Pirate Bay, the well known site that allows you to exchange music, movies, games, and software regardless of copyright, has now opened a new service, BayImg, allowing you to upload images under Swedish law with similar freedom from copyright law and censorship link here. It has also announced it will be hosting videos which will offer a real challenge to YouTube. It will be interesting to see how many users respond and how much competition this offers since YouTube has adopted a policy of working with copyright holders to take down such material when requested.

Dan Mitchell reports in the New York Times that Lawrence Lessig is shifting his focus to combat the influence of money on politics, which yields bad laws and not just the bad laws governing intellectual property link here. Lessig himself is in print link here and he has a YouTube posted link here . "Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide," he wrote in his blog. "In the United States, listening to money is the only way to secure re-election. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars."

Steven Shapin writes entertainingly in the New Yorker about our futuristic vision of innovation on which we impose several layers of mistakes link here. He goes on to consider how much we depend on old technology. A striking example was that we went to war on the ground in Afghanistan on horseback, following up on B-52 bombing runs, after being highly dependent on horses and mules in World War II. He draws heavily on "The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900" (Oxford; $26), by David Edgerton, a well-known British historian of modern military and industrial technology. New or old , the defining characteristic of current technology is whether it is useful.

He then calls our attention to "technological palimpsests," old technology that gets reshaped and refurbished to perform new uses and how dependent we are on it and how important the role of maintenance is in keeping our economy running.

This is a clever off-beat view of innovation, entailing a re-evaluation of what is really important in how we live our lives, fundamentally questioning how important innovation really is, and indirectly, the cult of intellectual property. Read it and change your mindset.

All of us Google-search users know that it is free for us and profitable from advertising. Most of us don't know that the advertising is handled by a subsidiary, AdWords. Google-AdWords has now teamed up with Salesforce.com to follow up on ad responses by keeping track of sales leads. Much of the communication involved uses Google mail and can use the Google online word processor and spreadsheet.

The Economist describes the relationship thusly link here: "Like all AdWords customers, they can then choose keywords ("car repairs", say) and bid to have small text links displayed next to the results of any web search for that term. They pay only when users click on the advertisement and are taken to the advertiser's website. At that point Salesforce's service kicks in [if they are among its subscribers], collecting information about the user which then pops up on the Salesforce page of the advertiser's sales team, allowing them to follow up and sell something."

Speculation arises that success will be followed by a buyout. Another natural monopoly challenges Microsoft's.

The Economist reports that countries with major health problems are overruling international patents and switching to locally made generic copies at a fraction of the price link here. "Last month the World Health Organisation passed a resolution supporting compulsory licensing. America objected vociferously, but other rich countries supported the motion." Countries invoking compulsory licensing include Thailand and Brazil, with India, Malaysia and Kenya, making noises about doing so. The Economist notes that these are not poverty stricken countries, to which the generic exceptions are supposed to be limited.

Drug companies are upset, arguing that while compulsory licensing is legal, TRIPS rules allow it only under limited circumstances, such as national health emergencies, and only after they try and fail to negotiate prices with firms.

Benefitting from compulsory licensing is the generic-drugs industry (as well as the consumer, at least in the short run, depending on whether it reduces research on diseases afflicting poor countries). Canada encourages domestic firms to produce copycat drugs for precisely this reason. But their costs are so high that such exports cannot hope to compete with the cheaper pills produced by India. Countries unable to produce generics competitively are allowed to import them.

This story isn't over. Big Pharma is so profitable that it is hard to shed tears for it. Moreover, they haven't been all that eager to develop drugs for poor countries' diseases to date. They have instead been shamed into supplying poor countries when they have already developed the drug for the rich--like AIDS drugs. But the world would be unwise to wait for it to develop drugs for diseases confined to poor areas. Another way has to be found, like the Gates and Buffett initiative.

June 9's edition of the Economist has several interesting articles concerning IP. A short one discusses how Skype, podcasts, and broadband have transformed teaching of foreign languages link here. With Skype, you can get a native speaker on line to correct your mispronunciation, at native wages. With podcasts, you have the language lesson recorded, and can listen and repeat while driving or gardening or what have you. Broadband makes access to both really cheap.

Having struggled learning several languages myself, this is the most flexible and attractive development I've heard of. It still depends on doing the work though, so you have to want to learn it.

Mike Masnick has a thought provoking piece on new business models for musicians and music companies link here. Live concerts are still where the money is, while CD sales are slowly tanking. He cites two examples, tying priority access to concert tickets to purchasing an iTune and an earlier post of his, handing out USB drives with new music on them at a concert link here. That latter post mentions still another gimmick, selling CDs by having them change color as they are played.

So the music business is changing, the RIAA members are hurting, but the musicians are adapting and the consumer benefits. Good news all around.

Google says it is about to test "video fingerprinting" to identify and block copyrighted material put up by YouTube users link here. In the testing phase, the system will run with "partners" (presumeably companies that have licensing deals with Google) like Disney and Time Warner, as well as some which are not, to determine if the technology works properly. Once it proves accurate and quick, it will be expanded to all content owners who wish to use it.

It will interesting to see how companies calculate the gain from the free advertising that YouTube provides against the "cost" of no longer controlling the use to which its "old" material is put.

Timothy Lee writes "A Patent Lie" attacking software patents link here. The article makes several good points, ending up by arguing that copyright provides better and less expensive protection, inducing greater competition and lower costs to the consumer.

But why have any protection, other than the basic secrecy which allows the software writer to avoid publishing the code. If the idea behind the software, like Amazon's one-click ordering software, is so obvious, why protect it and prevent anyone else from producing software which serves the same purpose?

Why not reduce the wages of monopoly to an absolute minimum?

Matt Yglesias pokes into another small absurdity in IP, reporting that defense contractors hold copyrights on weapons designs used by toy replica makers and collects fees for their use link here. Now Congress is going to get involved as one Congressman proposes that design copyrights be owned by the government which paid for the weapon designs and receive the toy makers' fees. For me, there is a bit of confusion here in whether it is a copyright, a trademark, or a design patent that is owned. But there seems to be no doubt that a license is available for a fee and it ought to be the taxpayer who benefits.