By: Dustin J. Friedland
The United States Constitution gives Congress many powers, including the powers to tax and spend for the good of the public, and the power to facilitate technological and intellectual innovation. Both of these powers are exercised in the form of incentive systems to induce certain conduct by the states and/or private entities. Like any incentive system, both patent protection and federal subsidies involve trade-offs between the recipients and the federal government. However, the patent system and the spending power have yet to be used in conjunction with one another. This note proposes that using these two powers to complement one another would further the goals of both powers; namely, to promote innovation by private entities, particularly in fields that facilitate widespread social utility.
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By Tyson E. Hubbard
How would you feel if your daily travels were tracked and stored in a large computer database? Presumably someone going over the raw data could figure out where you worked, where your kids went to school, where your family lived and at what stores you liked to shop. In the wrong hands, the potential abuses of that sort of information are very scary. What many people do not realize is that it is exactly this type of information that is being collected every day by police officers across the country. New technology which is being heavily marketed to police departments allows a camera mounted on top of a police cruiser to take a picture of your license plate and store that information, complete with time, date and exact latitude and longitude coordinates for your vehicle. This sort of information is gathered anytime your car happens to travel past a police car, or more accurately anytime a police car travels past your car. Think about how many times you pass a police car on the average day: maybe it is on the freeway, or you see a police officer doing speed checks, or you are even going the other direction on the freeway and there is an officer across the median. Maybe as you run your daily errands there is police car that has someone pulled over on the side of the road, or even a cruiser parked at the local donut shop. Then there are the times a police officer drives by your car and you are not even aware. You might be in the parking lot at work or home with the garage door open. Everytime a transaction like this occurs, when your car and a police car are in the same location and the officer’s camera is operational, the information is collected. With the vast amount of information being collected and stored on every driver, police departments across the country have essentially placed tracking devices onto everyone’s vehicles.
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