Derek Khanna, Garrett Johnson, Aaron Ginn, and Chris Abrams for Lincoln Labs: Patents, when used properly and granted correctly, are an effective incentive for research and development, but when granted recklessly, they can just as easily stifle innovation.
Patents are required only to be for things that are novel, non-obvious and useful. This standard may seem clear in principle, but in practice there has been an abject failure to abide by the Constitution’s mandate by the patent office. Between 2000-12, the patent office has granted between 90-100 percent of all patent applications (as adjusted for resubmissions). [That approval rate] is absurd, and represents a complete dereliction of their duty to abide by statutory law to limit dubious patents.
Many of these patents are dubious and should never have been granted to begin with, such as a patent on janitor instructions on how to clean a building, rounded rectangles on a smartphone, the concept of “one-click checkout,” the concept of reverse auctions when online, squiggly lines when you mistype a word, a method to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, the idea of podcasting, the concept of a hyperlink and the idea of exercising a cat with a laser pointer.
These are not just silly examples. Every time non-inventions are given a patent, it drives up prices to consumers, encourages trolling behavior, creates perverse incentives in the marketplace and stifles creative destruction leading to less innovation.
Inbound scamming
Sam Adler-Bell for the Century Foundation: If you suddenly found yourself deep in the red, what might you do first? Where would you turn? Debt relief companies are counting on you doing what most people do when a serious and complicated problem strikes: Google it.
Earlier this summer, the CFPB sent letters to Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Yahoo warning them that student debt scammers were using their ad services and search products to “lure distressed borrowers.” CFPB Student Loan Ombudsman Rohit Chopra urged the companies to watch out for suspicious ads that pop up when users search for keywords such as “student debt relief,” “student loan forgiveness” and “Obama student loan relief.”
Today, when I searched for “student debt relief” on Google, the first three results were for the same website: studentdebtrelief.us — which, despite its SEO-commanding name and deceptively official-sounding “.us” domain, is not affiliated with the federal government. Rather, like the sites investigated by the CFPB, Student Debt Relief charges hundreds of dollars to prepare and submit documents to free government programs. The website does not (loudly) advertise the fact that borrowers have the option of submitting the forms on their own at no cost.
The fourth Google result was a Department of Education page titled “Beware of Student Loan Debt Relief Offers.”
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As the CFPB has urged, Google should once again take responsibility for its role in determining what information gets in front of users’ eyes by driving search traffic toward unbiased sources — like the Department of Education’s own debt relief walkthrough.
If borrowers find the DOE’s materials too complex or need help navigating the application, they are of course empowered to seek help from private companies like Student Debt Relief. But as it stands, many borrowers may never see the DOE site before signing up for SDR’s services.
Obama tries to call backsies
Gary Schmitt for AEIdeas: As The New York Times’ Peter Baker writes, “In effect, Mr. Obama is arguing that he reluctantly went along with those who said it was the way to combat the Islamic State, but that he never wanted to do it and has now has [sic] been vindicated in his original judgment.”
It’s difficult to imagine the administration stooping any lower. This is a president more than willing to ignore black letter law when he wants, but he is now suggesting he was dragged into a program by his Syrian policy critics and his then cabinet secretaries Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Poor guy. Too bad he’s only president.
But this does, of course, help explain why the program has been the failure it has. When the record is opened, undoubtedly one will see that the White House and National Security Council team so complicated the effort with demands and oversight that it was bound to fail.
This article appears in the Sept. 28 edition of the Washington Examiner magazine.
Compiled by Joseph Lawler from reports published by various think tanks.
