Via slashdot, a letter in the Los Angeles Times by Dallas Weaver raises an interesting point. While propogandists for the copyight and patent mills are eager to have their exclusive grants treated as "property" they don't seem terribly interested in paying property tax. Since they've successfully managed to press the term "intellectual property" into the dictionary, why not charge them a property tax? This is a serious suggestion with serious benefits for two reasons.

First, it would go a long way to solving the problem of automatic copyright and orphan works - it would force copyright holders to emerge from the shadows or give up their copyrights. Moreover, it would get around some ridiculous language in the Berne convention to the effect that "The enjoyment and the exercise of these rights shall not be subject to any formality." It's not that you wouldn't get your rights if you didn't pay your property tax, any more than you would if you didn't pay property tax on your car. You would of course go to jail.

Second, owners of houses and automobiles and the like pay taxes on their property in exchange for real government services they receive ranging from roads to police. So also with owners of "intellectual property" who receive a variety of government enforcement services - which at the current time they do not help to pay for.

The Patent Troll Tracker is no long anonymous link here. The question now is whether he will continue. "Now that I have been unmasked, I'm not sure where the blog is going from here. I'd like to keep it going." That is good news, because in the past, he suggested he might bow out, once found out.

He also reports a bit about himself, including his career as a lawyer. And he describes his motivation for starting the blog: "When I started the blog, I did so mainly out of frustration. I was shocked to learn that a huge portion of the tech industry's patent disputes were with companies that were shells, with little cash and assets other than patents and a desire to litigate, and did not make and had never made any products. Yet when I would search the Internet for information about these putative licensors, I could find nothing. I was frustrated by the lack of information, and also by the vast array of anti-patent-reform bloggers out there, without a voice supporting what I did believe and still believe is meaningful reform."

May he continue until we get meaningful reform.

The Federal Court of Appeal in charge of interpreting Patent Law has been an absolute disgrace. I would have thought that it should be obvious that only tangible technology could be eligible for a patent under the law. But the court has at times implied that even modes of thought and communication can somehow be patented if it leads to concrete results in the physical world. Maybe they are slowly staring to get the message of just how wrong they have been all along.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit redefined the margins of patent eligibility in State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group Inc. in 1998. The effect was to boost patent protection for business methods, such as financial models, contract provisions, insurance policy features, computer-related inventions and Internet startups.

There were unintended effects, too. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was deluged with new patent applications and had few examiners with the expertise to handle them. Four Supreme Court justices have bemoaned the precedent, calling it vague and contrary. And several financial-services companies, frequent targets of the business-method-patent holder, have run up millions and in some cases billions of dollars in royalties and damages.

After a decade of disagreement over the precedent's bearing on American innovation, the Federal Circuit decided Feb. 15 to revisit State Street through the lens of another case, In re Bilski, which lifts State Street's holding on business methods and attempts to carry it further.

In a rare move, the court scheduled an en banc hearing without prompting by the parties in the case. The hearing is set for May 8.

Read the whole thing here.

The latest issue of Technological Innovation and Intellectual Property is hot off the blogs - and very depressing reading it is too. Bad patents drive out the good, costing the economy billions; patents in software make it hard for new firms to enter the market and to get financing. One good bit of news: James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer's new book Patent Failure: How Judges, Lawyers and Bureaucrats Put Innovators at Risk appears in the bookstores this month.

At the assertion that to be patentable something must be novel we can only laugh or cry. There is an article on apple insider: James and Marguerite Driessen of Lindon, Utah are suing Apple Computer claiming they have patented the idea of a gift card where the gift is downloadable over the internet. The actual patent 7003500 - which took six years to issue for some reason - is vastly worse than that. They have patented the "idea" of "selling of merchandise or media content on the Internet [using] at least one in-person contact with the buyer." I want to emphasize: this patent was approved by the U.S. Patent Office.

Thanks to Christian Zimmermann for keeping an eye on Economic Logic. They are blogging up a storm over patent abuse.

Did Alexander Graham Bell really invent the telephone? I'm not sure, though he seems to have the patent. And without that, there would be no Big Telephone. The latest chapter in this story is a piece by Peter Carlson in the Washington Post which recounts some of the history link here. It doesn't, however, make the obvious point that our patent system has been broken for a long time, since 1876 in Bell's case. Patent fights aren't a recent development.

One of the biggest problems with the patent system - and to a lesser extent with copyright - is the use to try to tax other people's innovations by claiming a monopoly over something you didn't invent. This is the heart of what it means to be a patent troll (see the article below about banks), and why it blocks rather than promotes innovation. There is a nice posting about SCO on Economic Logic: the point is that SCO now exists as a company the sole purpose of which is to slow down progress by claiming IP rights over other people's inventions and creations.

Technological change (i.e. innovation) continues and will transform IP law/practice. Here is a new one, a book scanner ("ripper") for the individual, the next step up from Amazon's Kindle, a hand-held reader of already digitized books link here.

The first review of the Atiz BookSnap aptly describes it as clunky -- "an ominous three-foot-high construction draped with a thick black darkroom-style shade -- looks like a Goth puppet theater and weighs 44 pounds. Under the shade is an angled cradle for a book and a glass platen to hold the pages down during scanning. You turn the pages yourself. It costs $1,600, not including the two Canon digital cameras (around $500 each) necessary to capture the page images and send them to your computer, where software transforms the pictures into files that can be read on a screen or an e-book reader. It takes considerable fiddling to get images set up properly."

But someone is bound to improve it. And so what Google has been doing, digitizing the world's libraries, will become mainstream, creating competitive pressures on book publishers that will both greatly lower the price of books and put the industry on the defensive.

Harvard's faculty has voted overwhelmingly to put it research on line link here. "Robert Darnton, the director of the University Library, wrote in an e-mail message, 'I hope this marks a turning point in the way communications operate in the world of scholarship.'" The library's site is expected to be up and running on April 1. It joins a free online legal research site (www.plol.org).

Free public access shows real progress.