The Weekly Standard and the American Conservative have both in recent weeks run longish essays on intellectual property reform. Both pieces lament the ways in which systems evolve to stifle competition and, ultimately, hurt consumers and creators alike. Jonathan V. Last in the Standard writes on the promise and peril of IP reform and, as is his wont, closes on a bit of a downer:
The deeper problem patent trolls represent, however, isn’t about inefficiency or innovation. It’s that they demonstrate how easily systems—in this case, economic and legal—can be perverted. A regime designed to fan innovation is now used to stifle it. Where patents were supposed to level the playing field between inventors and big business, the secondary effect of patent trolls is to encourage consolidation: Patent litigation becomes a tax on big businesses, to be sure, but also an effective barrier to entry for smaller competitors. (One recent development has seen large companies, such as Facebook and Microsoft, purchasing patents in bulk from failing businesses to wage patent wars of their own.) Then there’s the unpleasant fact that a protection designed to incubate "Progress of Science and useful Arts" has become just another tool for collecting rents. And finally, there’s the extent to which the patent regime has transformed the legal system itself from a mechanism for resolving occasional disputes into a state-run collection agency.
Derek Khanna in TAC is quite a bit more optimistic (as is his wont), writing that the GOP needs to jump wholehearetedly into the reformist camp:
This revelation, that new small businesses primarily create jobs and economic growth, demands a complete rethinking of economic policy for the United States. If Republicans understand this and thereby embrace the mantle of innovation, not only will they be expediting a new wave of ingenuity, but they will also share credit with entrepreneurs for the next tech boom.
This requires creating a regulatory and legal climate that fosters "permission-less innovation." True innovators often can’t afford—either in terms of money or mental energy—to hire lobbyists and change the law. Entrepreneurs should not be wasting their start-up capital on lawyers, consultants, and PAC donations.
You should read both pieces in full; I just wanted to give you a sense of where JVL and Khanna are coming from.
I am ... skeptical that the GOP will win the hearts and minds of the next generation by combatting hair-braiding regulations and fighting for a more robust public domain. I dunno, it just seems to be an issue of very low salience with most voters. Don't get me wrong: Khanna suggests a number of good policies for the GOP to pursue for their own sake. I'm just not really sure this is going to be where Republicans craft the coalition of the future.
One minor pseudo-caveat to the skepticism stated above: I think there is a narrow space in cities for Republicans to carve out a claim to being the Uber Party. The younger generation loves their smartphones and loves their "sharing economy," your Ubers and your Airbnb's and the like. And, frankly, the GOP has little to lose in cities like Chicago and New York and Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. Why not take on entrenched interests like the hotels and taxi cab cartels in an effort to win the allegiance of the next generation, the middle-class 20-somethings who scoff at the idea of hailing a yellow cab when they can call a towncar with their phone? Uber has demonstrated that these consumers are easily motivated and quickly roused to anger—the DC Taxicab Commission, for instance, was flooded with complaints when word broke that the city was looking to crack down on Uber, forcing the city to back down.
Can the GOP rebrand itself as an Uber Party for the Uber Generation? Could such an effort even really succeed? There's a big difference between whinging at the DCTC or firing off a snarky tweet and joining a party that has, shall we say, not exactly appealed to young urbanites for some time on social and spending issues.