

It's a daunting problem with a long history of both public and
private failure. Unlike, say, building a better dating service,
broadband is an infrastructure problem that requires solutions akin
to improving roads or plumbing. National infrastructure policy is
tough, and, at its worst, Bush's approach has borrowed largely from
Emperor Nero.

To start fixing things, the next president should immediately
announce a national broadband policy with this simple goal: to put
the United States back into undisputed leadership in wireless and
wire-line broadband. But the question is how, and that's where things
get complicated. Proposed fixes abound: pay Verizon, AT&T, or Comcast
to build it? Treat the Internet's pipes like the interstate highways,
and have the government build them? Use tax credits to encourage
consumers to buy their own fiber connections? Sell property rights in
spectrum or create a "mesh" wireless commons?

No one really knows what the best answer is. That's why the next
president should appoint a specialized broadband czar to get after
the problem. Right now, broadband is no one's responsibility, and the
buck keeps getting passed between industry, Congress, the White
House, and the FCC. The point of a czar would be to make it someone's
job to figure out what it will take to fix broadband.

=95 Create the FCC dream team. The next president will have the
opportunity to appoint an entirely new Federal Communications
Commission. The FCC is the principal American regulator of
communications, setting many of the most important rules for
information economy. The appointment opportunity shouldn't be wasted=97
the next president could and should dramatically transform what the
FCC can be.

Once upon a time, actual experts were appointed to the commission.
The first commission, in 1927, was, as historian Philip Rosen writes,
"a remarkable group." It included a former admiral who was a naval
radio expert, an inspector from the Commerce Department, an engineer
and editor from McGraw-Hill, a practicing broadcaster with a Ph.D. in
English, and a state Supreme Court judge. Today, none of these people
would be considered for the job.

Instead of communications expertise, the leading qualifications are
now mostly political. Preferred experience includes time logged as a
Capitol Hill staffer or in state government; work as a Washington,
D.C., telecom attorney and/or lobbyist; some campaign experience; and
buy-in from a major industry. Yes, many talented people possess these
qualifications, and the FCC has, and continues to have, great
leaders. But at some level the approach is like choosing from among
Nike's lawyers to find coaches for the U.S. Olympic team. At its
worst, it means commissioners show up with "team loyalty"=97a duty to
serve the interests of one of the major industries. And lax
restraints on lobbying post-FCC service exacerbates the problem=97why
make your future boss angry?

The next president needs to break this tradition. She or he should
search far and wide (yes, even outside of Washington, D.C.) for the
wisest tech experts and visionaries to try to create an FCC dream
team. The yardstick is the 1927 commission. By 2010, we should ask
whether the next administration has managed to at least equal
President Coolidge in the quality of its appointments.

=95 Fix international tech policy. The president has broad powers to
set U.S. international tech policy, and the next president can act to
do so quickly. As with the FCC, the president has the chance to staff
the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative with some of the best and
brightest; he or she should also appoint a worthy successor to
"Internet ambassador" David Gross in the State Department. The
president can also act to reverse a few of the uglier policy
practices that have crept in.

Here's a leading example: Today, the United States=97at the request of
the domestic drug industry=97continues to sanction poorer nations for
trying to make available low-cost medicines for their citizens. For
much of the 1990s, the drug industry and the U.S. government insisted
that the sale of affordable generic AIDS drugs in African nations
would be bad for innovation and global health. Under heavy pressure,
the Clinton administration in 1999 swore it wouldn't punish poorer
nations that break patents to sell cheap AIDS drugs, and Bush pledged
to respect that policy. But as recently as last year, the United
States was pressuring Thailand to abandon its efforts to provide
cheaper AIDS drugs to its citizens=97even though Thailand had followed
WTO rules in doing so.

U.S. backsliding in this area is indefensible and creates plenty of
bad international karma. The next president should declare early on
that the United States will no longer put trade pressure on
developing countries using WTO-compliant means to make medicine more
affordable.

=95 The technology of transparent government. One of the great and
enduring accomplishments of the Bush administration was that it
undermined once and for all the argument that the best decisions are
made in secret. Some of Bush's more grotesque mistakes=97like the
decision to spy on American citizens without warrants=97might have been
averted by even a tiny amount of transparency.

Bush leaves behind a transparency tradition somewhere between
Brezhnev and Dracula. A new administration can and should change that=97
but giving people information about what the government is doing is
actually an information-technology problem. To an Internet user, what
the government really lacks today is a good search engine or wiki to
find out what's going on. The White House, perhaps through a CTO- or
CIO-like figure, can find out what the barriers to transparency are,
how many are unnecessary, and what can make it easier for citizens to
follow their government. Whether that means turning the next White
House into a four-year episode of Real World, I leave to the next
administration to decide.

Long-term solutions

=95 Immigration. The insanity of the current U.S. immigration policy
hurts not just the conscience but the tech industries as well. Yes,
Congress controls immigration levels, but the new president can
certainly push for more visas for highly skilled foreign workers.
Otherwise, innovation will follow the talent, whether it's in India,
Ireland, or Palau.

=95 Patents and prizes. The United States patent system drifted into a
state of generally recognized insanity in the late 1990s, turning the
supposed friend of innovation into a menace. In its darkest days, the
U.S. Patent Office and the Federal Circuit Court essentially threw
open the patent store and let anyone take what they wanted. Hence the
years of ridiculous patents on sandwiches and anti-gravity space
vehicles, along with industry-endangering patents used to force
settlements out of innovators like RIM and Microsoft.

To their credit, the Supreme Court and the Patent Office have in
recent years fixed a few of the worst problems, but issues remain.
The next president or his surrogate must lean heavily on the Patent
Office to take seriously its responsibility as an effective
gatekeeper of patent quality. The deeper cure has two parts: The
first is pushing for a system that allows opposition to patent
applications and other reforms, like the famous "gold-plated patent"
proposal championed by Mark Lemley, Douglas Lichtman, and Bhaven
Sampat. The second is starting to rebalance the pro-patent Federal
Circuit, arguably among the more activist courts in the nation and
the recent target of a Supreme Court crackdown. The president can
appoint judges to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals (the patent
court) who are both respected experts yet also believe that more
patent isn't always better.

In addition to patent reform, over the last decade economists have
urged limits to the patent as a tool of encouraging invention. More
economists think there needs be a greater role for "innovation
prizes"=97prizes for beneficial inventions that, for one reason or
another, the commercial patent system doesn't seem to do a good job
of encouraging. Examples are renewable-energy technologies or
treatments for diseases in developing countries. If we can afford to
put a price on the head of Osama Bin Laden, why not one for inventing
a malaria vaccine?
Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and co-author of Who
Controls the Internet? He has advised the Obama campaign on certain
aspects of its technology policies. His views do not necessary
represent those of the Obama campaign.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2187740/