The character of the Chinese government — one that marries aspects of the free market with suppression of political and personal freedom — would become a widespread and disquieting norm.

In the op-ed, the former Massachusetts governor also criticized Obama for failing to press Beijing on human rights and intellectual property violations.

While Romney is quick to criticize Beijing and the White House’s management of U.S.-China relations, an examination of the GOP frontrunner’s investments with Bain Capital — a company he co-founded and once led — suggest he has profited from Chinese surveillance of its own citizenry and from companies that have engaged in intellectual property theft.

The New York Times revealed yesterday that a Bain-run fund in which a Romney family blind trust had holdings purchased Uniview Technologies in December, a Chinese company that claims to be the biggest supplier of surveillance cameras to the Chinese government. Uniview produces “infrared antiriot” cameras and software that allow police to share images in real time and provided technology for an emergency command center in Tibet that “provides a solid foundation for the maintenance of social stability and the protection of people’s peaceful life,” according to Uniview’s Web site.

Human rights advocates say that the rapidly growing number of surveillance cameras in Chinese cities are used to intimidate political and religious activists. “There are video cameras all over our monastery, and their only purpose is to make us feel fear,” Loksag, a Tibetan Buddhist monk in Gansu Province told the Times. He said the cameras helped the authorities identify and detain nearly 200 monks who participated in a protest at his monastery in 2008.

Romney has said he has no role in Bain’s operations but a financial disclosure form filed last August showed that his wife, Ann Romney, held a $100,000 to $250,000 investment in the Bain Capital Asia Fund that purchased Uniview.

In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Romney wrote, “In the economic arena, we must directly counter abusive Chinese practices in the areas of trade, intellectual property, and currency valuation.”

But Romney’s apparent hypocrisy between his hardline positions on China and his lucrative investment portfolio is on show once again with Bain Capital’s investment in Chinese YouTube competitor Youku. CBS Marketwatch co-founder Bill Bishop writes on his blog, Sinocism, that Romney’s talk of pressing Beijing to better enforce intellectual property rights is in direct contradiction with Bain Capital’s early investment in Youku, a “pirate’s den of copyright infringement” in the site’s early days. A Bain Capital VP now sits on the board of Youku and Youku has reportedly cracked down on copyright violating content. Its newly acquired partner, Tudou, still hosts a variety of pirated and copyright infringing videos.

But if Romney profited from Bain’s ties to Youku and Uniview Technologies, it’s worth examining how the GOP frontrunner’s tough-talk on China can happily coexist with Bain’s investments in companies that have constructed business models around Chinese human rights abuses and intellectual property theft.

In general, we think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable. Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customers use or by creating uncertainty.

Our goal is to create greater service value than pirates, and this has been successful enough for us that piracy is basically a non-issue for our company. For example, prior to entering the Russian market, we were told that Russia was a waste of time because everyone would pirate our products. Russia is now about to become our largest market in Europe.

I understand the entertainment industry’s antsiness about piracy, even if I don’t particularly agree with their approach. And I think that more companies and groups could take a lesson from this lens on the challenge. Even if you’re cracking down on “rogue sites” rather than on individual consumers, spending all your time talking about the evils of piracy sends the message to consumers that your focus is on limiting the way they get to the product, rather than on the product itself, or on improving methods of delivery. And even if I don’t think it’s the main reason people download content they don’t pay for, I think the idea that production companies have the interests of neither consumers nor artists in mind becomes a powerful part of the moral justification that people use to give themselves permission to do so. Focusing more of their public messaging on improving and diversifying delivery mechanisms — and actually doing so — seems like it would do much more to change the culture of consumption than talking about piracy will. And ultimately, it’s that cultural shift is what undid media companies and what they really need to change.

Slide to unlock is an excellent idea. Indeed, it’s difficult to see how you could implement a multi-touch smartphone without doing something along these lines. Which is why Android has the functionally equivalent, though in my view somewhat superior, pattern unlock feature. Jerry Hildenbrand seems to think that what’s ridiculous about this patent is that it arguably existed already when Apple was granted the patent. But the real problem here is that it’s contrary to the public interest to ban copying this kind of thing. We want to live in a world where useful new features are rolled out, and then bosses say “we need to find a way to implement that on our product.”

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which specializes in patent cases, said that Myriad Genetics was entitled to patents on two human genes used to predict if women have an increased risk of getting breast and ovarian cancer.

The court ruled that DNA isolated from the body was eligible for patents because it was “markedly different” in its chemical structure from DNA that exists inside the chromosomes in the body. As a result, the isolated DNA is not simply a product of nature, which would not be eligible for a patent.

The 2-to-1 decision on the gene patenting issue was also a rejection of arguments made by the Obama administration, which had filed a friend of the court brief arguing that isolated DNA should not be patented.

Although this case could potentially be reviewed by the Supreme Court, high Court review of the Federal Circuit’s patent decisions are unusual. The Federal Circuit was created in 1982 as a specialized appeals court that handles all patent appeals brought in any federal court in the nation. Accordingly, the justices frequently defer to the Federal Circuit’s patent decisions because of the court’s particular expertise in this area.

I kind of feel like people throw the word “bubble” around too loosely, and Richard Waters ought to at least consider the possibility that the sky-high valuations of patent-owning firms reflect the real economic value of the legal authority to extort money out of firms with products:

In the month since an auction of patents from the bankrupt Nortel Networks ended with a shockingly high bid of $4.5bn, or five times the initial offer, the favourite game in tech circles has been to find the next big chest of buried gold. [...] As always in tech bubbles, it is the “pure plays” that have drawn the most interest – in this case, the companies set up mainly to exploit the value of pure IP, rather than actually to build things. Shares in InterDigital, which specialises in mobile communications IP, have soared 75 per cent since it said last week that it was looking at putting itself up for sale: with a market value of $3.2bn even before any auction begins. [...] But even that pales in comparison with VirnetX. Despite having only one licensee for its internet security technology and royalties of just $17,000 in its latest quarter, VirnetX’s 14 US and 16 non-US patents pack a punch: with lawsuits out against Cisco, Apple and Avaya, among others, its stock market value has jumped more than fivefold in the past year, to $1.6bn.

It’s possible that this is a bubble. But smartphone sales have, in fact, soared over the past several years and there’s plenty of remaining room for growth. And it turns out that amassing patents and threatening to sue smartphone makers is a viable line of business. It also turns out that selling your patents to smartphone makers in order to let them sue or countersue competitors is a viable line of business. We’re not experiencing an unsustainable bubble in smartphone sales, so I see no reason to think that skyrocketing valuations of smartphone-related patents reflect anything other than a basic market dynamic. It looks like a bubble to some observers because it sounds insane that you could get rich off smartphones without actually selling smartphones or smartphone components to anyone. But the current state of law and policy really is that bad. What we’re getting here is a market test of a portion of the value of the rents created by the Patent And Trademark Office.

Now that we’ve run through the Republicans, it’s time to look at how one last candidate approaches arts policy: the incumbent President Barack Obama. Obama didn’t take on arts issues much during his tenure in the Illinois state Senate, but as a candidate and as president, he’s pursued a fairly wide-ranging arts policy that’s met with mixed success because of the pressures of the recession. I’m not including a discussion of internal changes by the National Endowment for the Arts here, though I’m a fan of the Our Town program, because I want to focus on the things that Obama’s made significant priorities:

2008: In his presidential campaign platform, Obama supported the Artist-Museum Partnership Act, which would have let artists deduct the full market value of works they donated to charity on their taxes, rather than just deducting the cost of the materials that went into the work. He also committed to expanding cultural diplomacy through public-private partnerships and to make it easier for foreign artists to get visas to come to the U.S.; to increase funding for the National Endowment for the Arts; and to add block grant funding that would support arts education through the Education Department (he cited the Mozart effect in stump speeches). At the time, this was considered one of the more comprehensive platforms a candidate had ever offered on the arts. The question is, how well did he live up to it?

2009: The stimulus bill Obama worked out with Congress included $50 million in arts funding, including $20 million in funding that went directly to state governments. The National Endowment for the Arts was supposed to use the funding specifically to bolster arts non-profits that saw their budgets shrink in the recession. In the normal budget process, the NEA got its highest budget in 16 years, $167.5 million, and the Education Department got $38.166 million for its Arts in Education program.

When Obama adjusted restrictions on travel to and from Cuba, he made it easier for cultural programs to take Americans to Cuba and for Cuban artists to make it to the United States.

But the administration’s cultural efforts became a minor political kerfuffle when the NEA’s Yosi Sergant encouraged artists to work with the Corporation for Public Service on projects that would highlight the administration’s public service efforts. Sergant eventually left the NEA.

2010: Obama made good on his cultural diplomacy promises in a number of ways, allocating $1 million to help visual artists create public art works in 15 countries as pat of a new smART Power program; increasing the State Department’s cultural diplomacy budget 40 percent in 2010 to $11.75 million; sending Stanford professor Clayborne Carson to Israel to put on a production based on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s writing.

At the same time, he proposed consolidating grants programs for education, leaving some advocates worried that arts programs would have to compete against science and literacy programs for funds. And the administration proposed cutting NEA funding by $6 million in is fiscal 2011 budget, both moves that drew criticism from arts advocates.

This year, U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel presented Obama and Congress with the first national strategy on intellectual property law and copyright violation, which includes improved interagency cooperation, targeting of websites that distribute pirated material, and better economic analysis of the impact of intellectual property law and violations on American firms. That same year, at the Export-Import Bank, Obama gave a speech in which he promised vigorous IP protection: “Our single greatest asset is the innovation and the ingenuity and creativity of the American people…It is essential to our prosperity and it will only become more so in this century. But it’s only a competitive advantage if our companies know that someone else can’t just steal that idea and duplicate it with cheaper inputs and labor.”

2011: An Obama-commissioned study argued that creative classwork has an “unambiguous place in the curriculum,” though it acknowledged that there needs to be more research to quantify the impact of arts education on achievement. Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s made the case for keeping arts education even in a recession throughout his tenure in the administration.

And on the copyright front, the Obama administration helped broker the deal that got Internet Service Providers to start providing warnings to users who are caught downloading content illegally.

It’s clear the president and his wife enjoy the arts, and they’ve hosted lots of cultural events at the White House — though his stance on copyright allies him more with content producers than with consumers. Obama has called for tax reform, and it would be interesting to see, if comprehensive efforts happen, if he includes artists’ tax credits, the one item in his 2008 platform that he hasn’t really addressed while in office. Whoever the Republican candidate is in 2012 is, they may be able to rally support by attacking the existence of the NEA (it’s dubious any of them would break with him on IP issues), but it remains to be seen if any of them will match Obama for a sense that arts policy isn’t just a matter of funding.

Tim Lee has an item on the Aaron Swartz arrest that strikes me as a bit wrongheadedly concern trolly, fretting that “the more lasting cost of Aaron’s actions will likely be to the reputation of the open access movement.”

This I doubt. Most likely, the lasting benefit of his actions will be to elevate the salience of the underlying issue on which Lee, Swartz, and I are all in agreement. And here’s the issue. Right now in academic publishing, what you have is basically a lot of donor- and government-financed nonprofit organizations taking outputs with near-zero distribution costs (electronic journal archives) and selling them to each other. For any one institution, this kind of makes sense. A publisher doesn’t want to give up his fees, which are valuable in meeting the costs of producing scholarship. But on net, it’s a mix of pointless and pernicious. Sale of access to journals helps finance scholarship, but it also raises the cost of scholarship. If everything was distributed for free, the whole exact same enterprise could be undertaken with no net financial loss. But there would be huge potential gains. A precocious 17 year-old could have free access to scholarship. So could a researcher living and working in a poor country. Or even an earnest political reporter who’s working on an issue and curious about what political science has to say about it. When I, personally, come across an article I’d like to read but can’t get free access to, my standard practice is to tweet about it and then someone affiliated with a university sends it to me. That’s good for me and, I think, good for the world. But there’s no reason curious people should need to amass thousands of twitter followers before they’re able to gain access to information that’s been produced by non-profit institutions that are supposed to be serving the public interest.

Both governments and private donors expend a good deal of funds on subsidizing the production of scholarly knowledge. That’s an excellent idea. Increasing the overall stock of human knowledge is important. But for most of the same reasons that producing scholarship is important, making it available is also important. Open access is important, and I’m glad to see people fighting for it.

Once leading mobile phone maker Nokia is on the ropes, first overtaken by Apple as a sexy smartphone maker and then crushed under the meteoric rise of Android-powered smartphones. But there is a new hope! Patent litigation. Specifically, Nokia has resolved its lawsuit against Apple with a settlement that involves both a one-time payment and ongoing royalties for iPhones and iPads. Interestingly, this isn’t even a bad deal for Apple:

In the statement, Nokia pointed out that it has invested approximately EUR 43 billion in research and development over the last 20 years, building up a patent portfolio with over 10,000 patent families. The agreement is expected to have a “positive financial impact” on Nokia’s quarterly earnings.

Legal pundit Florian Mueller viewed the settlement as a favorable outcome for Apple shareholders, despite the fact that Apple has to pay. According to Mueller, the agreement comes as a “sweet defeat” for Apple because competitors building Android-based devices will also likely have to pay Nokia, possibly paying more per-unit because rival handset makers may have less intellectual property to use as bargaining chips.

What’s more, Apple has tons of cash on hand and super-high profit margins. The people for whom this promises to be a big headache are, as usual, not the incumbent players but hypothetical future players. Imagine a firm that’s not currently a highly profitable, super-successful manufacturer of mobile devices. Now you’ve got a new barrier to entering the market. In other high tech news, Microsoft and other device manufacturers are filing suit to try to block Google’s purchase of network equipment maker Nortel. Google wants Nortel for its patent portfolio, but Microsoft claims a “worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free license to all of Nortel’s patents” as a result of a 1996 deal that apparently Google doesn’t recognize.

I don’t have a super-clean policy point to make about this, but it’s striking how much time and energy is spent in this most vibrant and innovative sector of the economy on these patent wars. It’s an equilibrium that’s obviously wonderful for patent lawyers, and seems to serve all the major incumbents well enough but I don’t think it really bodes well for the world. When firms engage in an arms race to hire more and better engineers to build better products, we all end up reaping gains. A battle to hire more and better lawyers to craft better litigation strategies is, by contrast, a zero-sum thing or even a negative-sum one if at the margin it persuades some bright hard-working people to become lawyers rather than engineers.

New York Stock Exchange (cc photo by Mike Fleming)

Another day, another cease and desist letter:

The New York Stock Exchange now claims that you have to get their permission (express or implicit) before you use images connected to the New York Stock Exchange. So if you find a wire photo of the trading floor and use it to illustrate a story on Wall Street, you’re violating the NYSE’s trademark because they’ve trademarked the trading floor itself.

We found this out yesterday when we got a cease and desist letter from the NYSE based on an article published at TPM back in November. You can see the letter here.

TPM is represented on Media and IP matters by extremely capable specialist outside counsel. And we’ve been advised that the NYSE’s claims are baseless and ridiculous on their face. But this is yet another example of how many large corporations have given way to IP-mania, trying to bully smaller companies into submission with inane and legally specious claims of intellectual property rights.

And of course good for TPM for having extremely capable specialist outside counsel. And good for TPM’s outside counsel for being so capable. But not only is this kind of IP bullying a form of rent-seeking by the bullies, it diverts social resources into things like being extremely capable specialist outside counsel for TPM on frivolous claims. There’s an urgent need to recenter policy, debate, and legal precedent in this sphere on advancing legitimate public interests rather than the interests of lawyers and incumbents.

Great piece from John Kay about the state of the intellectual property debate in the UK:

The Hargreaves report on intellectual property (PDF), published last week, is a landmark in the evolution of British policy. Ian Hargreaves concludes the existing intellectual property regime, far from being a spur to innovation and growth, gets in the way. The contrast between this document and the paper on the digital economy Lord Carter prepared for the last Labour government could hardly be more marked. Mr Hargreaves deplores the way government policy has been led by business interests and not evidence of its effects. The Carter report, unintentionally, illustrated his point in every chapter. [...]

As the commercial market is being transformed, anyone who thinks that the policy challenge is to restrict internet piracy has missed the point. Such thinking confuses, as Carter did, the development of successful businesses with the welfare of the industry’s established large companies. The result is that UK companies, and the UK government, are now no more than bit players in a play staged on the other side of the Atlantic. The UK government is at least more enlightened than the European Commission, which seems to be playing in quite another show – one where trade associations and naive artists are the only audience.

That’s all quite right. We’ll know that the time has come to strengthen IP protections for musicians when we start observing some kind of shortage of new bands and new recordings. And it’s the same across the board. Have people stopped writing books?

I think it’s difficult to maintain that absent said patent there would be insufficient economic incentive for programmers to want to create “the next Facebook” or for venture capitalists to invest in it. What this kind of promiscuous patent-granting does is stifle competition and massively complicate any new innovative firms. A big existing company can easily hire lawyers to deal with intellectual property issues, but as you’ll recall Facebook was founded by a couple of college students in their dorm. That’s how businesses get started, and that means you have to be able to do it without an army of lawyers.

Will Wilkinson writes “Gerald Gaus’ new book The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World is a major event in moral and political philosophy. It is also very long. And stupefyingly expensive.”

How expensive? Well it’s on sale right now over Amazon and it costs $82.40 with the discount!

That’s a lot of money. And while I understand how it is that academic books sometimes come out with such stagering unit prices, I do wish people working in the academic world would think a bit harder about this economic/scholarly model. Professors employed at research universities are getting public and charitable funding because we think the production and dissemination of knowledge is important. That means it’s important to think about what’s actually a good way of disseminating knowledge. It’s true that making academic books and journals cheaper would entail a loss of revenue. But the vast majority of the revenue is either coming directly from other academic institutions or else out of the pockets of the staff of other academic institutions. If you shifted to a different paradigm, there’d be no net loss of financial resources available for scholarly purposes. There would, however, be positive spillovers in that people who aren’t employed by research universities would be able to get access.

As he observes, the extent to which bad intellectual property policy stymies inquiry and science can be easily obscured to members of the faculty of an American university. These universities generally pay for subscriptions to JSTOR and all the rest on behalf of their professors. But there are lots of people in the world who might like to know things—and might even contribute to the world’s stockpile of useful knowledge—and who aren’t in a position to benefit from these institutional memberships. One of the perks of having over 20,000 Twitter followers is that if I ever want to read something that’s behind an academic paywall somewhere, I can normally just tweet that I want to read it and someone will email me a copy. But that’s illegal, even though enforcing the law more rigorously would generate nothing but deadweight loss.

So after a lot of thought, we’ve decided to bid for Nortel’s patent portfolio in the company’s bankruptcy auction. Today, Nortel selected our bid as the “stalking-horse bid,” which is the starting point against which others will bid prior to the auction. If successful, we hope this portfolio will not only create a disincentive for others to sue Google, but also help us, our partners and the open source community—which is integrally involved in projects like Android and Chrome—continue to innovate. In the absence of meaningful reform, we believe it’s the best long-term solution for Google, our users and our partners.

Call it a sign of the nutty times we live in. The point of patents is to encourage innovation by creating financial incentives to innovate, but mismanaged patent law is becoming a huge impediment to innovation in the software space. And there are no real heroes here. As NB pointed out to me today, Google’s not above filing its own ridiculous patent claims:

Google’s Doodles have certainly come a long way from their humble beginnings, but the company has now pulled off what may be its most jaw-dropping feat yet — it’s just been awarded a patent for them. Described as “systems and methods for enticing users to access a web site,” the patent credits Google co-founder Sergey Brin as the sole inventor, and it comes more than ten years after Google first filed the application.

The “systems and methods” in question are that they use cute different versions of their icon on certain days to project an imagine as a fun-loving company. And then, I guess, they threaten to sue you if you do the same. Fun!

What people should be asking themselves, though, is why did it take so long for this to happen. After all, the technology available to stream music over the web has existed forever. So why is it just now that someone is launching a business where you store your music remotely and then access it over the internet? The answer is that we had such a business over ten years ago, but in UMG v MP3.com a judge ruled that a service that let you rip music from a CD you owned and then upload it to a remote server for cloud storage amounted to copyright infringement. UMG was awarded over $53 million in damages and the whole thing died.

But of course killing MP3.com didn’t save the business of selling physical CDs. All it did was delay the advent of useful music storage services by more than a decade.

Julian Sanchez wonders about the political economy of “orphaned works”. Granting that owners of valuable old content (Mickey Mouse, Batman) have a strong interest in preventing those works from coming into the public domain, can’t we at least get some relief for the vast majority of other works that don’t fit that bill.

Megan McArdle is also puzzled:

As Julian notes, it’s puzzling that this hasn’t been resolved. Julian asks “Who’s the rational veto player here?” and I can’t think of an obvious candidate. And yet, congress has not seen fit to do something about the problem, even though resolving it would seem to be a rare example of pareto improving legislation: readers get to enjoy the material, while the copyright holders, who aren’t collecting royalties now, are no worse off.

I suspect the answer is either that Congress simply overlooked this issue, or that there is some reason to block it that Julian and I don’t understand.

This seems to me like a mistaken model of how congress works. For a bill to pass, it needs a majority in at least one House subcommittee. Then it needs a majority in at least one House full committee. Then it needs a majority in the entire House of Representatives. In parallel, a bill that is identical in all respects needs a majority in at least one Senate subcommittee, one full Senate committee, and sixty votes on the floor of the United States Senate where objections from even a single Senator can force days of delay. Members of congress need to do all this work while simultaneously fundraising & electioneering, positioning themselves for sundry bids for higher office, etc. The only veto player you need to explain why something doesn’t happen in the federal government is basic human laziness and risk aversion.

Meanwhile, even though Walt Disney and DC Comics wouldn’t be hurt by an orphaned works bill they don’t really gain from one either and it makes sense for them to be mildly averse to anything that puts intellectual property policy on the national agenda.

(cc photo by rodrigo senna)

Pursuant to this Kevin Drum story pharma horror story about a hundred-fold increase in the retail price of a drug that’s useful for averting premature births, it’s always worth pointing out that reforming how we incentive pharmaceutical research is some of the lowest-hanging fruit out there.

Even if we completely leave aside policy options that involve sticking it to the big drug companies, for any expected corporate revenue stream from a judge it would be welfare-enhancing for the federal government to pay a lump sum up front to have the drug released into the public domain rather than paying piecewise. In other words, if a company thinks it can maximize profits by charging $100,000 a pop for a pill that it expects to sell 10 of per year for 20 years, that comes out to $20 million in total revenue. But there are lots of people who might be helped by the pill who aren’t going to be able to afford it at that price. If you just buy the patent for $20 million (less than that with appropriate discounting) then total spending is the same but more people will get treated. In other words, we should be funding this research with prizes, not patents, as Joe Stiglitz lays out here. Bernie Sanders is the congressional champion of this idea, but it also garners support from libertarians like Alex Tabarrok. The Obama administration Office of Management and Budget is also doing some good things on this.

There was pretty overwhelming sentiment that Chris Dodd would find his post-Senatorial career as some kind of lobbyist for the insurance or finance industries, so I’m pretty surprised to learn that he’ll be heading up the Motion Picture Association of America instead. Apparently “the job will require Mr. Dodd to push a Hollywood agenda in Washington that includes a more aggressive governmental stance against piracy and prodding China to lift limits on the distribution of Western movies.”

China should, in fact, lift limits on the distribution of Western movies and the US government ought to press them to do it.

As for “piracy,” I think the recent murder of Americans by actual Somali pirates should drive home how absurd it is to analogize unauthorized copying of a non-rival good to violent kidnapping and robbery. Nobody dies when you download a copy of Little Fockers. So it’s always worth asking what pressing social problem stepped up anti-infringement measures are intended to solve. Is America a country with an unusually low violent crime rate, such that it makes sense to divert more law enforcement resources away from such matters? Do Americans have too much disposable income, so we’re looking to raise the cost of entertainment? It’s actually quite true that real wages for movie stars have been declining in recent years, so maybe this is the issue Dodd wants to address.

Mark Kishlansky’s A Monarchy Transformed offers the following on Stuart England’s efforts to move up the value chain:

In truth, schemes like the Cockayne Project, in which a syndicate of London merchants was given the right to export coloured cloth while the export of undyed cloth was inhibited, were unmitigated disasters.

What’s more, at the time there was no special legal distinction between a patent and the king’s general power to create monopolies.

We also learn this about occupational licensing:

He would rather ‘his child were baptized by an ape as by a woman’ he concluded in dismissing the custom of allowing midwives to baptize dying infants, which many, including the King, believed was a cover for witches to steal babies for satanic rituals.

Any time you read a well-written history of any subject you don’t know much about, you wind up learning surprising things and getting some interesting ideas.