Tim Lee has an article on the latest patent abuse, the Vonage case. Here Verizon has been able to destroy a competitor by having the deep pockets to go to court with specious patent claims.

Theoretically, the patent office is only supposed to award patents for "non-obvious" patents, and the concept of converting between an IP address and a phone number certainly seems obvious.

Unfortunately, our patent system has long since departed from this ideal. In recent decades, the courts have dramatically lowered the bar for obviousness. As a result, some of the patents being granted are so broad that inventing around them is practically impossible. The patents that allowed NTP to win a $612 million settlement from BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, for example, essentially covered the concept of transmitting new email notifications wirelessly. There's no way RIM could have "invented around" that.

If we are going to have patent reform and a patent arms race: how about at least allowing Vonage to countersue for abusing the patent system through overly broad and obvious claims?

The big patent news this week was the patent reform bill introduced in Congress

"balance" awards for damages, limiting them to only economic value of the improvement; establish fair standards for punitive damages; restrict forum shopping, and improve patent quality. In addition, the bill would create a "first-to-file" system

Any bill sponsored by Orrin Hatch can't be all good, and my preliminary reading of this is that it reinforces why I am skeptical about patent reform. Pretty much every item favor the large corporate inventor over the small independent inventor. This has a good side, since a lot of small independent inventors are more like blackmail artists than inventors, but the bill seems one-sided doing nothing to reign in the monopoly power the large corporations get from their patent portfolios. I'd rather both sides agree to an armistice - no more patents.

"Patents hamper innovation and interoperability on the World Wide Web" and much much more here (hattip: Christian Zimmermann)

Much ado about another weakening of the Sony decision allowing home recording. Via Jeff Ely, an article about the Cablevision case here. The upshot: because of some elaborate reasoning by the judge, you have keep your recording in your own home...Cablevision can't keep the recording for you on its servers. That's copyright: arbitrary distinctions by arbitrary judges.

There is an amusing article with a list of "greatest technology flops." Interesting that out of the top three two involve DRM - the Digital Audio Tape: died because of a mandatory copy protection scheme built into every unit, and Circuit City's DIVX - the DVD you couldn't play for more than two days unless you paid them extra money to unlock it. Turning to page two we find e-books - funny but not so many people want to buy e-books that are DRMed for one and only one e-book reader...So it looks like three out of the top fourteen worst business ideas involved DRM. Coincidence? I think not.

For an extra 30 cents you will be able to get songs from EMI on itunes without DRM - for 30 cents less you can get the DRM version. It will be interesting to see how many people buy the DRM version and remove it themselves...The EMI press release is here

The new higher quality DRM-free music will complement EMI's existing range of standard DRM-protected downloads already available. From today, EMI's retailers will be offered downloads of tracks and albums in the DRM-free audio format of their choice in a variety of bit rates up to CD quality. EMI is releasing the premium downloads in response to consumer demand for high fidelity digital music for use on home music systems, mobile phones and digital music players. EMI's new DRM-free products will enable full interoperability of digital music across all devices and platforms.

A good summary of why DRM infested music is an inferior product.

Steven Jobs explains

Want to know what the media industry would look like without copyright? There is one branch that has never had much access to copyright. For details, look here. For reasons that will become immediately apparent, this highly profitable portion of the industry does not make a living by suing its customers.

via Jeroen Swinkels - Colbert on copyright

The Viacom lawsuit against Google has received a lot of publicity. The Washington Post has has an article by one of the lawyers - an article that implicitly raise the question: Why do the courts tolerate the twisting of the plain meaning of words?

The worst example of this is the SCO lawsuit againsts IBM on the grounds that somehow Linux infringes on source code to which SCO holds the copyright. This lawsuit has being going on for years - the judge has repeatedly held against SCO's claims; SCO has repeatedly refused to provide evidence for its claims; and it is clear that SCO executive and lawyers have repeatedly lied to stockholders about the strength of and evidence for their claims. Yet the legal system treats the claims and liars with dignity as if they were serious plantiffs. There are laws against making misrepresentations to stockholders. Perhaps if the SCO executives and lawyers went to jail - which is where they belong for harassing IBM with a meritless and expensive lawsuit - that would send the right message to Viacom. It doesn't seem enough that somewhere down the road years from now a court will rule that Viacom's claims have no merit. Or even that they repay Google for its legal costs. Certainly SCO won't ever repay IBM: they've bankrupted the company by giving all of its assets to the lawyers who agreed to pursue a meritless lawsuit to the bitter end.