Finally, the Supreme Court has recognized that intellectual property rights exist to promote progress (Microsoft vs. At&T and KSR vs. Teleflex), and not simply to protect some intrinsic right of ownership.

I’ve think this is a pretty straightfoward reading of the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8) and it’s bothered me that people don’t get it: not my congressman who I once wrote to about IP issues; not the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals which has most jurisdiction over these matters; and not the lawyers in my family who will talk your ear off about politics and justice but can’t be engaged on this issue. Concern about this has seemed to be the exclusive province of a geeky subculture that reads Slashdot and Wired magazine, where Lawrence Lessig’s columns mostly “preach to the converted.” But it’s not a geeky issue; the free exchange of ideas (and access to technology to promote that exchange) is fundamental to our democracy.

Perhaps we should have been using an analogy: should a restaurant go out of business because someone patented putting ketchup on a hamburger? Should I lose my house because I didn’t license the patent on putting the diswasher next to the sink? Some things are obvious; but adopting obvious ideas was becoming something that could risk one’s company or career. Chefs, interior designers, and software developers have similar jobs: we aren’t hired to invent something new and patentable as often as we’re hired to make to order that same general sort of thing everyone else is doing. What’s fair is for people and businesses doing actual creative work to be protected without their legal budget exceeding their R&D cost, but until now the the legal system didn’t see it this way.

Interesting article (via EFF) that Cuyahogo County, Ohio may replace their new e-voting machines. Interesting personally because it’s where my wife’s family is from, and I’ve been to the county courthouse myself to get my marriage license. Interesting politically for two reasons:

1. This is the greater Cleveland area which, on its own, is much closer to being a “blue state” than the rest of Ohio, so it does affect Ohio’s electoral college vote and the national election.

2. The article says they may be using more optical-scanner machines. I’ve voted with these in Newton and Brookline and, as I found in the last primary, they can actually be pretty high tech - it took less than a second for the machine to read and reject my ballot because I’d accidentally voted twice in the same race. The optical systems could be best of both worlds - an inherently paper system that also has the benefits of an electronic system.

Note that in Brookline and Newton you use a marker to fill in a circle on a card; this is not the punch type of system with “hanging chads.” What makes this system ideal is that the electronic ballot box gives the voter immediate feedback as to whether their ballot is valid (and there is a procedure to destroy and replace the ballot in the voter’s presence) so there is no gathering up the ballots and guessing at what a partially-punched circle means later, as there was in Florida in the 2000 election.