Brookings Press Blog

Too Big to Fail?

Déjà vu, 5 years later

Gary H. Stern and Ron J. Feldman's book, Too Big to Fail, was first published back in 2004. While it seems fitting that we've just released an updated paperback edition, CNBC's Gloria McDonough-Taub puts it best when she says, "...the book is back – with new insight and new recommendations....You can imagine all the questions the authors are fielding now – like why wasn’t their book written back in 2004 given more attention? Oy!" Perhaps we'll all pay closer attention this time around.

- Read Gloria McDonough-Taub's "Bullish on Books" post on CNBC.com

- Read the transcripts from Gary Stern's interview with CNN's "Your Money"

- Learn more about the new paperback edition of Too Big to Fail

Patent Reform Act Heads to Senate

Author Ben Klemens says legislation doesn’t address the real problem

As the Senate considers H.R. 1908, the Patent Reform Act of 2007 passed by the U.S. House, critics worry that the legislation is missing the point. In a posting to Google’s Public Policy Blog, Ben Klemens wrote:

“I wish you guys would put your weight behind solving the real problem: subject matter expansion. Until the mid-1990s, a patent had to have a non-trivial physical element, like a drug or a new machine; but at that time, a panel of former patent attorneys decided—without referring to Congress or other prior study—that non-physical objects like mathematical algorithms and business methods should be patentable.”

Klemens is author of Math You Can’t Use: Patents, Copyright, and Software, which explains that patent laws are intended to apply to physical machines and should never have been extended to include software. The book describes why the current patent and intellectual property system for software is such a mess—and proposes how to clean it up.

- Learn more about Math You Can’t Use.

- Read more about patent reform at InformationWeek.com.

Math You Can Use

Canadian Business Law Journal Calls Book "Interesting and Engaging"

In recent review in the Canadian Business Law Journal (Vol. 44), Teresa Scassa calls Math You Can't Use: Patents, Copyright, and Software by Ben Klemens "interesting and engaging" and "an important contribution to the debate over the appropriate means to protect the fruits of the innovation economy." Scassa goes on to describe the unique perspective Klemens adds to this discussion.

Klemens's mathematical background, combined with his ability to express complex propositions with clarity, free from excessive technical jargon, leave him well placed to make a unique contribution to the development of policy in this area.

In Math You Can't Use, Klemens discusses the intellectual property issues regarding software from the perspectives of law, computer science, mathematics, and economics. He explains that patent laws are intended to apply to physical machines. Software, on the other hand, is quite different and should not be treated as just another machine. As a solution, he outlines how copyright could be more effectively implemented to protect the rights of software developers without unnecessarily hampering innovation. Ultimately, he concludes, it is up to Congress to determine how software should be protected.

Ben Klemens is a guest scholar at the Center on Social and Economic Dynamics at the Brookings Institution, where he writes programs to perform quantitative analyses and policy-oriented simulations. He also consults for the World Bank on intellectual property in the developing world and computer-based simulations of immigration policy.

- Learn more about Math You Can't Use.