The U.S. patent system borrowed from mainland Europe a concept that had evolved over hundreds of years: the “moral right” for inventors to protect their ideas. But America's founders went even further – they also included the obligation for inventors to publish.

This extra part of the deal was ingenious: It has been key to America's history as a global leader in innovation.

Because inventors were incentivized by protection, yet still obligated to publish, their ideas became available for everybody to see. Not only did this increase the global pool of knowledge, it also allowed follow-on developers to avoid the blind alleys experienced by the original inventor.

The published patent also provides a roadmap to further innovation: the work-around. When developers become too enamored with popular features, they stop innovating. By preventing access to such successful features, patents conversely force competitors to come up with the new ideas or workarounds that lead to fresh innovation.

But as technologies converge and the products we use become increasingly complex, the system needs intermediaries within the market – companies like Intellectual Ventures – to help sift through and navigate the published landscape. By developing focused expertise, these patent licensing entities and intermediaries can function as patent aggregators, assembling portfolios of relevant inventions and providing access through licensing.

Yes, sometimes aggregators have to go to court to protect their patent rights – and get labeled with all kinds of nasty names for doing so.

Patent aggregators sift through the issued patents with an expert eye, and provide efficient access to the long tail of patents. When tens of thousands of patents touch a product, hundreds of inventors spread around the globe deserve to be paid. But in the race to market, product companies often ignore the long tail; small inventors have very little power to do anything about this unless they can enlist the help of patent aggregators.

But aggregators, in order to maximize returns from the patents they've acquired, are incentivized to package and license patents as broadly as possible. If patents are available to all-comers, not just used to exclude, companies can focus on improving their products and competing through innovation.

Despite this complexity, we must maintain the founding principle of the U.S. patent system – providing an incentive for inventors to create without fear of being ripped off. Only then can inventors continue to focus on doing what they do best: inventing. Society benefits when the value of ideas is recognized.

Aggregators also provide a signal to the market as the debate around patent quality continues. Every time Intellectual Ventures purchases a patent, we are making a bet that it is a quality patent. We purchase only 15 percent of the tens of thousands of patents we review, drawing on and continually building the expertise of our acquisitions team. Sometimes patents come as a package deal so we have to buy 10 to get the six or seven we really want, which is why only 40,000 of our 70,000 assets are in active licensing programs. But we continuously prune our portfolio to maximize quality – thus helping the market navigate the long tail of patents.

Ultimately, the users of those products – you – are the ones who benefit.

Pizzaright – the exclusive right to sell pizza – is a new kind of intellectual property right. Pizzaright law, if adopted, would make it illegal to make or serve a pizza without a license from the pizzaright owner.

Creating a pizzaright would be terrible policy, of course. We’re much better off letting the market decide who can make and sell pizza.

The Pizzaright Principle says that if you make an argument for expanding copyright or creating new kinds of intellectual property rights, and if your argument serves equally well as an argument for pizzaright, then your argument is defective. It proves too much. Whatever your argument is, it had better rest on some difference between pizzaright and the exclusive right you want to create.

Which brings us to the third notable item: “the exclusive right”. This is what we would refer to colloquially as a “monopoly”. The copyright industry has been tenacious in trying to portray the copyright monopoly as “property”, when in reality, the exclusive rights created are limitations of property rights (it prohibits me from storing the bitpatterns of my choosing on my own hardware).

"The fact is, I can unequivocally say that I did not create a single job while I was governor."

At the dawn of the self-service banking age in 1985, for example, the United States had 60,000 automated teller machines and 485,000 bank tellers. In 2002, the United States had 352,000 ATMs--and 527,000 bank tellers. ATMs notwithstanding, banks do a lot more than they used to and have a lot more branches than they used to.

Our new economy is shrinking because technology leads to efficiency over growth. That is the notion I want to explore now.

Pick an industry: newspapers, say. Untold thousands of jobs have been destroyed and they will not come back. Yes, new jobs will be created by entrepreneurs -- that is precisely why I teach entrepreneurial journalism. But in the net, the news industry -- make that the news ecosystem -- will employ fewer people in companies. There will still be news but it will be far more efficient, thanks to the internet.

Take retail. Borders. Circuit City. Sharper Image. KB Toys. CompUSA. Dead. Every main street and every mall has empty stores that are not going to be filled. Buying things locally for immediate gratification will be a premium service because it is far more efficient -- in terms of inventory cost, real estate, staffing -- to consolidate and fulfill merchandise at a distance. Wal-Mart isn't killing retailing. Amazon is. Transparent pricing online will reduce prices and profitability yet more. Retail will be more efficient.

Consider: If I suddenly decide I want to dial you up, I have no way of knowing whether you're busy, and you have no idea why I'm calling. We have to open Schrodinger's box every time, having a conversation to figure out whether it's OK to have a conversation. Plus, voice calls are emotionally high-bandwidth, which is why it's so weirdly exhausting to be interrupted by one. (We apparently find voicemail even more excruciating: Studies show that more than a fifth of all voice messages are never listened to.)

The telephone, in other words, doesn't provide any information about status, so we are constantly interrupting one another. The other tools at our disposal are more polite. Instant messaging lets us detect whether our friends are busy without our bugging them, and texting lets us ping one another asynchronously. (Plus, we can spend more time thinking about what we want to say.) For all the hue and cry about becoming an "always on" society, we’re actually moving away from the demand that everyone be available immediately.

Right now, in meetings at corporations around the world, the wise are suffering. They are trapped in rooms where debate rages over how to solve a problem. The rub is that the problem has already been solved, just not by someone in the room--and solutions from outside are ignored. This is the disease known as "NIH," or "Not Invented Here" syndrome, and it's alive and well in 2010. Despite our many technological advancements in communication, none have eliminated this perennial waste of time. Why is this problem so hard to shake? Will we always be confronted with people who insist on reinventing wheels?

Multitasking is not a distraction from our main activity, it is our main activity.

A long-distance relationship is, in emotional terms, a bit like culture in the time of Cervantes or Mozart. The costs of travel and access were high, at least compared to modern times. When you did arrive, the performance was often very exciting and indeed monumental. Sadly, the rest of the time you didn't have that much culture at all. Even books were expensive and hard to get. Compared to what is possible in modern life, you couldn't be as happy overall but your peak experiences could be extremely memorable, just as in the long-distance relationship.

Now let's consider how living together and marriage differ from a long-distance relationship. When you share a home, the costs of seeing each other are very low. Your partner is usually right there. Most days include no grand events, but you have lots of regular and predictable interactions, along with a kind of grittiness or even ugliness rarely seen in a long-distance relationship. There are dirty dishes in the sink, hedges to be trimmed, maybe diapers to be changed.

If you are happily married, or even somewhat happily married, your internal life will be very rich. You will take all those small events and, in your mind and in the mind of your spouse, weave them together in the form of a deeply satisfying narrative, dirty diapers and all. It won't always look glorious on the outside, but the internal experience of such a marriage is better than what's normally possible in a long-distance relationship.

The same logic applies to culture. The Internet and other technologies mean that our favorite creators, or at least their creations, are literally part of our daily lives. It is no longer a long-distance relationship. It is no longer hard to get books and other written material. Pictures, music, and video appear on command. Culture is there all the time, and you can receive more of it, pretty much whenever you want.

In short, our relationship to culture has become more like marriage in the sense that it now enters our lives in an established flow, creating a better and more regular daily state of mind. True, culture has in some ways become uglier, or at least it would appear so to the outside observer. But when it comes to how we actually live and feel, contemporary culture is more satisfying and contributes to the happiness of far more people. That is why the public devours new technologies that offer extreme and immediate access to information.

Many critics of contemporary life want our culture to remain like a long-distance relationship at a time when most of us are growing into something more mature. We assemble culture for ourselves, creating and committing ourselves to a fascinating brocade. Very often the paper-and-ink book is less central to this new endeavor; it's just another cultural bit we consume along with many others. But we are better off for this change, a change that is filling our daily lives with beauty, suspense, and learning.

Perhaps what we are doing has nothing to do with efficiency. I don't operate the way I do with the principal goal of speeding things up. My motivations are much more complex and diffused.

I don't perceive what I am doing as multitasking, really. I am not trying to speed up how quickly I shift from one thing to another. Instead, I am involved in a stream of activities, in which other people figure prominently, either synchronously through direct discussion (a la Twitter or IM) or indirectly, through their writings and my responses.

In many cases, I leave activities dangling because I don't know exactly how I feel about them. In some cases, I could resolve my feelings and take some action if I simply stopped other activities and focused solely on that activity, but in most cases that is not the case. And simply forcing myself to focus on the next thing in the activity would not lead to an acceptable or beneficial result, necessarily.

It's like a painter with a number of works in process. My primary motivation is not getting a particular painting 'done', but adding dabs of paint that I feel are the right ones.

These economic constraints, in turn, greatly constrain what journalists can do. They have a strict deadline every evening, and there are strict limits on the word count they can publish. Because newspapers have to target a large, general audience with limited space, reporters are often discouraged from covering niche topics where they have the greatest interest or expertise. Moreover, because many newspaper readers rely on the paper as their primary source of news, people expect their newspaper to cover a broad spectrum of topics: national and international news, movie reviews, a business section, a comics page, a sports page, and so forth. Which means that reporters frequently get dispatched to cover topics they don't understand very well and that don't especially interest them. The content they produce on these assignments is certainly valuable, but it's probably not as valuable as the content they'd produce if they were given more freedom to pursue the subjects they were most passionate about.

The web is very different. Servers and bandwidth are practically free compared with printing presses and delivery trucks, so news organizations of virtually any size—from a lone blogger to hundreds of people—can thrive if they can attract an audience. And thanks to aggregation technologies such as RSS and Google News, readers don't expect or even want every news organization to cover every topic. Here at Techdirt, we don't try to cover sports, the weather, foreign affairs, or lots of other topics because we know there are other outlets that can cover those topics better than we could. Instead, we focus on the topics we know the most about—technology and business—and cover them in a way that (we hope) can't be found anywhere else. In the news business, as in any other industry, greater specialization tends to lead to higher quality and productivity.

Moving online will give the PI vastly more flexibility to adapt to changing market conditions and focus on those areas where they can create the most value. The PI says they'll have about 20 people producing content for the new web-based outlet. That's a lot fewer than the print paper employed, but it's enough to produce a lot of valuable content. And now that they're freed of the costs and constraints of newsprint, and the expectation to cover every topic under the sun, it'll be a lot easier to experiment and find a sustainable business model.