Patent Troll still anonymous provides a rundown on patent suits for the year against large companies like Microsoft. He then summarizes the situation thusly, "Before I give the list, my conclusions: patent litigation is out of control. Out of the top third of the companies in the Fortune 100 sued for patent infringement over the last two years (plus adding in Apple and Google), these 35 companies were sued 500 times in that two-year period! That's an average of over 14 times per company."

For more details, go to the Tracker's website for Dec 21 2007 link here.

David Pogue ends his latest blog posting, saying "I do know, though, that the TV, movie and record companies' problems have only just begun link here. Right now, the customers who can't even *see* why file sharing might be wrong are still young. But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*. What will happen then?" His piece is an extended survey of various audiences, using a range of hypothetical situations involving copyright violations, ending with the question, how many in the audience see that practice as wrong. Very few of them do.

I speculate that economics teaching has succeeded in persuading most people that monopoly is wrong and that charging more than the marginal cost for an item is a violation of the free market.

Know hope!!!

Of all the arguments for IP, the argument that somehow existing inventions can be diffused more quickly if only someone has a monopoly over them is the one that has the least theoretical or empirical support. But the mere absence of facts is no bar to making the argument. Via Stefano Trento, here is an entire manual devoted to that proposition. To quote "It is well established that intellectual property advances product development because intellectual property provides incentives for R&D, commercialization, and product distribution." This is, of course, not well established, and while it is true that IP provides some incentives and disincentives for R&D, it is almost certainly not true that it provides incentives for commercialization and product distribution.

For some years now, we have seen the term of copyright protection extended in country after country. The latest to join this move has been South Korea, where the "copyright period for royalty payments will be extended to 70 years from the current 50 years after the original copyright holder dies, as a step to meet the requirements of the 'provisional' free trade agreement (FTA) between South Korea and the United States link here."

It is probably the case that few in South Korea opposed the copyright change, though publishers have complained about increased cost and complexity. To buy them off, the government has promised 160 billion won ($173 million) in aid. There remains considerable opposition to the overall FTA as a surrender of Korean sovereignty and a loss of competitiveness against the economic giant of the West. The strongest opposition is generated by farm groups who do not want to give up protection for their high priced farm sector.

Passage of the FTA remains problematic in both the US Congress and the Korean National Assembly. It will be interesting to see how the just elected conservative Grand National Party presidential candidate, Lee Myung Bak, handles the matter; he is generally thought to be pro-business and was elected on a pledge to get the economy growing faster. If the FTA is not approved, it is unclear whether the copyright extension will remain.

I didn't mention in my earlier post on the Patent Troll Tracker, but its author(s) remain(s) anonymous link here. A well-known patent attorney on the other side of the troll issue has offered a $5000 reward for the Tracker's identity and recently raised it to $10,000. The Tracker is clearly having some success in getting under the Troll's skin. But legally, as Techdirt's Mike Masnick points out, the Tracker has a legal right to remain anonymous. It undoubtedly makes his research easier.

The ever valuable Research on Innovation has its latest issue. There is a discussion of software patents: has the sky fallen? I'm not sure that it is a good argument in favor of patents that they don't cause the sky to fall, by the way. And there is a discussion of Petra Moser's latest research into 19th Century patents: what is striking is even where patents were available, they weren't so much used in that "golden age of patents."

You may be aware of various lawsuits against such major pirates as the Boy Scouts of America over violating copyright by singing songs around the campfire; via Christian Zimmermann the situation is apparently no better in Britain.

I recently mentioned the patent troll site link here. To give you a sample of its work, here is a paragraph posted today on patent suits filed and the number brought by trolls:

"Here are the cumulative statistics for the first 11 months of 2007, comparing the various districts. Note that I got an email from someone who had numbers run independently, and I am told I have undercounted the number of cases by X and the number of defendants in EDTX by Y. As I said above, this is really a judgment call. I may not have counted all of the bifurcated Judge Clark cases while someone else may have. Either way, even if my numbers are low, they are astoundingly high compared to history:

"ED Texas: 343 patent cases, 1,320 defendants sued (140 troll cases)

CD California: 251 patent cases, 647 defendants sued (17 troll cases)

D New Jersey: 176 patent cases, 329 defendants sued (13 troll cases)

D Delaware: 128 patent cases, 310 defendants sued (16 troll cases)

ND California: 127 patent cases, 240 defendants sued (19 troll cases)

ND Illinois: 125 patent cases, 231 defendants sued (23 troll cases)

SD New York: 95 patent cases, 244 defendants sued (13 troll cases)"

Noam Cohen writes in the NYTimes today about the love-hate relationship between publications and the search engines link here. Some of the publications want to be paid for the use of their texts. At the same time, they exploit the search engines, trying the jigger the search results so that they come up high on the list of sites identified and the sites get more traffic and respect and ultimately, more money. Having given up on fee-based web content, they clearly would like a cut of the search engine advertising revenue.

Cohen moves on to the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) which is supposed to replace the currently used robots.txt protocol (RTP). To an outsider, that seems quite flexible and restrictive as matters stand since it is already voluntarily accepted by the search engines. The search engines using RTP agree to be excluded from all or part of a web site. Reading between the lines, the ACAP advocates will want to exclude access for any search engine not paying up.

It is not clear how much clout the ACAP has. Its members, principally European, notably include AFP and AP and several book publishers but none of the large American or European papers as best as can be told from the ACAP website link here. They would like you to believe that their only interest is to benefit the consumer and they are coy about what their protocol would actually do, other than to apply "metadata to data."

Where "fair use" plays in all this is not clear, but be suspicious. Expect an attack in Congress to try to impose the ACAP on search engines, an ACAP with real teeth.

We have all been painfully aware of patent trolls, those monopolists who exploit their possession of patents, often of questionable validity, to extract money from users who find it more attractive to pay off the "owner" than to challenge him in court. They now have their own website providing a running record of the damage they impose. Trolltracker link.

Great news. Have a look.