The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the patent exhaustion doctrine applies to so-called 'method patents'. Read the decision here.

A company (LGE) bought up a bunch of patent portfolios (As is often the case, such companies contribute nothing to actual inventions - they merely buy up existing monopoly rights). The patents in question do not involve tangible inventions, but rather a 'process' relating to computer operations. These 'process' inventions are known as 'method patents'.(I have always felt that the entire concept of 'method patents' to be suspect, but that is a discussion for another post.)

LGE licensed its patents to Intel in order to allow Intel to make and sell microprocessors using the LGE method patents. A third party (Quanta), then purchased the microprocessors from Intel to manufacture their own computers using Intel chips. LGE then sued Quanta - arguing that they (Quanta) somehow violated LGE's patents. Got that?

Only one word to describe the claim: Surreal.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court saw through the nonsense and unanimously agreed that there was no patent infringement here.

Its a bit wonky, with lots of legalese, but the decision is worth reading for those who want to know the nitty-gritty insanity of our patent laws. LGE even had the cojones to argue that the patent exhaustion doctrine doesn't apply to method patents.

It is only being done in small increments, but the Supreme Court is slowly restoring some sanity back to attempts at patent law overreach.

More at Patently-O here.

More details on the case at the ScotusWiki here.

AP weighs in with case coverage here.

A lot is being written about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and given that many readers here will have seen something about it elsewhere link here, here and here I have not posted on the subject. But for those not up to speed on this, the government with strong support from the copyright holders and their lobbying groups has been trying to agree on the wording of trade agreements with many of our main trading partners whose terms were not revealed. They now have been leaked link here. It is widely assumed that the government was proceeding this way to avoid having to open the language of legislation to amendment by Congress. An up-or-down vote on an already negotiated trade agreement would have a better chance of passing as submitted in its present strong form. In addition, it is expected that the government will press other countries to sign up to the same strong terms, i. e., without change, if they want trade agreements with the US.

What has some really upset is the provision to enforce filtering on the internet, to disable such P2P sites as Pirate Bay, and to invade privacy by going through travelers computers and music players when they cross borders. In other words, this is not simply better enforcement but a substantial expansion of the law.

There was a fascinating discussion on TWIT 144 with Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine. Kahle is great--he put up a heroic fight against the FBI after it served the Internet Archive in 2007 with a "national security letter" seeking the identity and behavior of an Internet Archive user. The letter circumvented the FISA court and put Kahle and his attorneys under a gag order under penalty of incarceration. Kahle's discussion of his Kafka-esque battle--except that he won--is inspiring and fascinating. Apparently the FBI served 200,000 such letters in four years. The Internet Archive and Kahle was limited in how it could respond to the suit, so it ended up just suing the goverment (Internet Archive v. Mukasey) with help of the heroic ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In response to a victim who was not willing to just roll over, the FBI instantly wanted to settle, but the Internet Archive would not agree to this until the settlement permitted all this to be public, so that other victims of such "national security letters" might have an idea of how to fight back.

In any event, I was aware of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine but hadn't realized that Archive.org is trying to be a sort of open library storing books, films, etc., nor that Microsoft had teamed up with Archive.org (see this Dvorak column). Microsoft helped start the project but has backed out; but at least it removed contractual restrictions on the books it had scanned. You can find hundreds of thousands of free books now on the Internet Archive; take, for example, this gorgeous scan of a classic 18th century nursery book Goody Two Shoes.

(Cross-posted at Mises.org)

Paul Krugman has a good column today in the New York Times about how technology is undermining the monopoly formerly known as intellectual property. He uses the example of the Amazon Kindle and notes the parallel between digital downloads of books and music. In noting that Charles Dickens made money from book tours, he overlooks the fact that Dickens was front and center in the copyright monopolists' battle against the "pirates." He also might have noted that, contrary to legend, Dickens was paid royalties by three American publishers, including Harper & Brothers.

As he puts it, "in the long run we are all the Grateful Dead"--even if the Dead did sue Wolfgang's Vault for copyright infringement.

Here is the article.

Via the New York Times, the Supreme Court has refused an appeal by Major League Baseball of an appeals court ruling that the First Amendment rights of people engaged in fantasy baseball (and other sports) trumped any rights of publicity controlled by the league. MLB was attempting to force the various operators of fantasy sports web sites to pay royalties on their use of statistics generated by actual players to update performance of fantasy teams.

Per Wired -

A federal judge on Monday freed the producers of a movie promoting intelligent design to continue using a 15-second recording of John Lennon's "Imagine."

A New York judge said the makers of Expelled had a right of fair use under copyright law to use a small portion of the work without Yoko Ono's permission.

I'm not going to get into the controversy surrounding the subject of this film. But in terms of the fair use/copyright issue, this is great news indeed.

The Supreme Court has refused to consider the case of whether or not fantasy sports leagues infringe on publicity rights of a sports league and/or the players.

Since an appeals court has already ruled that the First Amednment trumps so-called 'publicity rights' in this context, this news is no cause for alarm. However, it still would have been nice for the Supreme Court to take the case to put an exclamation point on that obvious conclusion.

A copyright battle is opening over a poem, Footprints in the Sand, a piece of inspirational saccharine which has been widely believed until now to be in the public domain. According to Washington Post Staff Writer, Hank Stuever, the poem has at least six people claiming authorship link here. The copyright is pretty questionable, since it has been published for years under the authorship of anonymous. Copyright was not claimed until 1986 but there is money, apparently quite a bit, in licensing the poem for imprint on cups and shirts and such, so the fight will now commence and more claimants may emerge.

The lawyers are about to have a feast once again over what is the result of really vague and therefore bad law. But with so many vested interests in the present text, it is unlikely to be changed anytime soon so we all lose.

More and more journals adopt a policy of open access, i.e., they do not charge anything to readers. One recent adopter is "Economic Analysis and Policy," which is also publishing in 2009 a special issue on the topic. Consider sending a paper!

Details.