Abstract
The patent system is just one example of how government institutions create single points of failure by concentrating decision-making power in the hands of the few, whether legislators in Congress, cabinet officials in the executive branch, or bureaucrats in agencies. Administrative practices are constructed around the belief that government professionals know best how to translate broad legislative mandates into specific regulatory decisions in the public interest. Governance, the theory goes, is best entrusted to a bureaucracy operating at one removed from the pressure of electoral politics and the biased influence of the public at large
The world is full of amateurs: gifted amateurs, devoted amateurs. You can pick almost any group that has any kind of intrinsic interest in it, from dragonflies to pill bugs to orb-weaving spiders. Anybody can pick up information in interesting places, find new species or rediscover what was thought to be a vanished species, or some new biological fact about a species already known.
E.O. Wilson
Contribution received in 2010.
This chapter is an excerpt from Noveck 2009.
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Notes
- 1.
Gerth and Wright Mills 1991.
- 2.
Ruhl and Salzman 2006.
- 3.
Tetlock 2005, p. 20.
- 4.
Ibid., p. 15.
- 5.
Page 2007.
- 6.
Sapien 2008.
- 7.
Lunder and Houlihan 2008.
- 8.
Union of Concerned Scientists 2005.
- 9.
Union of Concerned Scientists 2008.
- 10.
Mooney 2005.
- 11.
Government in the Sunshine Act, P.L. 409, 94th Cong. 13 September 1976.
- 12.
Ashcroft 2001.
- 13.
- 14.
Terkel 2008.
- 15.
Kiel 2007.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
American Inventors Protection Act, P.L. 113, 106th Cong. 29 November 1999.
- 18.
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Manual of Patent Examining Procedures, sec. 904.02(c) (8th edn. 2001) (‘This policy also applies to use of the Internet as a communications medium for connecting to commercial database providers’); U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, ‘Patent Internet Usage Policy’, 64 Federal Register (21 June 1999) (‘If security and confidentiality cannot be attained for a specific use, transaction, or activity, then that specific use, transaction, or activity shall NOT be undertaken/conducted’), p. 33,060.
- 19.
Silicon Valley for Obama, http://www.sv4obama.com
- 20.
See also Miller 2008.
- 21.
Connecticut Policy and Economic Council, http://www.city-scan.org, Accessed October 2008.
- 22.
Cowell 1975.
- 23.
- 24.
Collins 1901.
- 25.
Anderson 2008a.
- 26.
Baker M, Mozilla Foundation chairman of the board 2008.
- 27.
‘Energy Bill Bans Incandescent Lightbulbs.’ For more on mercury in lightbulbs, see the EPA website, http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/hazard/wastetypes/universal/lamps/index.htm. For more on the congressional mandate, see Wald 2007.
- 28.
Fountain 2008.
- 29.
Newport 2008; ‘Congressional Approval Falls to Single Digits for First Time Ever’, 8 July 2008. http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/congressional_performance
- 30.
‘Series of Tubes’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes. Also see the Series of Tubes weblog, http://www.seriesoftubes.net (Accessed October 2008). The remark also spawned a graphic, ‘Series of Tubes as a Tube-map’, http://www.boingboing.net/2007/07/20/series-of-tubes-as-a.html
- 31.
See, for example, Chadwick 2006.
- 32.
Noveck 2005.
- 33.
Cronin 2006.
- 34.
Krauthammer 1992, p. 84.
- 35.
Center for Tele-Democracy, https://fp.auburn.edu/tann/. See also Direct Democracy League, http://www.ddleague-usa.net
- 36.
Volokh 2001.
- 37.
The company was Vivarto Inc., founded by Mikael Nordfors. Its website is, http://www.vivarto.com (online)
- 38.
‘The U.S. Congress Votes Database’, http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/rss/; Meskell 2007.
- 39.
- 40.
Mutz 2006.
- 41.
Sunstein 2003, p. 118.
- 42.
Macintosh and Coleman 2003.
- 43.
Shane 2004.
- 44.
Czapanskiy and Manjoo 2008.
- 45.
Meiklejohn 1960.
- 46.
Wyatt and Bagli 2002, p. A1.
- 47.
See, for example Zinn 2007.
- 48.
Sorkin 2003, pp. 57–61.
- 49.
Schudson 1998.
- 50.
- 51.
Balkin 2004.
- 52.
The ideal type of citizens’ group is one that is ‘composed of representatives of all strata of its community; it would be unbiased, courteous, well-organized, adequately financed, articulate.’ Guimary 1975, p. 148.
- 53.
Oram 2007.
- 54.
Nye 2008.
- 55.
Sony Corp. of America. Universal City Studios, 464 U.S. 417 (1984).
- 56.
Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008 (ProIP Act) S. 3325; Anderson 2008b, Borland 2003, Bangeman 2007. See also MGM Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., 545 U.S. 913 (2005) (peer-to-peer file-sharing case), and also http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/06/5042.ars
Abbreviations
- USPTO:
-
United States Patent and Trademark Office
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Noveck, B.S. (2011). The Single Point of Failure. In: van der Hof, S., Groothuis, M. (eds) Innovating Government. Information Technology and Law Series, vol 20. T.M.C. Asser Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-6704-731-9_6
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