Stanford Center for Internet and Society

“Patriotism,” as Samuel Johnson famously said, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” In that sense, perhaps the USA PATRIOT Act is appropriately named after all.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, most people (though not everyone) agreed that the government should be given additional investigative powers to reduce the risk of more terrorist attacks. The fact that perfectly good intelligence was already available and ignored before 9/11 was considered water under the bridge. The attacks signaled a new era in national defense.

Electronic communications bore the brunt of government complaints that the enemy had outpaced the government in an information arms race, and not surprisingly some of the most contentious features of the PATRIOT Act involved provisions to expand government powers of surveillance, information collection, and secrecy:

http://larrydownes.com/the-patriot-act-last-refuge-of-scoundrels/

No one would seriously disagree with my observation that the patent system has become the single greatest obstacle to innovation faced by entrepreneurs and established companies alike.

Which is ironic, because the only reason the system exists at all is to encourage innovation.

In the U.S., patents have been around since 1790. Many would argue that the existence of this powerful but short-lived monopoly protection (originally only 14 years) given to inventors of novel and useful technology was crucial in America’s transformation from an agricultural to industrial economy.

Unfortunately, in the transformation from industrial to information economy, the system is showing both its age and the poor fit of many of the baubles and ornaments hung on it over the years by Congress and the courts. As I write in Law Eight of The Laws of Disruption, the unique economic properties of information call for a very different kind of incentive system, one that current information law doesn’t provide.

For more, see http://larrydownes.com/horsemen-of-the-patent-apocalypse/

One of the more interesting results of the Framingham Heart Study: happiness and healthiness are contagious:

"two years ago, a pair of social scientists named Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler used the information collected over the years about Joseph and Eileen and several thousand of their neighbors to make an entirely different kind of discovery. By analyzing the Framingham data, Christakis and Fowler say, they have for the first time found some solid basis for a potentially powerful theory in epidemiology: that good behaviors — like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy — pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses..."