The Scottosphere

Today is the spe­cial pri­mary elec­tion for Mass­a­chu­setts’ Eighth Suf­folk Rep­re­sen­ta­tive District.

How would I know that? And why was I so excited to vote?

For starters, F and I have met both can­di­dates for our party–Jay Liv­ing­stone and Josh Daw­son. They have rang our door­bell sev­eral times over the last cou­ple of months. So have many of their sup­port­ers. They have left mes­sages on our answer­ing machine. They have hung tags on our door­knobs. They have slipped notes under our front door that say, “sorry I missed you!”

I don’t think I would have paid any atten­tion to this elec­tion if it hadn’t been for the sheer energy of these can­di­dates. With the stakes appar­ently so high for these guys, I felt obliged to cast a vote one way or another. But how? Their plat­forms are so sim­i­lar. Liv­ing­stone got a lot of key endorse­ments, but Daw­son even­tu­ally earned the Globe’s. Both nice peo­ple with sen­si­ble views. Happy smil­ing fam­i­lies. Both live in my neighborhood.

I’ve never seen an elec­tion like this. (Per­haps this is because I don’t live in a swing state.)

When I got home from work this evening, there were four mes­sages on our answer­ing machine: two from Livingstone’s vol­un­teers, one from Dawson’s staff, and a final mes­sage from Daw­son him­self, men­tion­ing me by name and say­ing that he would be hon­ored to have my vote.

Well, Mr. Daw­son, I am happy to say you earned it. I am dis­ap­pointed to see that you may have lost this elec­tion. Best of luck next time.

The Boston Con­ven­tion and Exhi­bi­tion Cen­ter is a short walk from my office, so I went to check out the scene at lunch today. Exhaust­ing as they are, one of the things I find so fas­ci­nat­ing about Amer­i­can pres­i­den­tial elec­tions is the way they cap­ture such rapt inter­na­tional atten­tion. I vividly remem­ber wan­der­ing through the out­door fes­ti­val in Cop­ley Square eight years ago, watch­ing rows and rows of reporters from far-flung places report­ing to their cam­eras on John Kerry’s situation.

It’s kind of like that here again. At least, the jour­nal­ists are back. But in a more dis­mal setting–indoors, in a bland con­ven­tion cen­ter in a rel­a­tively unin­hab­ited part of town. With a can­di­date in whom I have no inter­est. But still, it’s neat to see the world look­ing so closely at us, even for a day.

I’m proud of myself: I have not watched any of the debates this year. As an informed and com­pletely decided voter, I have noth­ing to gain.

In past years, watch­ing the debates was an alter­nately exhil­a­rat­ing and gut-wrenching expe­ri­ence. It made me want to pace back and forth and occa­sion­ally shout back at the tele­vi­sion set. I finally real­ized that this must be what it’s like for peo­ple who care about foot­ball to watch peo­ple play­ing foot­ball on TV.

Just check­ing to see if the neigh­bors still have their wire­less net­work run­ning. Yup.

The U.S. patent sys­tem is bro­ken. In the old days, the goal was to pro­tect the small-time inven­tor from get­ting ripped off by big com­pa­nies. That would seem­ingly encour­age inno­va­tion, which is regarded as a Good Thing. For decades how­ever, the sys­tem has shifted to favor the deep-pocketed com­pa­nies, who have dis­cov­ered that with enough legal wran­gling they can gen­er­ally get util­ity patents on any­thing they want. Such patents are assigned a the­o­ret­i­cal value and become bar­gain­ing chips. So that’s a bum­mer, but not the end of the world.

Lately, a num­ber of hos­tile players–patent trolls–have taken to the scene. These are indi­vid­u­als, com­pa­nies, or even shell com­pa­nies who are nei­ther inven­tors nor pro­duc­ers of goods. They sim­ply buy the rights to patents and sue the shit out of peo­ple who may or may not be in vio­la­tion. Most defen­dants set­tle because the cost of pur­su­ing a legal bat­tle over arcane and tech­ni­cal mat­ters is pro­hib­i­tive for all but the most well-funded com­pa­nies. (For more infor­ma­tion, see exhibit A and exhibit B.)

I pro­pose a sim­ple three-step fix to the system:

1. Elim­i­nate soft­ware patents entirely. This was a really bad idea. In soft­ware, last year’s novel inven­tion is this year’s stan­dard indus­try prac­tice. Does the patent you got for an Inter­net shop­ping cart in the ’90s enti­tle you to bil­lions of dol­lars of roy­al­ties today? No. And how can you really prove when some­one is in vio­la­tion? Spe­cific exe­cu­tions of soft­ware con­cepts are pro­tected under exist­ing copy­right law. What hap­pens under the hood is just dig­i­tal plumbing.
2. Pro­hibit “non-practicing enti­ties” from own­ing patents. All patents should be assigned to either the actual inven­tors or to a com­pany actively engaged in the busi­ness. Any other own­er­ship is not in the best inter­ests of society–remember that we want to pro­vide incen­tives for only the cre­ation and exe­cu­tion of ideas.
3. Elim­i­nate jury tri­als for patent cases. All patent lit­i­ga­tion should be resolved by a judge assisted by a panel of experts drawn from indus­try and acad­e­mia. I’ve served on a jury of my “peers,” and I can cer­tify that nobody on that panel would have been qual­i­fied to eval­u­ate a sub­tle ques­tion about pro­gram­ming, engi­neer­ing, or pretty much any tech­ni­cal sub­ject. It pains me to imag­ine what the jury had to say about the inner work­ings of Java APIs dur­ing May’s Google-Oracle trial.

James Fal­lows makes this great point in his Sun­day opin­ion piece, “Can China Escape the Low-Wage Trap?”:

In much of Amer­ica, the Inter­net is slow [com­pared with South Korea or Japan], but mainly for infra­struc­ture rea­sons. In China it’s slow because of polit­i­cal con­trol: cen­sor­ship and the “Great Fire­wall” bog down every­thing and make much of the online uni­verse impos­si­ble to reach. “What coun­try ever rode to pre-eminence by fight­ing the reign­ing tech­nol­ogy of the time?” a friend asked while I was in China last year. “Did the Brits ban steam?”

I try my best to ignore election-related news cov­er­age in non-election years such as this one. It’s dis­tract­ing and coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. But it can be hard to tune out—especially when the list of appar­ently viable con­tenders for the Repub­li­can ticket include such, um, bril­liant minds as Her­man Cain and Michelle Bachman.

There are two phe­nom­ena at play that I have trou­ble under­stand­ing. First, who would rally behind a pres­i­den­tial can­di­date that lacks a top-notch knowl­edge of law, pol­i­cy­mak­ing, for­eign pol­icy issues, and eco­nom­ics? (Isn’t this sup­posed to be the hard­est job in the world?) Sec­ondly, why does the Repub­li­can vet­ting sys­tem seem to revolve around pub­licly ques­tion­ing the can­di­dates on whether they are con­ser­v­a­tive enough? (Can there be no room for com­pro­mise in a func­tion­ing two-party system?)

For­tu­nately, some­one has writ­ten a funny and inter­est­ing essay explor­ing both top­ics: “Why Repub­li­cans Embrace Sim­ple­tons and How it Hurts Amer­ica.”

F told me about a new protest tech­nique hatched by the Occupy Wall Street types: using the pre-paid return evel­opes enclosed with credit card offers to send mes­sages back to big banks. I have decided to do this, although I har­bor no illu­sions of chang­ing the finan­cial sys­tem. My dream: a mail­box with fewer credit card offers in it.

If I can help to keep the US Postal Ser­vice sol­vent on some­one else’s dime, that’s not a bad out­come either.