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Tech at Night: FCC continues to regulate, Chance to defeat the AIA?, Amazon Tax corruption in California

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  August 26th, 2011 at 11:00 PM  | 

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Tech at Night

Hey look, it’s Tech at Night before midnight Pacific time. Guess who’s got two thumbs and is finishing the week early? This guy.

The FCC is creating yet more new regulations. The Obama Administration just can’t get enough of these things. I didn’t know if anyone would have noticed it happen, but The Hill caught it as well.

Meanwhile the FCC slowly moves to increase national 4G competition in America by moving inch by inch toward approving the AT&T/T-Mobile deal, over the continued whining of Al Franken. Franken says he is “very suspicious of consolidation of power.” Yet, he won’t lift a finger against large unions, and he voted for Obamacare. Hmm.

I’d been under the impression that Patrick Leahy’s America Invents Act was a done deal once it passed the House, despite the objections of Tech at Night and Dana Rohrabacher. RedState diarist Ron Robinson says it’s not over though, and has a call to action posted.

More on patents: Daniel Foty has an extended analysis of Google, Motorola, and patents. He suggests, and I agree, that in the short run, buyers of phones won’t notice. But the deal is part of an ongoing escalation of patent litigation in America.

We’ll close with some more on the California referendum to repeal the unconstitutional, punitive Internet Sales Tax aimed at Amazon. It’s been looking good for the referendum, so the Democrats are panicked. They’re now looking to prevent the referendum from happening by re-passing the tax as “urgent.”

Slimy enough, no? Well the new bill also exempts eBay from the tax, making it even more specifically targeted at Amazon. So eBay is now on board to punish the competition.

This whole Amazon Tax is one of the more corrupt situations I’ve seen in my lifetime of watching California politics. They’re not even hiding it. For shame.

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  • Adjoran

    have been detrimental to their original purpose, which is to bring more creativity into the public domain.

    Before our Constitution, there was little or no protection of intellectual property. If you hoped to profit by your invention, you had better keep it secret until you had secured some means of manufacture and distribution, or someone would copy the idea and beat you to it. Even so, they could copy it after you brought it to market. There was nothing you could do about it. This tended to discourage invention, because your idea wasn’t yours for long.

    Writers were even easier targets; their work was simply copied immediately, and sold without a penny to them. So most found patrons and issued their work “by subscription” – a limited edition distributed only to those who paid in advance. The general public was deprived of the work of both inventors and writers.

    So our grand idea was “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” with the emphasis being on LIMITED time, after which these wonders should pass into the public domain for general use.

    Lobbyists have bastardized the entire process. Today you may control the patent on your life-saving medicine for 14 years, starting from the day of approval, not from the day you produce the first. But a cartoon mouse may be sacrosanct for 75 years after his creator’s death . . .

  • Menlo

    Somewhere else along the way, anything deemed “disparaging” was excluded. A vitamin supplement manufacturer has not been able to get a trademark for its “China-Free” claim.

    I’m not sure all the changes were bad or unwarranted, although many obviously are. I don’t think a life-saving medicine should be allowed any patent, but that’s a debate for another day.