National Journal's Andrew Noyes has an interesting piece about patent reform that's, alas, behind a pay wall. No worries, though. I'll tell you what's in it. The backdrop is that a fairly major piece of patent rights reform legislation is wending its way through Congress, and the debate can get heated. Should patent rights go to the first documented inventor of a product -- which is how things work now -- or simply the first to get their paperwork in to USPTO? Should there be a cap on the damages that a court can award for patent violations? And would doing so encourage innovation, or do the exact opposite and stymie it? Complicated stuff.

But what's particularly interesting for us here is that U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra was named at Friday's hearing before the House Science Committee as a White House point person responsible for determining the Obama Administration's stance on patent reform. That's noteworthy. Why? Because placing Chopra in the midst of a complex legislative battle points to a policy-oriented, instrumental role in crafting the U.S. approach to technological innovation. Even parsing Obama Administration statements, it's never been exactly clear what the nature of Chopra's post would be. Reading the tea leaves a bit, this development points to a U.S. CTO with a significant and potentially powerful portfolio. (Photo by cytech)

The White House has made an intriguing pick with nominating David Kappos to head up the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Kappos is well-known in the patent world as both a patent reformer in general and, from his position inside IBM, one of the driving forces behind Peer-to-Patent project in particular. Peer -to-Patent is the attempt to apply principles of collaboration and community review to solving USPTO's resource allocation problem. There are too many patents applications awaiting review, and many of them are enormously complicated. There are too few patent examiners and they, through no real fault of their own, don't have access to the knowledge necessary to make sense of the applications in the time they have available to do so. It's kind of a hot mess. That's where Peer-to-Patent comes in...

(Source: Peer-to-Patent Second Anniversary Report, Center for Patent Innovations at New York Law School)
When it comes to opening up government to the public, how do we measure success? In just a handful of years, we've seen participatory democracy empowered by technology moving from a crazy notion at the fringes of politics to an operating principle accepted at the highest reaches of government, including 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But if citizen-driven politics is to become politics as usual, we'll likely hear the question asked more and more -- is it worth it? What is the return on the investment of the government's time, resources, and attention into cracking open the political sphere to citizen engagement? In other words, how do open government projects operating within the government bureaucracy justify their keep?...