patent troll

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The Pirate's Dilemma by Matt Mason

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But for some, frivolous lawsuits are the entire business plan. These companies sometimes get called patent trolls: they don’t invent or make anything themselves, they just buy patents that already exist—or register patents for good ideas already in the public domain. They then track down businesses and individuals already using those ideas, and extort money from them either by suing or threatening to sue. These companies create no value for society at all. The only purpose they serve is to make money by suing other people who are. Forgent Networks was a company accused by critics of patent trolling when they purchased a patent to JPEG digital image compression in 1997, a widely used technology that had been freely available since 1987.

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The company abandoned all claims on the patent and walked away, keeping the $90 million it had made licensing the rights to JPEGs to thirty companies. The negative effect this is having has not gone unnoticed, and laws are being proposed in the United States and many other countries that will make patent trolling of this kind much more difficult in the future. But patent trolls aren’t just going after private businesses; they also have their sites set on our most priceless assets. Our attitude to piracy is important, because what is happening to our freedoms in the world is a troubling sign of things to come elsewhere. There is a race on to patent and control the building blocks of life itself.

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Designed by Kyoko Watanabe Illustration by Ji Lee Visit us on the World Wide Web: http://www.SimonSays.com Library of Congress Control Number: 2007023530 ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-5401-1 ISBN-10: 1-4165-5401-7 For Emily CONTENTS INTRO: Enter the Lollipop 1 1. Punk Capitalism From D.I.Y. to Downloading Sneakers 9 2. The Tao of Pirates Sea Forts, Patent Trolls, and Why We Need Piracy 33 3. We Invented the Remix Cut-’n’-Paste Culture Creates Some New Common Ground 68 4. The Art of War Street Art, Branding, and the Battle for Public Space 103 5. Boundaries Disco Nuns, the Death of the Record Industry, and Our Open-Source Future 134 6. Real Talk How Hip-Hop Makes Billions and Could Bring About World Peace 172 7.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

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James Watt and the Wright brothers riled their contemporaries with their willingness to enforce patents to stop other people’s research on steam and flight, respectively. Patent trolling can be thought of as a pure-play form of this strategy. The patent troll buys up patents, often from defunct companies, and goes around seeking to enforce legal rights against anyone who might otherwise benefit from the spillovers of the original investment. There are good reasons to deplore patent trolling—but it is a pretty straightforward consequence of the spillover characteristic of intangible assets. If the law isn’t strong enough, companies can lobby to have it changed.

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This fusion of creative and commercial intangible property is what we have to thank for the media franchises of today, from Star Wars lunchboxes to Princess Elsa costumes. And, of course, today issues of intangible property continue to be contested. Global trade negotiations founder on disputes between the United States and China over piracy and fair use. Patent trolls pursue their controversial calling in the courts of the Eastern District of Texas or of Moscow. Controversies arise when companies try to push the limits of the intellectual property rights in new ways, such as when, in 2015, tractor maker John Deere argued that, under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, customers who had bought its tractors did not have the right to repair them themselves.

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Copyright lawyers sometimes talk about the Mickey Mouse Curve—the steadily increasing length of copyright in US law that grows just fast enough to stop Disney’s iconic mouse from entering the public domain. When Disney first created Mickey, his copyright was due to expire in 1984. Extensions in 1976 and 1998 mean that this won’t happen until 2023. And who knows what new laws might be made between now and then. Patent trolls and copyright lawsuits catch our attention because they are newsworthy, but other ways of capturing the spillovers of intangible investment are more common—in fact, they’re part of the invisible fabric of everyday business life. They often involve reciprocity rather than compulsion or legal threats.

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The by Mariana Mazzucato

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Such strategic patenting can be especially effective when a patent is obtained at an early stage of the development of a technology, before the technical standard is properly determined, or in fast-paced and patent-intensive fields such as ICT or biotech, where innovations are highly interdependent or complementary.31 An early patent gives its owner the chance of setting the dominant standard and blocking improvements others might make. The risk of infringing the patent can also prevent other firms from marketing their products or services. Another related and growing practice is ‘patent-trolling': the strategic holding of patents, not to develop or commercialize the underlying idea but deliberately to collect royalties through patent enforcement. A market for patents has emerged in which the value of the patent is divorced - or effectively monetized - from the value of the production of goods or services the patent makes possible.

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It has been argued that strategic patenting can aid innovation by providing small firms with liquidity as they seek to bear the costs of development and commercialization32 - but the evidence suggests that this practice is also causing harm. James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer, authors of The Patent Litigation Explosion, estimate that ‘patent trolls cost defendant firms $29 billion per year in direct out-of-pocket costs'.33 Another study finds that in aggregate, ‘patent litigation destroys over $60 billion in firm wealth each year',34 with the costs falling more heavily on smaller firms.35 UNPRODUCTIVE ENTREPRENEURSHIP It might be said that these changes have, collectively, caused patents to result not in productive but in unproductive entrepreneurship.

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Kattel, ‘Development as leapfrogging, not convergence, not catch-up: Towards Schumpeterian theories of finance and development', Review of political Economy, 28(2) (2016), pp. 270-88. 31. Mazzoleni and Nelson, ‘The benefits and costs of strong patent protection'. 32. S. Haber and S. H. Werfel, ‘Why do inventors sell to patent trolls? Experimental evidence for the asymmetry hypothesis', Stanford University Working Paper, 27 April 2015. 33. J. Bessen and M. J. Meurer, ‘The Patent Litigation Explosion', Loyola University Chicago Law Journal, 45(2) (2013), pp. 401-40: http://lawecommons.luc.edu/luclj/vol45/iss2/5 34. J. E. Bessen et al., ‘Trends in private patent costs and rents for publicly-traded United States firms'(March 2015).

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

One study estimates that it would take two million patent attorneys working full time just to check every software-producing firm’s new products against all the new software patents issued in a given year; alas, there are only 40,000 practicing patent attorneys in the country.23 As a result, the patent system can act as a vast and uncharted minefield through which innovators must pass at their peril. The dysfunctions of the patent system have been exacerbated in recent years by the rise of so-called patent assertion entities, better known as “patent trolls.” Patent trolls are firms that neither manufacture nor sell products but instead specialize in amassing patent portfolios for the purpose of initiating infringement lawsuits. According to a White House report, lawsuits by patent trolls tripled between 2010 and 2012 alone, as the share of total patent infringement suits initiated by such firms rose from 29 percent to 62 percent.24 That’s right: most patent infringement suits are now brought by firms that make no products at all and whose chief activity is to prevent other companies from making products.

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According to a White House report, lawsuits by patent trolls tripled between 2010 and 2012 alone, as the share of total patent infringement suits initiated by such firms rose from 29 percent to 62 percent.24 That’s right: most patent infringement suits are now brought by firms that make no products at all and whose chief activity is to prevent other companies from making products. A 2012 study found that the direct costs of defending patent troll suits (i.e., lawyers’ and licensing fees) came to $29 billion in 2011. To put that figure in context, it amounts to more than 10 percent of total annual R&D expenditures by US businesses.25 The threat of such predatory behavior has given rise to the practice of “defensive patenting,” seeking patents for one’s own products or amassing portfolios of others’ patents in the hope of protecting oneself from infringement suits.

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, ending welfare as we know it, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, first-past-the-post, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, information retrieval, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, megaproject, mini-job, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Kinnock, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge unit, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, openstreetmap, patent troll, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, remote working, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, structural adjustment programs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

And the patent system has distorted the direction of research and development, so that resources flow towards areas that promise high rental income, not to areas that would maximise the public good or benefit the less well-off. PATENT TROLLING AND HOOVERING In the USA, the monopoly rents gained from patents have spawned a lucrative industry of ‘patent trolls’: firms that produce nothing themselves but buy up unexploited or undervalued patents with the sole intention of tracking down supposed patent violators and demanding they pay licence fees for use of the patent or face court action. On being threatened by trolls, many corporations pay up simply to avoid lengthy and expensive legal procedures. Nevertheless, there were over 5,000 US lawsuits in 2014, driven by multiple filings by patent trolls, frequently aimed at big tech companies.

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In areas such as pharmaceuticals and information and communications technologies there is also a problem of ‘patent thickets’, with rival firms holding key patents on some aspect of the overall technology. Witness the ‘smartphone patent wars’, started between Apple and Samsung, which have involved all the main smartphone manufacturers suing each other in various combinations and in various countries, with damages claims running into billions of dollars. Patent thickets and patent trolls have become impediments to innovation in the IT sector because companies cannot move without stumbling over someone else’s patent and having to pay licensing fees to multiple patent owners. A mobile phone, for instance, may have as many as 3,000 different patents. Similarly, in the pharmaceuticals sector, the development of combined drug formulations for people with Aids has been hampered because the drugs are patented by different companies.

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A paper for the St Louis Federal Reserve, hardly a hotbed of radicalism, concluded: ‘The vast bulk of patents are not only useless, they don’t represent innovation at all. They are part of an arms race. Any successful large company needs a large portfolio of patents to fend off potential lawsuits by rivals and by patent trolls.’13 Besides hoovering up others’ patents, corporations have devised clever tactics to extend patents or the rental income from them. The pharmaceutical industry does this by ‘follow-on’ patenting or ‘ever-greening’ (making small changes to drug formulations and claiming a new invention), by clever marketing that maintains demand for a branded product after the patent expires, or by entering ‘pay-for-delay’ agreements with generic producers, enabling firms to continue to receive rental income beyond the patent term by delaying the entry of cheaper generics on the market.14 The USA, European Union members and some other countries have introduced another extension of rental income for drugs by granting pharmaceutical companies ‘data exclusivity’ and ‘market exclusivity’ beyond the patent term.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Pushing back on the ease with which patents could be obtained and defended was great for Big Tech, which, of course, has its own IP to protect, but which was also increasingly monetizing the data and IP created by others. The majority of those companies had legitimate technologies and ideas to protect. But some—so-called patent trolls—were playing a game of legal arbitrage, filing as many patents as possible in order to get larger companies to settle with them for the use of their technology. By the time Barack Obama took office in 2009, the patent troll narrative had reached a fever pitch. It was a story line supported by many Big Tech companies14 that individually and via lobbying bodies pushed for the America Invents Act. The law established a non-court adjudication body, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.

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The law established a non-court adjudication body, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. The idea was to save time and money with the non-court inter partes process, and indeed, patent claims went from taking three years and an average cost of $2 million to settle, to taking eighteen months and costing $200,000. The argument about patent trolls increasingly rang false. Yet the largest tech groups, particularly Google, lobbied hard for even more anti-patent legislation in 2013. Companies that supported that additional legislation said it would have cut out legal distortions around issues like the venue in which patent cases are heard, thereby cutting litigation costs.

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“This second round of drastic cutbacks to the patent system was a commercial ploy designed not to stop abuse but to cut supply chain costs by devaluing others’ innovation.” The new legislation was ultimately held up in Congress. Meanwhile, Michelle Lee, Google’s former head of IP, eventually took over as head of the USPTO. In 2013, the White House put out an alarming report on the prevalence of patent trolls and their destructive effects, blaming them for two-thirds of patent suits. Yet subsequent research done by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office put that number at one-fifth, and other data showed that the number of patent defendants had been roughly flat before and after the AIA. “The historical trend in litigation rates relative to patents granted clearly does not support claims that litigation in the past decades has ‘exploded’ above the long-term norm,” wrote Bowdoin College professor Zorina Khan in a 2013 paper entitled “Trolls and Other Patent Inventions.”

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

Selden was not an engineer but a patent attorney, and at the time he had not produced a single car. But he did file a patent in 1879 that he claimed covered all gasoline-powered cars (US patent 549,160).1 He made the most of this patent, forming in due course a cartel with a number of other businesses to demand royalties from every car sold—a precursor of the patent trolls who acquire obscure patents and use them to shake down tech companies today. A dynamic industry looked like it might fall victim to a greedy collective. Several years later, Henry Ford challenged the patent, eventually prevailing after an eight-year lawsuit, and the rest was history. But the situation could have turned out differently, moving the American auto industry onto a different path and affecting the wider history of the motorcar, too.

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Thomas Philippon’s influential book The Great Reversal argues that large American businesses have used political influence and lobbying to chip away at antitrust law, protecting themselves from competition and reaping monopoly profits at the expense of customers, workers, and society at large.28 For many critics, this explains both the growth of vast businesses with few strong competitors (Google in search engines, Amazon in online retail) and the decline in productivity: Why innovate when you have no credible competition? Other critics point to the legal monopolies granted by patents, copyrights, and other intellectual property rights; when patent trolls acquire old patents for the sole purpose of suing legitimate businesses, or when media companies seek to have the copyrights of profitable franchises extended on a technicality, it is hard not to think that bad behaviour on the part of the powerful is holding the economy back. The narratives human beings are drawn to are powerful, but they are also dangerous, in that they may oversimplify or misrepresent what is really going on and contain really bad advice.

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In 2000, Blackberry’s owners, RIM, and other mobile phone manufacturers were sued by NTP, a small company whose main activities were owning a set of wireless patents and suing mobile phone companies for infringing on them. NTP’s case was questionable at best, but after six years of costly litigation RIM ended up paying $612.5 million to settle the action. This case is a classic example of patent trolling—the use of patents to extort money from innovators, with few positive effects on the incentive to invest in innovation in the first place. Researchers James Bessen and Michael Meurer17 estimated that the costs of patent litigation represented 14 percent of total R&D costs in the late 1990s, a truly remarkable waste.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Today, the biggest generators of new patents in the US system are ‘patent trolls’ – firms that buy up weak patent applications with no intention of making the products in question, but with every intention of making money by suing those who infringe them. Research in Motion, the Canadian company that manufactures BlackBerries, had to pay $600m to a small patent troll called NTP that did no manufacturing itself but had acquired contested patents with the aim of profiting from their defence. Michael Heller’s analogy for the patent trolls is to the state of the river Rhine between the decay of Holy Roman imperial power and the emergence of modern states.

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Benkler, Y. 2006. The Wealth of Networks. Yale University Press. p. 265 ‘the biggest generators of new patents in the US system are “patent trolls” – firms that buy up weak patent applications’. I am indebted to R. Litan for this information. p. 265 ‘Research in Motion, the Canadian company that manufactures BlackBerries’. Baumol, W.J., Litan, R.E. and Schramm, C.J. 2007. Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism. Yale University Press. p. 265 ‘Michael Heller’s analogy for the patent trolls is to the state of the river Rhine between the decay of Holy Roman imperial power and the emergence of modern states’. Heller, M. 2008.

When Computers Can Think: The Artificial Intelligence Singularity by Anthony Berglas, William Black, Samantha Thalind, Max Scratchmann, Michelle Estes

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, AI winter, air gap, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, backpropagation, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, call centre, cognitive bias, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, create, read, update, delete, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, DeepMind, disinformation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, factory automation, feminist movement, finite state, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general-purpose programming language, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, job automation, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, patent troll, patient HM, pattern recognition, phenotype, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Thomas Malthus, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zero day

Genetically engineered crops are widely dispersed in the environment, and it is even possible to purchase genetically engineered GloFish that glow in the dark. The conference certainly did not curtail the use of genetic engineering for the development of biological weapons. Patent trolls One fanciful hypothesis is that the patent trolls and legal system will be our saviours. The development of an AGI would provide a rich source of patents both trivial and real. Where there are patents, there are wonderful opportunities for aggressive litigation. If exploited effectively, patent wars could make the development of artificial intelligence uneconomical.

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Wishful thinking 18. Whole brain emulation 19. Chain of AGIs 20. Running away 21. Just do not build an AGI 8. Political Will 1. Atom bombs 2. Iran's atomic ambitions 3. Stuxnet 4. Glass houses 5. Zero day exploits 6. Practicalities of abstinence 7. Restrict computer hardware 8. Asilomar conference 9. Patent trolls 10. Does it really matter? 9. Conclusion 1. Geological history 2. History of science 3. Natural selection 4. Human instincts 5. Intelligence 6. AI technologies 7. Building an AGI 8. Semi-intelligent machines 9. Goals 10. Prognosis 10. Bibliography and Notes When Computers Can Think The Artificial Intelligence Singularity Anthony Berglas, Ph.D.

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If exploited effectively, patent wars could make the development of artificial intelligence uneconomical. Organizations would spend their budgets on patent attorneys and lawyers, with little remaining for any real engineering, which would be pointless anyway because nothing could be brought to market without extensive, destructive litigation. So we have misunderstood the motivations of patent trolls and attorneys. They are not greedy, self-serving parasites whose only interest is to promote themselves at the expense of others. Rather, they are on a mission to save humanity from uncontrollable advances in technology. Does it really matter? After millennia of conflict and hunger, mankind seems to be finally becoming civilized.

Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy Is a Sign of Success by Dietrich Vollrath

active measures, additive manufacturing, American Legislative Exchange Council, barriers to entry, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, falling living standards, hiring and firing, income inequality, intangible asset, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, old age dependency ratio, patent troll, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, tacit knowledge, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, women in the workforce, working-age population

Or did this patent just help Amazon shut out some potential competitors back in the days before it was Amazon as we know it today, when it was just an online bookseller with aspirations to something more? The group of “patent troll” firms is something of a textbook example of IPRs creating market power with no benefits. These firms buy up patents and run around suing companies for infringement, mostly hoping to get some sort of settlement, while their targets hope to avoid actual litigation. They provide a useful benchmark for evaluating other firms. Do we think the rise in market power and markups over time is because firms are acting more and more like patent trolls, or because they have distinct innovations that are worth protecting? You wouldn’t call Apple a patent troll. Or would you? Apple sued Samsung in 2011 because Samsung produced a smartphone that was a rectangle with rounded edges and had a grid of app icons on the main screen.

Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, diversified portfolio, indoor plumbing, Iridium satellite, Jeff Hawkins, junk bonds, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, PalmPilot, patent troll, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the new new thing

Stout saw an opportunity to parlay Campana’s patent rights into a revenue stream of licensing fees at a time wireless data was taking off. The two men formed NTP to hold the stranded patents. The skeletal company was part of a growing breed of patent trolls whose primary business was to sue businesses allegedly infringing on their rights. Lawyers represented trolls on the contingency they would share a portion of any court awards. It was a booming business. U.S. lawsuits filed by patent trolls rose sharply to 428 in 2007 and 2,750 just five years later, by which point they accounted for nearly 60 percent of all U.S. patent lawsuits, double the level of five years earlier.4 Stout started the hunt for licensing fees by writing letters to dozens of communications companies suggesting they were infringing on its technology.

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He lobbied governments on both sides of the border and spoke to business groups to push for reforms that might prevent the legal brinksmanship that nearly flattened RIM. Washington and Ottawa were receptive, but progress was slow. In this vacuum, tech companies strengthened their legal rights by acquiring patent collections from struggling rivals. With Motorola’s patent chest, RIM would hold a much stronger hand against patent trolls and competitors alike. Balsillie and senior RIM executives and bankers met frequently in Schaumburg with Brown and his team during the spring and summer of 2008. Balsillie initially believed the takeover would happen. Motorola was under enormous pressure from investors to sell its mobility business.

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cognitive load, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, general purpose technology, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, new economy, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, patent troll, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Sand Hill Road, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social software, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine

So long as everyone with a huge portfolio of unexamined, overlapping, generous patents was competing with similarly situated manufacturers, there was a mutually assured destruction — a kind of detente represented by cross-licensing deals for patent portfolios. But the rise of the patent troll changed all that. Patent trolls don't make products. They make lawsuits. They buy up the ridiculous patents of failed companies and sue the everloving hell out of everyone they can find, building up a war-chest from easy victories against little guys that can be used to fund more serious campaigns against larger organizations.

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, electricity market, Etonian, European colonialism, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, G4S, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, green new deal, haute couture, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, Piper Alpha, post-Fordism, post-war consensus, precariat, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, remunicipalization, rent control, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, risk free rate, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, software patent, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech bro, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, very high income, wage slave, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, yield curve, you are the product

Pitkethly, ‘Intellectual Property Strategy in Japanese and UK Companies: Patent Licensing Decisions and Learning Opportunities’, Research Policy 30 (2001), pp. 425–42. 92. Research has found that non-practising entities in the UK were responsible for 11 per cent of all patent suits filed between 2000 and 2010. See C. Helmers, B. Love and L. McDonagh, ‘Is There a Patent Troll Problem in the UK?’, Fordham Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law Journal 24: 2 (2014), pp. 509–53. 93. J. Mullin, ‘Patent Troll’s Stock Soars 20% after Court Victory over Samsung, Huawei’, 24 November 2015, at arstechnica.com. 94. S. K. Rathod, ‘Ever-greening: A Status Check in Selected Countries’, Journal of Generic Medicines 7 (2010), pp. 227–42, at p. 227. 95.

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They do this in multiple ways, very often supported by domestic courts and regulators that – in line with their penchant for strict enforcement – appear to be more accommodating to ‘pigging out’ than their peers in other jurisdictions. In this regard, the example of US company Unwired Planet is an instructive one to begin with. It is an example of what has come to be referred to as a non-practising entity – or, more pejoratively, a ‘patent troll’: a company that exploits patents not by producing the patented product or using the patented process, but solely by licensing its patent rights and/or enforcing those rights against alleged infringers. Non-practising entities arguably represent the very apotheosis of IP-related rent-seeking, inasmuch as there is not even a pretence of innovation or economic production.

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See also contract rents; contracts Outsourcing Playbook, 274 owner-occupancy, 46, 332–334, 336–337, 339, 344, 366, 375 Oxfam, 62 Oxford Economics (OE), 231, 241–242, 246 Oxford Sciences Innovation (OSI), 147 Oxford University Innovation (OUI), 147 Palma, José, 21 Parker, David, 280, 319 Pasquale, Frank, 208 Patel, Jag, 256 Patent Box, 168–169 Patent Co-operation Treaty, 146 patent trolls, 173–174, 440n92 patents, xxvi, 8, 139, 143, 158, 440n96; applications for, 146–148; European, 157; evergreening of, 174–178; and monopoly power, 139, 150; tax relief on exploitation of, 168–169. See also intellectual property; intellectual property rents Patents Act (1977), 152 patrimonial capital, 88, 90, 390–392, 412–413 pay for delay agreements, 175 Pebble mine, 98 pensions, xxxv, 87, 89, 93, 365–366 performativity, 101–102, 120–121, 150 Persimmon, 9, 356, 359–360, 362–363 Pesole, Annarosa, 199, 218–219 Petitjean, Olivier, 404 petits rentiers, 42–43, 88, 90, 364–365, 371, 373, 418 petroleum colonization, 108 Petroleum Development of Oman, 101 Petroleum Reserves Group (PRG), 102 Petroleum Revenue Tax, 124, 134 pharmaceuticals sector: evergreening of intellectual property, 174–178; importance to UK economy, 137–138; intellectual property rents in, 16, 151; lobbying by, 153–156 Pickens, T.

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Carvin, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, context collapse, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, iterative process, James Bridle, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, lifelogging, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patent troll, pattern recognition, pre–internet, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, superconnector, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Vannevar Bush, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize, éminence grise

Handing a patent on an invention to one person creates artificial scarcity. It is a crude device, and patent offices have been horribly abused in recent years by “patent trolls”; they’re people who get a patent for something (either by conceiving the idea themselves, or buying it) without any intention of actually producing the invention—it’s purely so they can sue, or soak, people who go to market with the same concept. Patent trolls employ the concept of multiples in a perverted reverse, using the common nature of new ideas to hold all inventors hostage. I’ve talked to entrepreneurs who tell me they’d like to talk openly online about what they’re working on.

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See theory of multiples multiplexing, 142 multitasking, pros/cons of, 135–36 Mundaneum, 122 Munroe, Randall, 116 Muybridge, Eadweard, 97 Myrdal, Gunnar, 252 Myung-bak, Lee, 260 Nabokov, Vladimir, 23 Napier, John, 59 narcissism, and social network postings, 220–22 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 183–84 Natsidia, Christoph, 16 “Nature of the Firm, The” (Coase), 152 Navalny, Alexei, 105–6 Naver, 74–75 Netflix, 169 neurasthenia, 224 Nielsen, Michael, 160 Nilsson, Nils, 103 Nintendo, 149 Nook, 82 Norman, Don, 116 note taking, 120–21 novels, early, critics of, 223–24 Obama, Barack, 88, 239 ObscuraCam, 274 Occupy Wall Street, 81 Odnoklassniki, 269 Offer, Daniel, 27 Ogburn, William, 58–60 O’Gorman, Hubert, 251–52 Okolloh, Ory, 45–46, 61–63 omniopticon, 238, 241 O’Neill, Michael, 216–17 “On Exactitude in Science” (Borges), 33 open-source, 112 O’Reilly, Tim, 76 Orwell, George, 106–7, 236–37 Otlet, Paul, 122–23 Otpor!, 267 Pac-Man (video game), 148 PageRank (Google), 33 Pan, Bing, 204 Panagopoulos, Costas, 83–85 panopticon, 236–37 Papert, Seymour, 188–93 Pariser, Eli, 230–31 Park, Clara Claiborne, 132–33 partisan online discourse, 261–63 Patel, Rupal, 19 patent trolls, 64 Pearce, Katy, 269 penicillin, discovery of, 60–61, 63–64 Penny, Laurie, 77 Perry, Rick, 24 Phaedrus (Plato), 68–69, 118 photographic literacy, 105–10 filters, use of, 109–10 LOLcat-crafting, 108–9 photomanipulation, 105–8 political uses, 105–7, 109, 247–48 Photoshop, 107 Pinboard, 154–55 Pinterest, 221 Plato, 68, 117 pluralistic ignorance Egypt, breaking down in, 255–58 social effects of, 252–53 Plutchak, Scott, 208 Pocket, 136 Poincaré, Henri, 131–32 Poke, 242 politics and political activism, 245–77.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

., “Citi Partners with Streetline and IBM to Provide $25 Million Financing for Cities to Adopt Smart Parking Technology,” last modified April 9, 2012, http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/37424.wss. 17Eve Batey, “Muni App Makers, Rejoice: MTA, Apple Disputes Private Company’s Claims To Own Arrival Data,” SF Appeal Online Newspaper, last modified August 19, 2009, http://sfappeal.com/news/2009/08/mike-smith-of-nextbus-said.php. 18Joe Mullin, “A New Target for Tech Patent Trolls: Cash-Strapped American Cities,” Ars Technica, last modified March 15, 2012, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/a-new-low-for-patent-trolls-targeting-cash-strapped-cities/. 19John Tolva, interview by author, November 10, 2011. 20Steve W. Usselman, “Unbundling IBM: Antitrust and the Incentives to Innovation in American Computing,” in Clarke, Lamoreaux, and Usselman, eds., The Challenge of Remaining Innovative (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 251. 21Dom Ricci, remarks, X-Cities 3: Heavy Weather—Design and Governance in Rio de Janeiro and Beyond, Columbia University Studio-X, New York, April 10, 2012. 22Noelle Knell, “Detroit Pulls Plug on 311 Call Center,” Government Technology, last modified July 11, 2012, http://www.govtech.com/e-government/Detroit-Pulls-Plug-on-311-Call-Center.html. 23Michael Batty, “A Chronicle of Scientific Planning: The Anglo-American Modeling Experience,” Journal of the American Planning Association 60, no. 1 (1994): 7. 24Michael Batty, telephone interview by author, August 19, 2010. 25Douglass B.

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They lack the capacity to even negotiate controls over the data streams generated by their citizens as they interact with private vendors’ technologies. Watchdog groups will need to step in and identify where the crucial conflicts lie. (And in fact, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is doing just this on behalf of a number of transit agencies being sued by another transit-arrival patent troll, Luxembourg-based ArrivalStar).18 Cities will need regular audits, perhaps conducted by a chief privacy officer or chief data officer charged with extending public control over government- and citizen-generated data. An intriguing option is to hand off this data to a trust equipped to manage it on behalf of citizens, covering its costs—and possibly generating a revenue stream for the city—by licensing the data.

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy by Erik Brynjolfsson

Abraham Maslow, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, business cycle, business process, call centre, combinatorial explosion, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, hiring and firing, income inequality, intangible asset, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, minimum wage unemployment, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ray Kurzweil, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, self-driving car, shareholder value, Skype, the long tail, too big to fail, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

This sector attracts a disproportionate number of the best and the brightest minds and technologies, in part because the government effectively guarantees “too big to fail” institutions. 18. Reform the patent system. Not only does it take years to issue good patents due to the backlog and shortage of qualified examiners, but too many low-quality patents are issued, clogging our courts. As a result, patent trolls are chilling innovation rather than encouraging it. 19. Shorten, rather than lengthen, copyright periods and increase the flexibility of fair use. Copyright covers too much digital content. Rather than encouraging innovation, as specified in the Constitution, excessive restrictions like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act inhibit mixing and matching of content and using it creatively in new ways.

Cancel Cable: How Internet Pirates Get Free Stuff by Chris Fehily

Firefox, patent troll, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, WikiLeaks

Retail DVDs, for example, are region-coded to play only in specific parts of the world. Retail music, games, ebooks, and software often have DRM restrictions too. (DRM isn’t about impeding pirates but repeatedly selling ordinary customers the same content in different formats.) Opt out. Every act of piracy nibbles at the world of enforcers, patent trolls, ad agencies, techno-optimists, free-marketeers, agents, graphic designers, and flag wavers. Positive liberty. Pirates’ actions embody the system that they want to create: self-organization, mutual aid, direct action, autonomy, voluntary association, opposition to power, exposure and subversion of coercive institutions, and means consonant with ends.

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

They are betting that someone who has a pressing reason for using the name will someday offer a lot of money for it.60 For example, during the 2016 presidential cycle in the United States, clicking on the domain address http://www.clintonkaine.com led to an empty page; a cybersquatter had held out for a price the Clinton-Kaine campaign was unwilling to pay. The owner ended up selling instead to a group affiliated with the rival campaign.61 A COST could help address holdout in this and other forms of intellectual property, such as those created by patent trolls who buy up patents and refuse to sell them to technology companies except at exorbitant prices that many companies refuse to pay.62 A COST would be useful for handling many other public assets. For example, ranchers lease grazing rights from the government, which often doesn’t know how to price those rights.

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Lipton, Beyond Cybersquatting: Taking Domain Name Disputes Past Trademark Policy, 40 Wake Forest Law Review 1361 (2005). 61. Hope King, Owner of ClintonKaine.com wants $90,000, CNN Money (July 27, 2016), http://money.cnn.com/2016/07/27/technology/clinton-kaine-website/index.html. 62. Lauren Cohen, Umit G. Gurun, & Scott Duke Kominers, The Growing Problem of Patent Trolling, 352 Science 521 (2016). 63. It is increasingly popular to refer to such a universal refundable tax credit as a “universal basic income” (UBI). We resist this description because a UBI is typically described as being indexed to some notion of an income required to live a decent life, a notion that we consider ill-defined and which, in any case, is not the aim of our proposal.

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

The natural monopoly can benefit users by releasing value. A good example: the Internet. It can also punish them by capturing users and then taxing them without mercy. Your mobile phone bill is a case in point. The dream of every self-respecting patent troll is to get patents on a widely used standard, CSIRO-style. Owning a standard allows the owners -- usually a consortium of firms, often including patent trolls -- decide who gets to implement it. This is how large firms keep control of the audio and video encoding markets, the mobile phone market, WiFi, and so on. Consortium standards are generally backed up with patents (because it's a far easier argument to the regulator to say, "We're licensing our patents under a Fair!

Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project by Karl Fogel

active measures, AGPL, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, collaborative editing, continuous integration, Contributor License Agreement, corporate governance, Debian, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, GnuPG, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, intentional community, Internet Archive, iterative process, Kickstarter, natural language processing, off-by-one error, patent troll, peer-to-peer, pull request, revision control, Richard Stallman, selection bias, slashdot, software as a service, software patent, SpamAssassin, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Wayback Machine, web application, zero-sum game

Individual developers often understand the nuances of various open source licenses, but they generally do not have the time or resources to competently handle legal issues themselves. If your company has a legal department, it can help a project by assisting with trademark issues, copyright license ownership and compatibility questions, defense against patent trolls, etc. If the project decides to organize formally, or to join an existing umbrella organization, your legal department can help with issues of corporate law, asset transfer, reviewing agreements, and other due diligence matters. Some more concrete ideas of what sorts of legal help might be useful are discussed in Chapter 9, Legal Matters: Licenses, Copyrights, Trademarks and Patents.

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Recent developments, such as the 2014 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court against the patentability of abstract ideas, in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_International), have made the future of software patents unpredictable. But there is so much money to be extracted via infringement claims, in particular by patent trolls but in general by any entity with a large patent portfolio and a lack of other revenue sources, that I am not optimistic this fight will be over any time soon. If you want to learn more about the problem, there are good links in the Wikipedia article en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent. I've also written some blog posts summarizing the arguments against software patents, collected at www.rants.org/patent-posts.

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Salop, “Competition and Cooperation in the Market for Exclusionary Rights,” American Economic Review 76, no. 2 (1986): 109–13; Steven C. Salop and David T. Scheffman, “Raising Rivals’ Costs,” American Economic Review 73, no. 2 (1983): 267–71. 34.Even established firms sometimes have trouble, and even when the patent is not held by a large company but by what are called “patent trolls,” firms whose main business model is not innovation—bringing their patent to market—but suing for patent infringement. This happened to Blackberry, at one time one of the leading mobile phone companies, which, after extensive litigation, had to pay $612 million just to continue offering its services, whether the patents which it allegedly infringed were eventually held to be valid or not.

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., 210 noncompete clauses, 65–66 nongovernmental organizations, 148–49, 245 norms fragility of, 230–36 Republican violation of, 166–67 and revolving door, 173 not-for-profit universities, 148–49 “notice and comment,” 146 Nuance, 286n34 nutrition, access to, 203 OASDI (Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance), 13 Obama, Barack, and administration antitrust actions, 62 bank bailout (2008), 102–3, 113–14 Merrick Garland nomination, 166–67 inequality issue, 39–40 public option for Affordable Care Act, 211 Obamacare (Affordable Care Act), 40, 211–13 obesity, 146–47, 277–78n37 OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development), 36 oil industry, 168 oligopoly, in academic publishing, 76 on-call scheduling, 66, 197 1 percent and country’s overall growth, 19 income growth, 33, 103, 192 and public well-being, 244 share of nation’s wealth, 38, 43 strategies to maintain power, 27 Open Internet Order, 147 open society, 185 opportunity government involvement to promote, 142 inequality in, 44–45 intergenerational transmission of advantage/disadvantage, 199–201 restoring, 197–201 Opportunity Insights, 44–45 organized labor, 66–67, 86–87 “originate-to-distribute” banking model, 110 Orwell, George, 128 oversight, judicial/congressional, See regulation overtime, 66 ownership of data, 129–30 Oxfam, 43 PACs, See political action committees Pai, Ajit, 147 Paris Agreement, 207 part-time work, 66, 193, 214 patents, 59, 74–75, 126–27 patent trolls, 286n34 pattern of trade, 90–91 Paul, Rand, xix Paxton, Robert O., 15–16 per capita income, China, 37, 96 perfect competition, monopoly vs., 56 perfect price discrimination, 318n17 Petersen, Matthew Spencer, 17 Pew Mobility Project, 45 pharmaceutical companies, See Big Pharma Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception (Akerlof and Shiller), 63–64 Piketty, Thomas, 278n38 place-based policies, 187–88 Pledge of Allegiance, 202 polarization, of job market, 119 political action committees (PACs), 169, 171, 172 political manipulation, 128 political opinion, 75 political parties, public disenchantment with, 174 political power, market power and, 77 politics failures of, 5–7 to manage economic consequences of innovation, 121 power of financial sector in, 116 reforming rules of, xxvi pollution, 143; See also environment population growth, 9, 11 populism, 26 postindustrial world, facilitating transition to, 186–88 poverty education and, 200 and inequality of opportunity, 44–45 intergenerational transmission of, 200 life expectancy and, 41 power abuses of, See abuses of power competition vs., 22, 23 market, See market power PPP (purchasing power parity), 272n12 predatory behavior, 145 predatory pricing, 69 pre-distribution, xxv, 198 preemptive mergers, 60–61, 70, 73 price discrimination, 57, 64, 125 pricing power, 48, 50 principal agent problem, 291n58 prisons, See incarceration privacy, 127–30, 135 private equity, 258n6 private prisons, 323n8 private sector, government’s efficiency compared to, 142 productivity human/physical capital investment and, 36–37 improving, 182–83 knowledge and, xxiv, 183–86 restoring, 181–86 in US vs. other advanced countries, 36–37 wages no longer correlated with, 38 wealth of nations and, 9 working hours and, 191 profits from bank fees, 110 in China, 95 competition as threat to, 48 explaining increase in, 54–62 fractional reserve banking and, 111 globalization and, 80 from mergers, 107–8 as source of rent wealth, 54 progressive agenda and party reform/rebuilding, 175–76 in Preamble to the Constitution, 242 to promote general welfare, 242–47 Progressive Era, 12 progressive movements, 175–76 progressive taxation, 198 property rights, trade agreements and, 83, 84 protectionism, 35, 79, 89–92, 94, 240 Protestant Reformation, 10 public education, 200–201 public good(s) data as, 131 markets’ failure to provide, xxiii, 140–41 media as, 11, 133 nongovernmental organizations and, 148–49 research and, 184 public institutions, fragility of, 230–36 Public Interest Doctrine, 352n21 public option(s), 210–11, 220 and Affordable Care Act, 213 for mortgages, 216–18 for retirement savings, 215–16 public–private partnerships, 142 public sector, 115–16; See also government public transit, returns on, 195 public utility, reclassifying Facebook as, 134 purchasing power parity (PPP), 272n12 Putin, Vladimir, 235 Qualcomm, 59 quality of life; See also standards of living access to health care, 212–13 education, 219–20 ensuring decent life for all, 209–21 home ownership, 216–18 secure retirement, 214–16 racial discrimination, 40, 125, 180–81, 201–4; See also discrimination racial inequality, 40 racial justice, economic justice and, 176, 203–4 racism, 203, 241; See also discrimination; racial discrimination rate of return on capital, 53 Reagan, Ronald, and administration economic dogma, 112 financial liberalization, xiii and growth of inequality, 45 laws enabling greater market power, 78 redirection of values, 28 tax cuts, 25 Trump’s parallels with, xvi Reaganomics, xiv–xv, 26–27; See also supply-side economics real estate interests, 168–69 real estate taxes, 206 reason, 11, 228–29 Reconstruction, 241 redistribution, xxv, 122, 156, 198 regressive taxation, 267–68n41 regulation checks and balances on, 232–33 of data, 128–31 failure to keep pace with changing economy, 146–47 2008 financial crisis and, 101–2 financial sector, 115 freedom and, 144 government and, 143–48 importance of, 150 innovation and, 134 process of, 145–46 restoration of, 146–48 of social media, 134–35 of tech giants, 124–25 trade agreements and, 83, 84 regulatory harmonization, 88 regulatory takings, 301n8 relationship banking, 110 religion, 10, 145 religious Right, 223 Renaissance, the, 8 rents and appropriation of wealth by the 1 percent, 244 capitalized, 282n17 failure to share with workers, 282n19 and national income pie, 51–52, 54 profits as source of, 54 taxation of, 206 rent-seeking, xxiv, 52, 113, 169, 229, 244 representative democracy, 6 Republican Party and Affordable Care Act, 213 anti-science stance, 20 and Citizens United, 170 composition of, 175 and corporate tax rates, 85 fiscal stimulus during Great Recession, 121 and gerrymandering, 6, 159 indifference to those left behind by globalization/technology, 186 and lack of consequences for elites in Great Recession, 152 and money in politics, 168 power-seeking objectives, 160 and Supreme Court’s loss of status as fair arbiter, 165–67 and 2017 tax bill, 237 Trump vs.

Start It Up: Why Running Your Own Business Is Easier Than You Think by Luke Johnson

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, false flag, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Grace Hopper, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, James Dyson, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Kickstarter, mass immigration, mittelstand, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, patent troll, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Silicon Valley, software patent, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traveling salesman, tulip mania, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators

I believe in freedom for enterprise, but I also think entrepreneurs must be allowed to reap the just rewards for their efforts. Moreover, it is clear that some abuse the patent system to prevent progress. Too many patents are now issued, many of dubious merit – especially in the field of software patents. Patent trolls abound – those who file ‘paper patents’ or ‘submarine patents’ that they never intend to exploit, but merely use as tools to sue unwitting infringers. Both Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, and even Microsoft have suffered from this harmful toll on endeavour. Inventors I have met are fundamentally motivated by a desire to see their creations become appreciated and recognized, rather than an urge to accumulate wealth.

The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive by Dean Baker

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, medical residency, patent troll, pets.com, pirate software, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, too big to fail, transaction costs

[98] This figure is derived from the industry’s claim that the value that it assigns to “pirated” software was $59 billion in 2010 and that this was equal to 42 percent of total software shipments; see Business Software Alliance (2011). [99] Milliot (2010). [100] Newzoo (2011). [101] There is a whole industry of “patent trolls,” individuals or firms that buy up patents with the hope of finding a major innovation that is arguably derivative of the patent in question. The profit comes from filing a patent infringement suit. The troll just needs to be able to make a plausible case so that it can threaten the company with the possibility of an expensive legal suit and/or an injunction denying the company the use of the technology.

Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons by Peter Barnes

Albert Einstein, car-free, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, dark matter, digital divide, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, hypertext link, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, jitney, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, new economy, patent troll, precautionary principle, profit maximization, Ronald Coase, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

Patent Office has gone along with this, issuing patents for everything from one-click shopping on the Internet to genes that are 99 percent nature-made. Often, companies get patents not with the intention of developing them, but rather with the intention of suing someone else who might (a practice known as patent trolling). Figure 8.1 shows the dramatic rise in number of patents issued over the past few decades. Consumers and taxpayers are burdened as well. Thanks to patents, pharmaceutical companies can charge monopoly prices for up to twenty years after introducing a new drug. This is said to benefit society by providing incentives for research, but according to the Center for Economic Policy Research, the benefit is greatly exceeded by the cost.

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy by Pistono, Federico

3D printing, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, future of work, gamification, George Santayana, global village, Google Chrome, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, illegal immigration, income inequality, information retrieval, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, longitudinal study, means of production, Narrative Science, natural language processing, new economy, Occupy movement, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, post scarcity, QR code, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, Rodney Brooks, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, slashdot, smart cities, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, technological singularity, TED Talk, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce

I would like to work on cases of child abuse, workers rights, class actions against big industries polluting the environment and killing thousands – things that could help alleviate the pains and suffers of many people. But working on these cases does not pay nearly as much, so I turn to working for multinational corporations. I become a patent troll, harassing small companies that try to democratise access to cheap medicines. Cases like this one are not the exception, they are the norm. The idea that if you work hard and do your best, you will eventually succeed, is a somewhat compelling and romantic notion of the work ethic. Unfortunately, in most cases, it is no more than an illusion.

The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay by Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cross-border payments, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, government statistician, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, labor-force participation, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, patent troll, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Steve Jobs, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, very high income, We are the 99%

It doesn’t sound very plausible, but as a matter of logic it’s not impossible that at least some of them are motivated by the lure of immense profits and work harder when taxes are low. Whatever their sensitivity to after-tax returns, however, it’s clear they are not the people most responsive to monetary gains. The sellers of zero-sum financial products, the creators of deadly pills, the promoters of tax dodges and the lawyers who certify them, the price gougers, the patent trolls, the makers of fake university diplomas: they will rise to the occasion and supply more of their labor when taxes fall. These solely profit-driven individuals will innovate more boldly—faster and faster, making it harder and harder for regulators to catch up, or for people to learn about their fraud before falling for a new one.

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

Of course, we’re supporting the biggest of those cases in Trump’s Twitter case [in which the courts found the president was not able to block US citizens on the network while in office] that our friends the Knight Foundation13 are doing. We have a bunch of patentee cases where we’re supporting people who are fighting back against patent trolls. There’s a lot of litigation.’ Given Cohn came to the EFF’s executive directorship via a role as its general counsel and legal director, it’s unsurprising litigation takes up so much of her time – but it’s not all the EFF does in trying to fight for its vision of the internet. As well as some conventional activism, the EFF builds its own technology to try to help activist users take privacy issues into their own hands.

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit by Marina Krakovsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Al Roth, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, buy low sell high, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, experimental economics, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kenneth Arrow, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Network effects, patent troll, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, power law, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, search costs, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social graph, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Y Combinator

The Fair Trade movement has tried to protect smallholder farmers in the developing world from precisely such middlemen,36 who in Latin American countries are known by the wolfish moniker “coyotes.”37 Middlemen can prey on unsuspecting buyers, too, as when some retailers in the Fair Trade supply chain take advantage of the naiveté of Western consumers by charging markups for the fair trade label that are far higher than what growers receive.38 In general, anyone who preys on the vulnerable or ill-informed fits the bill: in banking, it’s lenders to the desperate, from mafia-style loan sharks to the predatory lenders who exploit the elderly and the disabled.39 In high tech, it’s patent aggregators, also known as patent trolls—companies that build up portfolios of patents not to ease patent licensing to firms that create products but to threaten alleged infringers with costly lawsuits.40 In academia, it’s predatory publishers, those with no scholarly credentials masquerading as distributors of legitimate journals.41 A snake in the grass is still a snake, and a wolf in sheep’s clothing is still a wolf—only more dangerous.

SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

agricultural Revolution, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boris Johnson, call centre, clean water, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, Did the Death of Australian Inheritance Taxes Affect Deaths, disintermediation, endowment effect, experimental economics, food miles, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, market design, microcredit, Milgram experiment, Neal Stephenson, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, power law, presumed consent, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, selection bias, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, urban planning, William Langewiesche, women in the workforce, young professional

The company also acquires patents from outside inventors, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to solo geniuses toiling in basements. IV operates much like a private-equity firm, raising investment capital and paying returns when its patents are licensed. The company currently controls more than twenty thousand patents, more than all but a few dozen companies in the world. This has led to some grumbling that IV is a “patent troll,” accumulating patents so it can extort money from other companies, via lawsuit if necessary. But there is little hard evidence for such claims. A more realistic assessment is that IV has created the first mass market for intellectual property. Its ringleader is a gregarious man named Nathan, the same Nathan we met earlier, the one who hopes to enfeeble hurricanes by seeding the ocean with skirted truck tires.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

You have to embrace the idea of being a leader, then get followers to support you. You can’t put a price on advice like that. The other investor/judge at the San Jose pitch event was to be Istvan Joyner, a computer science PhD and former Google middle manager turned VC. Joyner worked for a low-profile $100 million investment fund owned by an alleged “patent troll,” InterDigital, Inc., although the company disputes this characterization. This litigious outfit made hundreds of millions of dollars a year by acquiring patents—more than twenty thousand in all, “including the fundamental technologies that enable wireless communications”—then licensing the right to use those technologies to companies such as Apple and Samsung.

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Thanks in part to the spread of smartphone ownership, Twitter gained a hundred million active monthly users for the first time, whereas Facebook was close to gaining a billion monthly users. Since then, trolls have been blamed for everything from hate crime to sharing leaked nude images on the internet, the term metastasizing so that there can now be everything from ‘gendertrolls’ to ‘patent trolls’. Politicians often use the term to deride their social media critics, which at its most cynical works to deprive the criticism of its political substance. Previously, the role of internet folk devil was occupied by spammers, stereotypically represented as a Nigerian man trying to con a little old lady out of her savings, despite the fact that most spamming came out of the United States.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Projects of this scale and ambition are in fact hindered by market-based constraints, since a sober analysis of their viability in capitalist terms reveals them to be profoundly underwhelming.15 In addition, some social benefits (those offered by an Ebola vaccine, for example) are left unexplored because they have little profit potential, while in some areas (such as solar power and electric cars) capitalists can be seen actively impeding progress, lobbying governments to end green-energy subsidies and implementing laws that obstruct further development. The entire pharmaceuticals industry provides a particularly devastating illustration of the effects of intellectual property monopolisation, while the technology industry is increasingly plagued by patent trolling. Capitalism therefore misattributes the sources of technological development, places creativity in a straitjacket of capitalist accumulation, constrains the social imagination within the parameters of cost–benefit analyses and attacks profit-destroying innovations. To unleash technological advancement, we must move beyond capitalism and liberate creativity from its current strictures.16 This would begin to liberate technologies away from their current purview of control and exploitation, and towards the quantitative and qualitative expansion of synthetic freedom.

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

It registered a loss of $249 million for the fiscal year of 2011.13 Faced with the prospect of continued decline, Motorola sold itself to Google in 2012 for $12.5 billion (though this acquisition included Motorola’s $3 billion cash reserves, meaning the book value of the deal was only $9.5 billion). Even then, Google ostensibly acquired the company just for its patent portfolio, which helped Google defend Android against patent trolls and competitors. By the end of the year, Google already had sold off Motorola’s Home division for $2.35 billion. Scarcely a year later, it sold Motorola’s handset division for $2.91 billion to Lenovo. To add insult to injury, Lenovo decided to phase out the Motorola brand name entirely by the end of 2016.

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game

Faster approval of generics, and the importation of generics from Canada and Europe must be allowed to promote competition. Congress should remove patent protection for areas that are rife with abuse. Almost half of all patents are for things like software and business methods that have been abused by “patent trolls” who drive up costs for producers and consumers. Shareholders Workers must be granted shares so that labor can become owners of capital. The gap between labor and capital comes in large part because the vast majority of Americans do not own any meaningful shares in companies. Until the fruits of the economy are shared with workers, the benefits of markets will only go to CEOs, managers, and the very wealthy.

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, deindustrialization, discovery of DNA, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, mini-job, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paris climate accords, patent troll, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, zero-sum game

In the field of technology, innovators often have to wade through what has come to be called a patent thicket. A patent thicket emerges when large corporations have the resources to acquire a large number of patents, not to use them for research or to make new products, but simply to prevent other firms from entering the market and competing. Worse are patent trolls who acquire intellectual property rights solely for the purpose of making money by suing infringers. Today’s intellectual property regimes in Europe are not well designed. Their poor structure reflects corporate interests more than broader public interests. In a twenty-first-century economy, the market for innovation, or more particularly, for the knowledge behind intellectual property, is one of the most important markets.

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets by Thomas Philippon

airline deregulation, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, commoditize, crack epidemic, cross-subsidies, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flag carrier, Ford Model T, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, law of one price, liquidity trap, low cost airline, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, price discrimination, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

Few industries show signs of returns to scale significantly above one. There is also no reason to think that intangible assets are more likely to create positive externalities than tangible ones. Patents are a prime example of intangible assets. Many patents today, and most of the litigation surrounding them, come from patent trolls. They abuse the system and create negative externalities. Another example is market research and advertising, or marketing more generally. These have become more important in the digital economy, yet they contain a higher fraction of zero-sum activities than other types of research and development because the gains of one firm are directly related to the losses of another.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

Patent offices cannot compete with either the salaries or the expertise of large firms, particularly in complex and fast-moving sectors. Even as they were pressured to make money, patent examiners were overwhelmed by a flood of applications. The result? There was an explosion in the number of patents granted, tripling annually between 1983 and 2002.40 Patent trolling and squatting were normalised. Companies engaged in internecine patent arms races. Small companies, particularly in areas like software or biotech, couldn't compete and were locked out of the market.41 Patents became offensive weapons, hoarded as stockpiles to attack competitors and extract rents.

Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

A direct parallel to computer giants backing the Open Source Initiative is the sudden change of heart among biotech corporations towards private ownership of genetic discoveries. Pfizer, Merck & Co and other pharmaceutical and chemical industries were the chief architects behind extending patentability to life-forms in the US. Later they were alarmed when small start-ups and universities rushed to file patents on genetic information and act as patent trolls against the corporations. In 1992, the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association advised against government ownership of gene sequences, and the Industrial Biotechnology Association insisted that the U.S. government put gene sequences in the public domain.54 When the Human Genome project was launched it came up against an off-shoot of rampant greed.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Jodie Griffin of Public Knowledge argues that the government-approved deal carving up the ISP market by the phone and cable giants discussed in chapter 4 will make it possible for them to pool patents and have a “monopoly over foundational technologies for the next generation of internet access services.” See Jodie Griffin, “Verizon, Comcast, and the Patent Wars,” Public Knowledge, July 27, 2012, publicknowledge.org/blog/verizon-comcast-and-patent-wars. 27. Porter, “Tech Suits Endanger Innovation.” As Porter points out, there is now an entire industry of “patent trolls,” whose only business is to buy patents and sue for royalties. See also Vance, “Hiring a Mercenary.” 28. Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (New York: Knopf, 2010), 290–91. 29. Peter Decherney, Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 215. 30.

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech by Geoffrey Cain

Andy Rubin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, business intelligence, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double helix, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Hacker News, independent contractor, Internet of things, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, patent troll, Pepsi Challenge, rolodex, Russell Brand, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

Apple had taken advantage of this pitfall, arguing it owned what were in fact generic software features, and the black rectangle shape of a smartphone, in order to shut out competition. “Isn’t it simply unworthy of such a great company,” asked the popular patent blogger Florian Mueller, “to engage in behavior that increasingly resembles the conduct of patent trolls who seek to extract undue leverage from weak and dubious patents?” Yet that success came in the wake of a significant marketing pullback. Todd Pendleton’s successors at Samsung struggled to line up anything nearly as creative or effective as their previous campaigns. Casey Neistat, on his popular YouTube vlog after the Oscars in 2016, revealed that Samsung was “gonna have me skateboard down the aisle, past Leonardo [DiCaprio], taper down the aisle and jump on the stage holding their new 360 camera in my hand during the broadcast.”

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together by Bruce Schneier

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, corporate governance, crack epidemic, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, desegregation, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunbar number, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, hydraulic fracturing, impulse control, income inequality, information security, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, iterative process, Jean Tirole, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Julian Assange, language acquisition, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, microcredit, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nick Leeson, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, patent troll, phenotype, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, security theater, shareholder value, slashdot, statistical model, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, technological singularity, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, UNCLOS, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Also at the UN, Security Council Resolution 1441—used to justify invading Iraq—seems to have been designed to be ambiguous enough to both support and oppose the use of force. More generally, loopholes are ways institutional pressure is subverted by defectors to do things it wasn't originally intended to do. Think of patent law, originally intended to protect inventors but now used by corporations to attack other corporations, or by patent trolls to extort money out of corporations. Or the legal profession, originally intended to serve justice but now used as an offensive weapon. Or stocks, originally intended to provide capital for companies but now used for all sorts of unintended purposes: weird derivatives, indexes, short-term trading, and so on.

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

But two things are beginning to erode its lead—one negative and one positive. The negative is that the United States is currently facing a striking number of threats to its remarkable entrepreneurial ecology. The legal system can be burdensome or even destructive. One of the biggest new problems comes from “patent trolls”—trial lawyers who bring cases against companies for violating this or that trumped-up patent. The tax system is so complicated that many companies devote time and ingenuity to filling out tax forms that would be better spent on business. And, thanks to a combination of the “war on terrorism” and rising xenophobia, the American immigration system has turned into a nightmare: rather than trying to attract the world’s best and brightest, the United States forces them to run an obstacle course.

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

, Discover Society, 3, www.discoversociety.org/2013/12/03/growth-in-whose-interests/. 27 Ferguson, K. Everything is a remix. Video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAKa0AJHhL4. The implications of our debt to existing knowledge are elaborated further in Part Two. 28 Public Patent Foundation (2011) ‘Organic seed v Monsanto’, http://www.pubpat.org/monsanto-seed-patents.htm. 29 ‘Patent trolls’ are even worse – they patent things invented by others but not yet patented and then threaten small and medium-sized businesses with costly law suits (Bob Jessop, personal communication). 30 Bamfield, L. and Horton, T. (2009) ‘Understanding attitudes to tackling economic inequality’, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, http://www.jrf.org.uk/sites/files/jrf/attitudes-tackling-economic-inequality-full.pdf. 31 BBC News (2012) ‘Premier league clubs climb to new highs’, 31 May, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18248540. 32 Rosen, S. (1981) ‘The economics of superstars’, American Economic Review, 71(5), pp 845–58.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Albert Einstein, data acquisition, easy for humans, difficult for computers, gravity well, low earth orbit, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, patent troll, Skype, South China Sea, time dilation

“And to streamline situations like this, I also have a preemptive pardon from the president of the United States for any and all crimes I am accused of within U.S. jurisdictions.” The bailiff took the papers and handed them to the justice. “This…” said the justice, “this is exactly what you say it is.” “I’m only here as a courtesy,” said Stratt. “I didn’t have to come at all. But since the software industry, patent trolls, and everyone else related to intellectual property banded together in one lawsuit, I figured it would be fastest to nip this in the bud all at once.” She grabbed her satchel and put the tablet inside. “I’ll be on my way.” “Hold on, Ms. Stratt,” said Justice Spencer. “This is still a court of law, and you will remain for the duration of these proceedings!”

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

We talk about the importance of intellectual property, but we have designed an expensive and unfair intellectual property regime that works more to the advantage of patent lawyers and large corporations than to the advancement of science and small innovators.40 Large firms can trespass on the intellectual property rights of smaller ones almost with impunity, knowing that in the ensuing legal fight they can outgun them. Rogue patent trolls (law firms) can buy sleeping patents (patents that have not yet been used to bring products to the market) at a low price, and then when a firm is successful in the same field, claim trespass, and threaten to shut it down as a form of extortion. That’s what happened to Research in Motion, the producer of the popular BlackBerry, which became the target of a patent suit from “patent-holding company” NTP, Inc.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

The Pinatubo Option has become a media favorite thanks in large part to the work of Nathan Myhrvold, the excitable former Microsoft chief technology officer who now runs Intellectual Ventures, a company that specializes in eclectic high-tech inventions and is often described as a vehicle for patent trolling.12 Myhrvold is a made-for-TV character—a child prodigy turned physicist turned tech star, as well as an avid dinosaur hunter and wildlife photographer. Not to mention a formally trained amateur cook who spent millions researching and co-writing a six-volume bible on molecular gastronomy. In 2009, Myhrvold and his team unveiled details for a contraption they called the “StratoShield,” which would use helium balloons to suspend a sulfur dioxide–spraying tube thirty kilometers into the sky.