"RC2, whom you probably know as the company that makes the lead-tainted Thomas & Friends toys, has filed a lawsuit against rival Munchkin, INC for allegedly infringing on a spill-proof sippy cup patent link here." Munchkin says it has patents that are pending.

My sister is 63 and she was raised on sippy cups. Where does this end?

Slashdot is on a roll today pointing to also to this Ars Technical article

The International Trade Commission (ITC) has announced that it plans to begin an investigation into several companies that either make or use certain hard drives. In a statement issued yesterday, the ITC said that the hard drives in question are alleged to infringe on patents owned by California residents Steven and Mary Reiber. The two filed a complaint with the ITC in September, saying that the importation of the hard drives violates section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930.

But the good news is that if not for the prospect of being able to halt all imports of hard drives, we wouldn't have had this great invention in the first place.

Can't we just get rid of the patent system?

I have some vague recollection of a top Microsoft executive leaving to join an IP firm...this appears to have some details. The next move in the ballet was predictable

Patent Infringement Lawsuit Filed Against Red Hat & Novell - Just Like Ballmer Predicted

I don't suppose it requires a conspiracy theorist to see Microsoft as spinning off a subsidiary to spread legal FUD against competitors. Of course you might think the patent has some merit. Ars Technica has a rather nice summary the last time the patent was used in a lawsuit

The language of the patent is interminably vague and could apply to any one of a dozen different user interface elements that are found in all modern operating systems, but seems to be most closely related to the idea of "tabbed" dialog boxes, like the ones seen in both Windows and Mac OS X. Ironically, the company to first release a modern-looking tabbed dialog box was none other than Microsoft with early versions of Office, although Apple had a Control Panel with similar functionality as early as Mac OS System 4.2, circa 1987. It remains to be seen whether or not IP Innovations will go after Microsoft and other system vendors after they are finished with Apple.

The dead hand of Xerox reaches out from the grave...

IP in the News is constantly full of humor. Today's comes from India, where Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling and her publisher, Warner Brothers, are suing a religious group for erecting a replica of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The replica is dedicated to the goddess Durga as part of a major four-day Hindu festival. The billionairess and her company want the equivalent of $50,000. They probably can rationalize this, but it does the reputation of copyright or them no good when it reaches the level of the ridiculous.

Rachel Aviv writes about college students getting organized to fight the RIAA's attacks on downloading copyrighted songs link here. She quotes one student, "I was stunned by the extremity of the punishment for taking songs I could have bought for a few cents ... It seemed grossly out of proportion." The threat was a lawsuit with possible fines of $750 to $150,000 for each song. He settled for $3000 but has gone on to co-found a chapter of "Students for Free Culture, a national organization sprouting up on college campuses that advocates loosening the restrictions of copyright law so that information from software to music to research to art can be freely shared." The group now has chapters on 35 campuses, inspired initially by Larry Lessig's 2004 book, "Free Culture". Outrage is a great mobilizer.

Astonishing.

I'll admit that if I was on that jury, I would have voted to acquit simply as form of jury nullification over bad copyright laws (not because I would have doubted that she actually downloaded music).

With that said, I think its actually a pity that the defendant here WASN'T fined the $3.6-million instead of the $222,000 that she was given. If she HAD been hit with a $3.6-million fine for copying 24 songs, it would have set up the perfect opportunity to mount a direct constitutional challenge to the punishments contained in our draconian copyright laws.

Cruel and unusual punishment anyone? I suspect that many courts might be willing to entertain such an argument - even those who would otherwise be inclined to protect harsh copyright monopolies.

That's what Lara Santoro argues (to which I agree).

Santoro observes -

Countries such as Kenya and Uganda, not to mention South Africa, have not only the manufacturing base needed to copy and reproduce drugs for a fraction of their cost, they also have the right. So what's stopping them? "There is a history of trade pressures," Love said. "Very few countries are willing to face such pressures."

Despite death on an unimaginable scale, talk of compulsory licensing remains anathema in most of Africa, so millions of lives are left in the hands of a well-meaning yet ineffectual group of international donors, whose solution to the problem has been to purchase and distribute generic AIDS drugs made in India and Brazil. It's a noble effort, but with pitiful results. Fifteen years after the invention of antiretrovirals, only one in four Africans has access to them.

But it gets worse. For many of those who survived thanks to first-line treatments, the time has come to switch to newer, less-toxic drugs -- all of them patented, none of them even remotely available. "We're starting from zero again," said Buddhima Lokuge, U.S. manager of Doctors Without Borders' "campaign for access to essential medicines." By the time generic competition kicks in for the newer drugs, millions of people will have died unnecessarily.

Read the whole thing.

The NYU chapter of Free Culture will host a screening of "Good Copy Bad Copy," a movie about copyright and culture, next Tuesday with two other groups. Lawrence Lessig and other copyright experts will be there.

More information is available here .

The New York Times today reports on a new student group, Students for Free Culture, which was founded at Swarthmore in 2004. A student at Brown organized a chapter there after he paid a $3,000 fine to the RIAA for using his property as he saw fit in downloading some copyrighted music. Here is the story .

The RIAA might be the best recruitment vehicle to the anti-intellectual monopoly cause going.

The New York Times today runs a full page ad entitled "STOP CONGRESS FROM TRASHING THE CONSTITUTON" (Page A13--it does not appear on the Times website) by opposing the proposed Patent Reform Act. The ad is paid for by "Fonar", but it shows nothing more about the company, not even that it is a company. A phone number is provided--1-888-633-3674--but when I tried it, I got the "order" department and was then put on hold for ten minutes before being cut off.

Googling Fonar brings up 21,400 sites. One shows the company was founded and is chaired by Dr. Robert V. Damadian. The sites also show that it has been involved in a slew of patent disputes, most of which it seems to have won link here

Damadian's claim to fame seems to be as a co-inventor of MRI, which is widely conceded, although he failed to be recognized when the Nobel for the invention was awarded to two rival M.R.I. innovators, Paul C. Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield link here

On the substance of the ad which begins by falsely asserting that Congress is about to amend the constitution, it argues that individual freedom founded on property ownership is to be abrogated and that the cost (sourced by nine categories) will be a "staggering" $1.66 trillion. It specifically opposes granting patents to "first to file" rather than "first to invent", "publication of all patent applications to the world at 18 months", and apportionment of damages, as we will lose our intellectual property to foreigners. The argument's details in each case eluded me.

Curiously, the ad peaks with a proposal to set up a separate Software Patent Division with separate patent criteria on the grounds that "unlike most inventions, software is continually evolving." The whole point of patents is to get the inventor to disclose so that follow-on invention can occur--not to reward him.

The ad urges the reader to write his senator and send him a copy of the ad. Sigh.