Consumerist takes us to Great Moments In Commercial History: The Back Up, a patented gun rack for one's bed link here. Don't be surprised in bed by some intruder bent on no good. But patenting it? You can see the patent and all the backup as well link here.

Interesting reading here.

[Hat-tip: Supreme Court blog.]

Great News! The U.S. Patent Office has apparently rejected Amazon.com's patent on one-click shopping on obviousness grounds, after the original patent was challenged by New Zealand actor Peter Calveley. The post on CNet's news site is here.

James E. Bessen and new Nobel winner Eric Maskin maintain that the software, semiconductor, and computer industries have seen considerable innovation with little patent protection. When patents were granted to these industries starting in the 1980s, they demonstated no R&D increases or productivity gains. Here is the paper .

Thanks to Alex Tabarrok at www.marginalrevolution.com.

The 8th Circuit Court Of Appeals has not only struck an important blow for free speech, but they may have also prevented the idea of "fantasy sports" from becoming a corporate monopoly.

As the court states: "[T]he information used in CBC's fantasy baseball games is all readily available in the public domain, and it would be strange law that a person would not have a first amendment right to use information that is available to everyone."

Indeed. But then again the radical interpretations of 'publicity' rights have been quite strange all along.

PDF link of the decision here.

[h/t: How Appealing]

Dean Baker has an interesting discussion of the general subject of exchanging of copyrighted material, keyed to the Jammie Thomas jury trial which awarded $222,000 to the recording companies for downloading 24 songs, with a long set of comments from readers link here. The one new thing to me was this: "The recording industry was apparently able to track down this crime by hiring a high tech sleuth who has software that can monitor the files that people place on their computers." Since when does the RIAA have the right to monitor our internet activity? Big Brother has been watching all of us with more or less legal authority and with the justification of the War on Terror, but since when does anyone else have the right to do so?

I earlier suggested that if defendant Jammie Thomas was hit for over $3-million in fines for downloading music, she would have a good shot at challenging the verdict in constitutional grounds.

Her attorneys have decided to still challenge the $222,000 verdict on the same grounds. [PDF alert. h/t: Wired.com].

Good luck to her!

Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu has a fascinating article on areas of American law that are never inforced.

He doesn't tackle the issue of copyright piracy, but his essay gives obvious food for thought on the issue and where the future might be headed.

This series explores the black spots in American law: areas in which our laws are routinely and regularly broken and where the law enforcement response is … nothing. These are the areas where, for one reason or another, we've decided to tolerate lawbreaking and let a law duly enacted and still on the books lay fallow or near dead.

Why are there dead zones in U.S. law? The answer goes beyond the simple expense of enforcement but betrays a deeper, underlying logic. Tolerated lawbreaking is almost always a response to a political failure the inability of our political institutions to adapt to social change or reach a rational compromise that reflects the interests of the nation and all concerned parties. That's why the American statutes are full of laws that no one wants to see fully enforced or even enforced at all.

Full article link here.

Radiohead has released their new album directly on their webpage, skipping all distributors and other intermediaries. The files are available for download at a price of "It's Up To You", which includes $0. The whole thing is, not surprisingly, becoming a major success, with the web site crashing repeatedly because of too high demands and informal reports that they have sold around $10million in 3 days. No contract, no record company's right, no claim, nothing!

http://www.inrainbows.com/

Another brick off the wall.

The US Patent Office has issued rejection guidelines. You can read them in the Federal Register link here or read K.C. Jones summary link here. Here is my attempt to boil it down. "Factual inquiries" remain the basis for deciding whether a proposed patent is obvious. "That is, patent examiners will continue to consider the scope and content of the prior art, the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art, the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art, and objective evidence relevant to the issue of obviousness," according to John Doll, commissioner for patents. Patent examiners must explain their rejection of an application as being obvious. One basis is if the examiner identifies a prior art teaching, suggestion, or motivation, but such a basis is not essential to determining whether an invention is obvious. The guidelines include examples.