Alan Sipress at the Washington Post link here reports that the Patent Office will begin opening some of its applications to public comment and that the process, initially experimental, may evolve and become Wiki-like. This is not new news as Slashdot reports link here and link here, but seems to promise more change, as the PTO is overwhelmed and increasingly criticized for its decisions.

We critics of the PTO and the evolution of IP law need to follow this closely to make sure that its decisions reflect appropriate attention to such things as prior art and non-obviousness. Is this the time to begin to organize to make our influence felt?

Anne Broache, Staff Writer for CNET News.com, (link here) writes that the House Judiciary subcommittee that originates intellectual property laws is cranking up to introduce a patent reform bill. Ideas broached in the piece include enough funding to hire an ample number of examiners and staff; meaningful, low-cost alternatives to litigation, requiring pending patent applications to be made public a certain number of months after being filed so that the public would have a chance to submit prior art; and restrictions on business method patents, a controversial class that grants protection to processes. Based on past experience, the prospects are not great because disagreements among interest groups have prevented real reform.

Those of us committed to intellectual property reform will need to follow this and weigh in with their own representatives and senators the only ones who will listen to individual constituents.

Techdirt earlier reported that Seth Godin, author of "Everyone's an Expert (About Something)," was unhappy because his book was published and for sale after it had been on line for free (link here). The story has now been resolved by the New York Times (link here.)

Originally licensed and published under a Creative Commons license that allows anyone to republish and sell it, Godin objected that it was dishonestly sold as a new edition. The publishers then put it out with a note that it was the same edition as the free one available on line. The author accepted that.

Nevertheless, the fact that the book was for sale produced some criticism of Godin as he could have put it out under a different Creative Commons license that allows anyone to make use of a published work but only on a not-for-profit basis.

It seems to me that the critics have got that wrong. Many people are willing to pay for the convenience of having a hard copy version and producing that has costs. If there is a profit involved, as some critics objected, that motive got the book printed. If the price were too high, others were free to print it as well, likely bringing the price down.

The consumer was well served here, better than if it had been put out under the more restrictive Creative Commons license.

MICHAEL CRICHTON writes on "Patenting Life" (link here). A few quotes will make its tenor clear. "YOU, or someone you love, may die because of a gene patent that should never have been granted in the first place. Sound far-fetched? Unfortunately, it's only too real." "Gene patents are now used to halt research, prevent medical testing and keep vital information from you and your doctor." "Why? Because the holder of the gene patent can charge whatever he wants, and does."

Strong stuff, well stated.

Mike at Techdirt (link here) points us to Jonathan Lethem's piece in Harpers (link here) which is both an extended discussion of copyright and the abuses it is now suffering, and a poetic evocation of language and imaginative ideas which have come to us through the ages and still inspire literature, ultimately questioning the definition of plagiarism. To make his point, he pulls the reader's leg by making the whole piece up from bits and pieces from other writers and then puts the sources for all of them in an extended set of footnotes, making his point that all of us depend on the work of others and that the current practice of sharply limiting access is a crime against society and human progress.

I tried to write a couple of comments on my earlier post, Competition--surprise-- fosters innovation. For some reason they were just deleted.

After I posted my original piece, I was off the web and didn't see the comments from others, but I think David answered them pretty well.

I would add one thought. A contest doesn't guarantee that the resulting innovation won't be patented, so if the sponsor patents it, the price to society may be a lot higher than just the prize money. Thus, I may have exaggerated the relative merits of contests and patents or copyrights. But I remain intrigued.

I was led back to this subject by a post from Alex Tabarrok (link here) which takes you to a Business Week story about Goldcorp. The gold mining company was in trouble and had suspended mining. It had mining leases. Question: should it develop any of them and if so how. In a contest, it posted the geological data on the leases and issued the "Goldcorp Challenge" which made a total of $575,000 in prize money available to participants who submitted the best methods and estimates. Big response and big success for Goldcorp, though rising gold prices had something to do with it as well.

Subsequently, I Googled "contests+innovations" and got 915,000 hits. Obviously, I haven't looked at more that a few, but there seems to be more going on out there than I thought; lots of competition, just not from patent and copyright holders.

A while back, I sent David an email questioning whether patents and copyrights didn't contribute significantly to rising income inequality in the US. He didn't think so (his emphasis was on significantly) and I ceased that line of inquiry. This week, Matt Yglesias raises the same question (link here) and references posts from Brad Delong on income inequality (link here) and from Bradford Plumer who writes on how rich people control politics and get their wealth enhanced (link here). Yglesias cites the Sony Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and sends readers to Wikipedia. The logic of that story is that the act served no purpose but to enrich existing copyright owners (usually not the creator and therefore constitutes little incentive to innovate) and served to create income inequality. As David argued earlier, this by itself could not be a significant contributor to total inequality. I remain unsure and would like to see more evidence.

Yglesias cites as well Dean Baker's book, the Conservative Nanny State (free to download here), which argues that the rich have overwhelming political power. Commenters on Yglesias' piece cite only one additional piece of evidence, that the Mar's and other rich families spent $500 million to get the inheritance tax reduced (link here). But none of this actually uses statistical data to make the case that it is a significant cause of income inequality.

Ideology, Marxist or Libertarian or Friedmanesque or Keynesian, doesn't count in this discussion. We need more numbers.

UCC or user-created content has become a problem for Korean webcaster Pandora which is being sued for copyright infringement by Korea's TV networks (link here). The users have been editing short network broadcasts to make them funny or critical and posting them on Pandora.

UCC got more complicated when Korea's National Election Commission asked that obvious advocacy clips be taken down as they violated Korean election law during the short period when a political campaign is formally declared (link here).

Pandora which collects fees for advertising in connection with a post proposes to pay the stations half the fee and to cap the length of any video to five minutes. It has also proposed "reference rights" so it gets sued rather than the poster and "submitted a written statement to the National Internet Promotion Agency of Korea and the three national broadcasters - KBS, MBC and SBS - asking them to guarantee Web users the rights to 'freely edit' a certain part of a TV program, be it news, documentary, drama or entertainment show, in order to add fun or wit to the content."

UCC is apparently very widely created and viewed in Korea. As elsewhere, the broadcasters can benefit from the exposure as well as any fees Pandora would pay. Stay tuned.

David Leonhardt writes in the NYTimes today about another way to increase innovation offer prizes (link here). He takes off from Netflix' search for better algorithms to suggest movies to subscribers in which they would likely be interested, based on what they have already seen and rated highly. The prize is a million dollars, and there is a threshold to beat, a ten percent improvement over Netflix' present algorithm. The competition lasts five years and seems very risky to enter, but has attracted widespread participation.

Prize competitions were apparently common centuries ago; Leonhardt cites one example, the British Parliament's £20,000 prize for a way to determine longitude and thus a ship's position at sea.

Leonhardt argues that prizes are efficient in that they only pay for success, the cost is fixed in advance, and the competition is open to everyone. This contrasts with grants, an alternative way to get innovation, but one which is essential in the sciences where the setup costs are so great.

I would suggest that the lesson is, if you want innovation, create competition. The contrast is with patents and copyrights, where the payoffs are undefined, the costs to consumers are huge, and they are increasingly used to prevent competition; in the process, they end up slowing innovation.

Borys Musielak writes a long piece on DRM (link here). He calls for boycotting the hardware and software that impose DRM, most notably Vista currently, and for political action. He points us to ways to get around the controls where they have been broken but then notes that may not be legal. "For instance, if you have the misfortune of being located in the United States or France, you are prohibited by law to play your legally purchased music or films (sic!) that are secured by DRM if you don't buy an approved operating system (like MS Windows or MacOS) with an approved media player (like PowerDVD or iTunes). In the US this has been enforced by the DMCA act. In France, a similar act called DADVSI."

Are these great countries or what?