own question, was the policy analysis that justified this extraordinary change
in regulation?

I remember thinking, Where are the Republicans when you need them?
Here was critical new regulation that would significantly affect innovation
in cyberspace. Where was the regulatory impact statement? Here was a gov-
ernment official overseeing a radical expansion in patent regulation, within
a field that had been the most important component of growth in the
United States' economy in the past twenty years. Yet the government didn't
have time to learn whether its patent policy would do any harm or good?
Regulate first, ask questions later.

There's good reason to wonder whether patents are necessary in a field
such as this. Patent law is designed to create a barrier against idea theft, so
that inventors have an incentive to invent and use their ideas. The term of
this protection is not to be overly long: patents are monopolies; monopolies
raise prices. The term should be long enough to give enough incentive,
without being so long as to raise prices unnecessarily.

But a patent isn't the only device that might protect the innovator against
inefficient copying. Being first to market in a network economy creates a
first-mover advantage without imposing the costs of a patent.

And other incentives are often sufficient to induce innovation without a
patent. Jeff Bezos, for example, said of the 1-Click patent that Amazon.com
would have developed the 1-Click technology whether or not there was a
patent system.[11-97] The reason is obvious: The system helps sell more books,
and the profit from those additional sales of books is enough of an incentive
for the invention of new technology.

Either one of these reasons, plus a host of others suggested by legal and
economic scholars, would lead a rational policy maker to ask whether mo-
nopoly is needed here.[11-98] But this question has not been asked about patents
affecting cyberspace.

///\\\

So why is Washington doing it? What reason could there be for the gov-
ernment to allow this launch of regulation to occur without even a hearing
about whether the regulation will do any good?[11-99]

The answer is obscure, but we can identify a number of causes. First is
the patent bar itself. Dickinson is not an evil man; his heart is certainly in
the right place. But he is a political figure, who feels the pressure of the in-
terest group that is most affected by the decisions of his department. That

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