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Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias - Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Matthew Yglesias is a fellow at the Center for American Progress. His first book, with the working title Heads in the Sand: Iraq and the Strange Death of Liberal Internationalism, scheduled to be published next spring by John Wiley and co., deals with the Democratic Party's struggle to find a post-9/11 foreign policy, focusing primarily on the rise and (hopefully) fall of the liberal hawk movement.

Previously, he was a staff writer at The American Prospect and an Associate Editor at TPM Media, where he contributed to the group blogs Tapped and TPMCafe. His main blog, now at The Atlantic, has existed in various forms since the dark ages of the blogosphere in January 2002.

His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Slate, The New Republic, and The Washington Monthly, and he is a regular on BloggingHeads.tv and makes the occasional radio or television appearance.

Desperately out of touch with the American mainstream, Yglesias was born and raised in Manhattan and studied philosophy at Harvard where he was editor in chief of The Harvard Independent, a campus alternative weekly.

His latest writings can be found on the Matthew Yglesias blog.

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Software Patents

By Matthew Yglesias

Feb 24 2007, 10:36 AM ET Comment

The good news about the software patent mess is that it has an easy solution: There shouldn't be software patents. Code should be copyrighted if that's what the author of the code wants to do, but whil conventional patents are sometimes abusive, software patents are almost invariably either abusive or else redundant with existing copyright protections. Software patents do far more to inhibit innovation (by making the cost of doing new things both high and strangely unpredictable) than to encourage genuine technical innovation. They are, however, very useful for encouraging legal innovation as companies have strong incentives to gin up new patents!

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