At the risk of being somewhat off topic: over on slashdot they are claiming that you won't be able to upgrade (or reinstall) windows Vista unless you already have some other version of windows installed...Vista already seems to be deep in the colossal blunders department. Have to wonder at this point how many people are going to try upgrading to this. The price is right - and you don't need to have old windows installation disks lying around to try it out.

As some reader may know, Michele Boldrin and I have been working on a book about intellectual property, titled "Against Intellectual Monopoly." There we make the case that without the artificial protection of patent and copyright competition functions best, and that patent and copyright do little or nothing to increase innovation and creation. Since they do plenty of other harm: we conclude that it would be best to do away with the entire mess. If you are interested in the details, we've just released the latest version on line at http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm.

The book is to be published (yes under copyright...but under our contract there will continue to be a free version available online) by Cambridge University Press - probably to appear in about a year's time.

I previously posted on an article by security researcher Peter Gutmann about DRM in Windows Vista in which he argues that Microsoft has chosen to degrade in important and significant ways the performance and capability of their operating system to protect "premium content." Microsoft has posted a response denying all charges. Unfortunately, reading the details of the denial, it appears that everything Gutmann said is true.

Slashdot draws our attention to an an article by security researcher Peter Gutmann about DRM in Windows Vista. The gist of the article: Microsoft has chosen to degrade in important and significant ways the performance and capability of their operating system to protect "premium content." He is of the view that it probably won't work as far as protecting premium content, but will significantly raise the cost and lower the performance of such things as video cards - as well as making them difficult to reverse engineer for open source operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD. It may well be that the latter is the intention of Microsoft - certainly the evidence is that Apple's music DRM doesn't do much for protecting content - but protects Apple from competition in the music business.

That said - the demand for degraded computers that can play "premium content" is limited. People just don't buy computers to play movies on them. Michele and I previously dug out some numbers on the size of the "premium content" industry versus the IT industry. According to the RIAA, the value of all CD's, live presentations, music videos, dvds in 1998 was 13.72 billion US$. According to the SOI, in 1998 the business receipts of the computer and electronic product manufacturing including both hardware and software was 560.27 billion US$. I looked up at the census 1997 revenue in the telecommunications industry: 260.50 billion US$. So: are people going to give up their general purpose computers they spend $560 billion on to access less than $14 billion in content? Predictions are dangerous, but I will venture one: Microsoft's decision to build heavy DRM into the core of Vista will go down as one of the colossal business blunders of all time.

Jim Luke and I are going to get together in the lobby lounge of the Swissotel at one pm for about an hour to talk about intellectual property. Anyone who is interested in joining us, please drop by.

Larry Lessig admits the obvious: if dead musicians can sign a petition, then they can be inspired to create new works. So it seems that retroactive copyright extension is OK after all. Or maybe the musicians just want more money for work they've already done? Nah...

Over on Freedom to Tinker there is a nice essay about an important discovery in the online game SecondLife. To briefly summarize: people can create and sell objects for "Linden Dollars" which can be traded in the real world for US Dollars. Someone has now built a copybot which can make exact duplicates of any object. It seems the "perfect storm" for the pro-IP crowd: surely the economy will collapse over night. (It does matter quite a bit whether the copybot can operate without or without the permission of the current owner of the object - it isn't clear to me from the essay which way it works.) If you want to know what will happen next, go read the 1958 Ralph Williams science fiction short story "Business As Usual During Alterations."

Turn your head and if the RIAA didn't do something ridiculous, the MPAA must have. Via Slashdot an article on TorrentFreak. A company preloads DVDs onto ipods then gives consumers the ipods and the DVD. That is, just doing commercially what would be perfectly legal under fair use to do for yourself. Plus - surely this increases the demand for legal movies. Smart move you big brains in the MPAA: sue the ones who are paying you money. One of the most important arguments against monopoly in my book: it empowers the stupid.

Via Tim Sullivan, an interesting article in Slate about a company specializing in collecting money from hip-hop artists who sample a few notes and play them repeatedly. While the issue of sampling in hip-hop isn't new - Larry Lessig has written about this extensively, for example, the article does have some interesting analysis of whether this makes any sense for fostering creativity.

Hooboy - another DMCA triumph. From arstechnica via Matt Yglesias - A website somehow got advance notice of Best Buy's planned Thanksgiving sale prices and posted them on the internet. Best Buy forced them to take it down with a DMCA take-down notice. This is the chilling effect on free speech - facts are not copyrightable, so it is doubtful that BlackFriday could be successfully sued. But "Black Friday said, 'While we believe that sale prices are facts and not copyrightable, we do not want to risk having this website shut down due to a DMCA take down notice.'"