I've been pondering, inter alia, the Federal Circuit's recent decision in Figueroa v. U.S., which holds that the high fees charged by the Patent and Trademark Office are constiitutional. The odd thing is not the holding, but the fact that there was a concurrence by Judge Newman, suggesting that the constitutional question was much closer than the majority thought, and that a future case and set of facts might push the other way.

The theory, as I understand it, is that fees that are higher than necessary for the PTO to function violate the rule that Congress's copyright and patent power must be exercised "to promote the progress of science and useful arts." This is a power to promote science via patents, not a power to raise revenue via charging lots of money for patents. Of course, if the patent fees were earmarked to fund the copyright office, or even for the general prupose of science-promotion, it seems to me that the preamble-based objection would disappear.

I've largely given up blogging at all about politics, but there's just one issue of sufficiently broad importance that I thought I ought to say something quickly. The french legislature, as you can read here, recently passed a law making denial of the armenian genocide a crime. Obviously, I have no sympathy for deniers of the armenian genocide - between 1915 and 1917, one side of my family was more or less wiped out, and the other side was unceremoniously expelled from Turkey by a friendly local governor (my great grandfather, apparently, used to give the governor rides in his brand new Ford Model T), to spend the next eighty years marooned in Syria.

But free speech is free speech. It is free speech even when it's very wrong. Especially when it is very wrong, both because sometimes what seems wrong is right, and because allowing the wrong to speak reminds us that the wrong are still about, and need to be persuaded to be right. Of course, one suspects the real agenda behind the French government's efforts is to show that it's serious about impeding Turkey's entry into the European Union. If so, I wish legislators would leave my heritage, such as it is, and free speech, much more importantly, alone while they did it.