The site Make Textbooks Affordable has opened a petition already signed by 1000 faculty to declare "their preference for high-quality, affordable textbooks, including open textbooks, over expensive commercial textbooks." Well, that seems to be like an obvious preference, but I think the point here is to demonstrate that there is a demand for open textbooks, which should encourage some supply to form.

The fact is that there are already quite a few open textbooks. See the list on the site of the petitioners, or Textbook Revolution, or WikiBooks. Finally a list for Economics on IDEAS/RePEc.

This is a story that won't end here, but raises a lot of important issues for academia. As do many universities, Georgia State produces on-line study materials from published material, for use as course readings link here. It is now being sued by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Sage Publications for copyright infringement. The complaint, violating publishers rights, is based on the extent of the copying because it goes way beyond fair use. I would expect Georgia State to lose the case under current copyright law since it had not obtained permission or paid for a license.

In the absence of changing the law, the only way around this is to get authors to make the texts available on line, perhaps for limited uses, as our own David Levine has done and allow commercial publication with this understanding. As we have written before, academic authors need to be urged to adopt such an arrangement, perhaps using a little friendly collegial pressure. That will still leave a lot of published material that would be useful for courses but could not be used without permission. Would a change in copyright be feasible that made such use an exception? That seems unlikely, but worth thinking about.

Kurt Denke is my new hero. He's the former lawyer who is President of Blue Jeans Cable, a competitor of Monster Cable. When he received a cease and desist letter from Monster, who alleged some of Blue Jeans' "Tartan" cable products were too similar to Monster's, Denke sent back a devastating and heroic reply. This is one of the best letters I've ever read. It's heroic and ballsy, and strategically brilliant. Further, I think this letter can help illustrate the unavoidable practical difficulties that will necessarily plague any attempt to have an IP--that is, pattern privilege--system. It helps to highlight why such a system cannot be but unjust. These kind of expensive and intractable problems, inherent vagueness and bullying tactics, will always accompany a patter privilege system. Any layman who is in favor of patent should read this letter, and think about the consequences of the system they advocate.

(Cross-posted at Mises blog)

Via Marginal Revolution and Boing Boing, Boeing (no relationship) has patented using the moon's gravity to adjust a satellite's orbit. It is however believed the patent would not stand in court, as it is merely rebranding of a physics law. Yet, given legal costs, the satellite is on its way back...

Under the headline, "SAVE THE U.S. PATENT NOW! IT'S THE HEART AND SOUL OF AMERICA'S ECONOMIC SYSTEM" the Professional Inventors Alliance ran a two-full-page ad in the New York Times (Monday, April 7, p A10 and A11, not available on line). The alliance has a website link here which has a single webpage with some of the thrust of the ad, but tells little more about the group.

It is an attack on the Patent Reform Act (S. 1145) and an ostensible plea to unions to join the Alliance in opposing the legislation. It asserts that "the fundamental dependence of America's economy [is] on America's patents" and that "U. S. patented inventions have been the primary source of America's historically unparalleled wealth." It also claims that "the growth of America's GDP [is] generated by American manufactures products and that there is "nearly universal opposition to the IT sectors self-destruct proposals for patent reform." It then identifies the members of the Senate Judiciary committee who voted for the bill and those in the House who did so.

It finally gets to what it calls the patent destroying provisions of the bill: tipping off potential infringers by the 18-month publication of pre-issuance submissions; replacing the first inventor-to-file in place of the actual inventor; restricting the apportionment of damages to the incremental value of the invention, not its total value; giving priority to venue for suits where the infringer resides; and allowing post grant challenges of patents for their entire 17-year lifetime.

Here we go again with the same questionable claim that patents promote innovation. More clearly, they provide some with large incomes. Who else could afford a double-page spread like this. It also identifies the issues on which the losers from the pending bill choose to fight it.

Via thenewspaper.com, here is another example of why patents on software and business practices should never have been allowed.

IBM has been granted a patent on a system which would monitor vehical traffic on the "premium" lanes of a toll road (presumeably using EZPass-type technology) and automatically adjust prices for those lanes to ensure they don't become congested.

Quite an innovation.

I'm going to sit down and write a script which uses information on housing prices and zip codes to advise merchants on how much to charge customers in those zip code areas. Then I can get a patent on price discrimination, too.

Chinese internet firms Baidu.com Inc. and Sogou (part of Sohu.com) have been sued in a Chinese court for allowing illegal downloads of music files. Here is the story in today's Wall Street Journal. The plaintiffs are the usual suspects--Chinese based units of the labels. Sony BMG Music, Warner Music Group, and Viviendi are suing both companies; EMI's Gold Label is suing Sogou.

The suits are for relatively small but still unprecedented (by Asian standards) sums ($9 mill for Baidu and $7.5 mill for Sogou), but could open the floodgates for real money, even by Sen. Dirksen's standards.

Baidu has revenue-sharing deals deals in place with many Chinese labels, including EMI. These have been nixed by the other majors.

Meanwhile, MySpace Music has cut a deal with Warner, Sony BMG, and Universal that offers them equity and ad revenue.

Here is the article, from Business Week, April 14.

Marilyn Monroe is dead but her image lives on as intellectual property and a source of wealth? link here Perhaps no longer. Photographers and other owners of her images have paid license fees to her estate under California law. Now, however, she has been declared a citizen of New York by the Los Angeles Federal District Court because the estate had argued to the California tax man that she was a New York resident. In California, the "rights of publicity" continue after death, but not in New York. The estate will appeal but grounds have yet to be stated.

Good decision in another trivial case. Who will end this plague?

Writing in the Washington Post, Melody Petersen reviews OUR DAILY MEDS by Shannon Brown link here. Little in the review is new to readers of this blog, but it is still eyeopening to read the history of Big Pharma. The review's begins, "Once upon a time there was an industry called pharma that was interested in doing well and doing good. Run by doctors and chemists, drug companies employed battalions of researchers whose scientific efforts resulted by mid-century in a flood of life-saving drugs, including antibiotics, vaccines, tranquilizers, antihistamines and steroids. As George Merck, president of the company founded by his father, put it in 1950, "We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow. . . ."

The review goes on to trace the development of Big Pharma's business model:

Develop or acquire a patented drug;

Forget further R&D as long as sales increase;

Identify a disease, real or imagined, which it treats but preferably doesn't cure for fear of cutting off a lifetime of sales;

Brand it for that condition;

Advertise the hell out of it, as ads are more important to sales than efficacy or developing new drugs;

Develop close competitor drugs to those which are very successful, like the more-than-10 anti-cholestoral drugs;

Ignore drugs for diseases which the rich world doesn't get.

There is more to the story, but that is enough for starters.

Here we have a hugely important and expensive industry that starts out with IP and then twists it to maximize profit. Business school students would regard that as highly innovative, but for the most part, what innovation there is doesn't benefit the consumer. The best I can say for it is that the ads pay for evening television news check them out.

In a recent Mises blog post, Renaming Intellectual Property, I noted that in If Intellectual Property Is Neither Intellectual, Nor Property, What Is It?, Techdirt writer Mike Masnick (who continually has excellent comments on IP policy) discusses various proposd replacements for the misleading term "intellectual property." Contenders include "intellectual monopoly," "intellectual privilege," "imaginary property," and "None of the Above." There are problems with each of these. Masnick concludes: "In general, because of common usage, I don't think it's bad to use the phrase "intellectual property" just so that people know what you're talking about -- but we should be careful to not use it in a way that reinforces the concept that it's property just like other kinds of property."

I tend to agree. What IP law does it give legal (positive) rights to people to try to protect or stimulate innovation or creation. It gives them rights in innovations, creations, recipes, or patterns. If one keeps in mind the distinction between natural and positive rights, then it's easy to see that laws do create legal rights, and of course all rights are, in the end, types of property rights. So IP laws do create (positive, or legal) (property) rights. And they do have to do with products of the mind, or intellect. So "intellectual property" rights seems fine to me, if one realizes that there is a difference between positive right (positive law) and natural rights (natural law).

Still, some ideas came to me (and I own them, I suppose). It would be nice to take the word "property" out, and just refer to the rights conveyed. Copyright gives authors of original works certain (legal) rights to their "works" or creations. Books, songs, paintings are regarded as "original works of authorship". There is an element of "creativity" to these things. Patents give certain (legal) rights to inventors of practical inventions--methods or processes for doing things (recipes) or arrangements of matter (designs). What do inventions and "works of authorship" have in common? One is practical, aimed at some gizmo or method that produces a practical result (a machine or process). Another is aimed at "creative" things--paintings, novels, songs. J. Neil Schulman, in his neo-Randian/Galambosian [I don't know if he would accept this label] IP theory groups them all under the term "logorights," where the "logo" refers to a "pattern". I think this is a pretty good description: a recipe is a type of pattern; as is the design for a practical machine or device. Likewise, original works like paintings, music, etc., are obviously representable digitally, as patterns. Copyright and patent law clearly grant rights ... to whom? To creators--inventors and authors--of "logos"--patterns, such as machine designs, process steps, or the patterns that represent the song, painting, etc.

So, as much as I disagree with Schulman's justification for "logorights," the term is a pretty good one--except that it is so arcane. A variation on it using more standard terms might be better: pattern rights, or perhaps innovation rights. Or, to make the label a bit less "neutral," replace "rights" with "monopolies" or "privileges," since that is what is being granted by the state. So we have "pattern monopolies" or "pattern privileges," "innovation rights" or "innovation privileges."

As I noted in my Austrian Scholars Conference 2008 talk, I think I like the term "pattern privileges" best.