Fred Hassan, boss (can't resist calling the CEO of a drug firm a boss) of troubled drug manufacturer Schering-Plough, is profiled in the Feb. 11 issue of Forbes, "Fix It, Fred".

According to the article, "Schering's case reveals the ugly reality of the pharma business. Lacking genuinely new medicines or definitive proof that their costly, patented drugs work better than cheap ones, producers are forced to turn minor marketing advantages into billion-dollar oppotunities. Hassan's great at this."

Schering had a problem with trial data from a study of arteries in 2006; last year an outside investigator called it "a mess."

Tell it to the cholesterol skeptics.

When Hassan was hired, the problems were so bad he brought in a compliance officer, who hired 100 (count 'em) compliance managers. No wonder they want their patent monopolies.

Gary Taubes, author of the acclaimed book Good Calories, Bad Calories, has a thought-provoking revisionist op-ed in the New York Times, "What's Cholesterol Got to Do with It?", in which he argues that the medical-scientific establishment has gone down a dead end path in developing ill-conceived and ineffective therapeutic agents for heart disease, at least to the extent that it is thought to be caused by "bad" cholesterol.

He points to studies questioning the scientific verity that cholesterol is even a disease-causing factor in the first place. It seems that the medical establishment has focused wrongly on the cholesterol cargo, which is easier for doctors to measure, and overlooked the lipoprotein vehicle, which carries the cholesterol, and which might be the real bad guy.

Meanwhile the drug companies have gotten rich off their patent-protected statin drugs, which might be useless, at least for many people.

My question, not considered by Gary Taubes (there's no reason why he should here), is: to what extent has the patent regime deflected scientific research away from more promising scientific paradigms and research programs on the one hand, and from more effective medicines and alternative treatments on the other? Just in case you can't get enough of this stuff, here's a link to The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics.

Bon apetit.

If I didn't actually read the patent applications I would believe that this stuff is invented by opponents of the system. Techdirt has a posting describing the lastest invention: the phone that can play mp3s and access the internet. The patent is here. The lawsuit against every maker of smart phones was filed moments after the application was approved. This is not an invention: it is a cocktail party wishlist: wouldn't be great if...

Here are some other inventions that no doubt have been mentioned millions of times by thousands of people all of whom had the common decency not to write it down and try to get a patent on it. I invite our readers to submit more; who knows it may be prior art one day.

*Wouldn't it be great if I put a pillow on that chair, it would be so much more comfortable.

*Wouldn't it be great if you could shop online while you were flying on an airplane and have the stuff you ordered waiting for you at the gate when the flight arrived.

*Wouldn't it be great is spaceships had built-in music players.

*Wouldn't it be great if flashlights had disco strobes that could be used for dancing.

Wouldn't it be great if...add your own.

Let's make a contest: submit your ideas, we'll have a vote of the bloggers to pick the top 5 and post them. If we make a fortune patenting any of the ideas and suing everyone already making the product, we'll share our winnings.

via Slashdot we hear a story about an author who raised sales of his book from 1000 a year to 1 million a year by aggressively making sure copies got pirated. I admit I have my doubts about these numbers; and I'm also quite sure that piracy of Harry Potter novels lowered rather than increased sales of the books. But what most authors (and musicians) rightly fear is not piracy but obscurity...for these marginal creators, IP has little to offer, and indeed, by making it easy for large intermediaries to act as gate keepers, IP is something for them to fear.

Picking up on Bill Stepp's previous post, the alternative way of publishing, posting a book on line and allowing downloading without charge is slowly expanding. Bell's book "Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good," is available that way here . This follows David's model.

A more trivial but perhaps economically more important variation is represented by a comic book now free to download here. This mode of distribution seems to have been a success; "The comic book publisher Boom Studios announced about 2 weeks back that they were going to release the full first issue of a new comic called North Wind online free the exact same day as it was released in shops. The hard copy sold out almost immediately and a second printing had to be ordered link here."

A variation on this for those who want to read a hard copy is to print it on a laser printer. I am also intrigued by the idea of having it printed by lulu press, which will print single copies at a competitive price link here. Public Domain Books Reprints Service has announced it will make available some 1.7 million books in the public domain, using lulu link here. Admittedly an experiment to test the demand for the service, it has the possibility of being expanded to new books.

Who knows what kind of copyright provisions would be necessary for this? Public Domain Books publishes with this disclaimer: "NOTE: There is no warranty of any kind with this service. Use it at your own risk. Please also note that we are not affiliated with any of the archives that the digital images are being obtained from. We are simply using these sites in accordance with their terms."

Copyright lawyer and blogger William Patry tackles "The Natural Rights Issue" as it relates to copyright in a January 18 post:

Claims that copyright involves human rights or is a property right are based on the theory that copyright is also a natural right -- a right that exists independent of legislative enactment, even if there are legislative enactments.

This is the theory alright, but it was blown out of the water in a notable essay by Tom G. Palmer, "Are Patents and Copyrights Morally Justified? the Philosophy of Property Rights and Ideal Objects". Howard B. Abrams had already proved that copyright was not part of the commom law in his 1983 Wayne Law Review essay, "The Historic Foundation of American Copyright Law: Exploding the Myth of Common Law Copyright."

In the United States, copyright is not a natural right, since the Supreme Court has said so twice, first in 1834 in Wheaton v. Peters, and then in 1932 in Fox Film Corp. v. Doyal.

Mark Brady e-mails me that what the SCOTUS rules doesn't make it right or wrong, even if they are correct on a particular issue. He asks if Patry is "implying that slaves didn't have natural rights until the Thirteenth Amendment?" and notes the "huge difference between natural rights that transcend constitutional and statute law and those particular natural rights that the Supreme Court in its infinite wisdom chooses to recognize at any given point in time."

The problem here is that William Patry seems to imply that natural rights are what the SCOTUS says. But government-granted monopolies (such as copyright) are hardly consistent with the natural right to use one's own property in the first place, and were in violation of such rights long before the SCOTUS--which itself is a government monopoly--came into existence.

He continues:

Yet, rhetoric based on a natural rights basis for copyright are behind all the claims that those who use copyrighted works without permission are thieves or pirates. If copyright is instead a limited privilege that parcels out limited control to copyright owners, one might view issues differently.

Copyright violates the natural rights of non-rights holders to use their property in non-invasive ways, such as making and/or selling copies of their own tangible property. The thieves and pirates are the copyright owners themselves, and their legislative and judicial branch enablers and executive branch enforcers. The "limited privilege" they are granted by the State is a monopoly that runs roughshod over the rights of other people. So yes, we do view issues differently, and in a very different way from how Mr. Patry does.

He closes with a sendup of Tom Bell's book:

Professor Tom Bell has a draft of a book that takes on these issues and many others, called "Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good," available here. There is a lot of good thinking and research, and I encourage others to read it.

Well, there's something we can agree on!

I posted about the Swedish Pirate Party last weekend, but failed to follow all the links. It turns out there is a Pirate Party here in the US and that it has a website here. More interesting, Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the Swedish party has been in the US giving speeches. They are pretty strong statements of how broken the patent and copyright system is. You can see and hear Falkvinge in an hour-long statement of his and his party's views here. There is also a long Wikipedia entry on the party here.

The Troll Tracker has a post up today in which he says he is unsure about the use of the term patent troll because it doesn't distinguish owners of legitimate patents who exercise their rights from those who try to exercise questionable rights and patents. But then he goes on to say, "Anyway, over the last few months I have begun to transition out the term. It doesn't add anything to the dialogue; in fact, it distracts from the message I'm trying to get across. That message being that patents are not being asserted like they were 20 years ago, that today's American small and large businesses have to navigate a minefield like never before. Whether the plaintiffs are well-deserving individual inventors, their shell corporations, or large licensing entities solely seeking to monetize patents, it adds up for the mom-and-pop businesses and the big corporations alike. All I want to do is highlight who is behind these cases, who is backing them financially, and where these cases are being litigated. And if we can have some fun along the way, and not take ourselves so seriously, all the better, right?" link here

He seems also to be suggesting that he wants to cease posting.

...or The Case of the Plagiarized Patent.

School children are dutifully taught that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and historians and biographers have defended his claim. But now science and technology journalist Seth Shulman has written an icon busting book The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret, which reveals the real history behind one of the greatest inventions. Don't miss the first of the comments appended to the first review at the Amazon page.

John Steele Gordon has a fine review in the Wall Street Journal today "False Claim, Future Fortune". He rightly rates Shulman's book "solid history," and notes that it reads like an Agatha Chritie whodunit. The story has enough human interest and twists and turns that it could be turned into a movie. It even has a romantic angle Hollywood would like.

You can order from Amazon or other online vendors. Strand Bookstore had six copies at half price today, and they ship anywhere. (New York, NY 828 Broadway at 12th Street, 212-473-1452, www.strandbooks.com.)

The Economist has a provocative piece on the recorded music industry and its death spiral in the sale of CDs and downloaded music. The subhead reads, "Last year was terrible for the recorded-music majors link here. The next few years are likely to be even worse." It cites three reasons: facing declining sales, big retailers are cutting display space; major distributors are cutting promotion to reduce costs; and they are refusing to invest in the growing parts of the industry, like touring. Downloads, for sale or free with advertising, do not get the same revenue return.

The article doesn't make this point explicitly, but the means for distributing music has changed, costs have been cut, and the majors are really out of a job. Copyright violations are a small part of the story, but they underscore the direction of industry trends. The spreading antipathy for enforcing copyright involving free exchanges will continue to cost the industry public support.