via Mauro Mello Jr., probably best just to quote him

Here is yet another article on how people who want to believe can get really screwed up.

Courtesy of the music industry and its allies, this is yet another not-so-subtle stab in the back of people who purchased DRM-protected music (a.k.a. bona fide customers, the raison d'etre of the music industry, by the way). It is almost surreal, along the lines of "if you don't ever upgrade this one specific computer of yours, or if it doesn't seize for any particular reason, your (our) music is yours to keep forever (sort of)".

The article is here

There are a couple of careful empirical researchers who are generally enthusiastic about intellectual property - and not so enthusiastic as we are about piracy. One is Ivan Png. Ivan, however, is an honest fellow: his latest work looks at the Business Software Alliance (read "Microsoft lobbying organization") and how they estimate piracy rates for software. Although the BSA statistics are widely used, Ivan finds them to less than neutral, with systematic cross-country biases, and more significant, in 2003 they started inflating their figures by around 4%. Go read it. Tables here.

The always invaluable Technological Innovation and Intellectual Property newsletter is out. This time a series of posts based on the new book by James Bessen and Michael Meurer, Patent Failure.

via Christian Zimmermann...ebay pays cold cash to be able to put a hot button called "Buy it Now" on its auctions link here

Via slashdot, a letter in the Los Angeles Times by Dallas Weaver raises an interesting point. While propogandists for the copyight and patent mills are eager to have their exclusive grants treated as "property" they don't seem terribly interested in paying property tax. Since they've successfully managed to press the term "intellectual property" into the dictionary, why not charge them a property tax? This is a serious suggestion with serious benefits for two reasons.

First, it would go a long way to solving the problem of automatic copyright and orphan works - it would force copyright holders to emerge from the shadows or give up their copyrights. Moreover, it would get around some ridiculous language in the Berne convention to the effect that "The enjoyment and the exercise of these rights shall not be subject to any formality." It's not that you wouldn't get your rights if you didn't pay your property tax, any more than you would if you didn't pay property tax on your car. You would of course go to jail.

Second, owners of houses and automobiles and the like pay taxes on their property in exchange for real government services they receive ranging from roads to police. So also with owners of "intellectual property" who receive a variety of government enforcement services - which at the current time they do not help to pay for.

The latest issue of Technological Innovation and Intellectual Property is hot off the blogs - and very depressing reading it is too. Bad patents drive out the good, costing the economy billions; patents in software make it hard for new firms to enter the market and to get financing. One good bit of news: James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer's new book Patent Failure: How Judges, Lawyers and Bureaucrats Put Innovators at Risk appears in the bookstores this month.

At the assertion that to be patentable something must be novel we can only laugh or cry. There is an article on apple insider: James and Marguerite Driessen of Lindon, Utah are suing Apple Computer claiming they have patented the idea of a gift card where the gift is downloadable over the internet. The actual patent 7003500 - which took six years to issue for some reason - is vastly worse than that. They have patented the "idea" of "selling of merchandise or media content on the Internet [using] at least one in-person contact with the buyer." I want to emphasize: this patent was approved by the U.S. Patent Office.

Thanks to Christian Zimmermann for keeping an eye on Economic Logic. They are blogging up a storm over patent abuse.

One of the biggest problems with the patent system - and to a lesser extent with copyright - is the use to try to tax other people's innovations by claiming a monopoly over something you didn't invent. This is the heart of what it means to be a patent troll (see the article below about banks), and why it blocks rather than promotes innovation. There is a nice posting about SCO on Economic Logic: the point is that SCO now exists as a company the sole purpose of which is to slow down progress by claiming IP rights over other people's inventions and creations.

If I didn't actually read the patent applications I would believe that this stuff is invented by opponents of the system. Techdirt has a posting describing the lastest invention: the phone that can play mp3s and access the internet. The patent is here. The lawsuit against every maker of smart phones was filed moments after the application was approved. This is not an invention: it is a cocktail party wishlist: wouldn't be great if...

Here are some other inventions that no doubt have been mentioned millions of times by thousands of people all of whom had the common decency not to write it down and try to get a patent on it. I invite our readers to submit more; who knows it may be prior art one day.

*Wouldn't it be great if I put a pillow on that chair, it would be so much more comfortable.

*Wouldn't it be great if you could shop online while you were flying on an airplane and have the stuff you ordered waiting for you at the gate when the flight arrived.

*Wouldn't it be great is spaceships had built-in music players.

*Wouldn't it be great if flashlights had disco strobes that could be used for dancing.

Wouldn't it be great if...add your own.

Let's make a contest: submit your ideas, we'll have a vote of the bloggers to pick the top 5 and post them. If we make a fortune patenting any of the ideas and suing everyone already making the product, we'll share our winnings.