Patent troll NTP is back at it again with a new suit against AT&T, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless over the same patents that brought a $612.5 million settlement from BlackBerry maker Research In Motion link here and here. The USPTO has already ruled preliminarily that the patents are invalid but NTP has appealed, so the case goes on and NTP can even expand its suits if it can afford more lawyers. If, as in the case of RIM, this threatens a company's continued existence, it will pay up, even if it is quite sure that it will ultimately win its case. It is another example of justice delayed being justice denied and an indictment of a legal system which grants questionable patents and then allows their use to extort.

Astounding...but not at all surprising.

Patent litigation probably couldn't get more high stakes than a Delaware lawsuit currently unfolding against Intel Corp. Transmeta Corp. has accused the Silicon Valley chip giant of infringing on 10 patents in its hugely successful Pentium products.

Yet rather than battle it out in court, Intel is trying to put the brakes on the proceedings. The company is making use of a relatively new government process, known as inter partes re-examination, that is becoming an increasingly popular way for accused infringers to get patents invalidated. It's far less costly than litigation, and even if the patent is upheld, a stall in court proceedings increases the likelihood of a settlement, patent attorneys say.

Since the inter partes procedure started in 1999, the yearly number of these requests has increased dramatically, and U.S. Patent and Trademark Office statistics show the process is likely to result in the invalidation of patents at issue. In 2006 there were 70 requests, and six months into this year, there have already been 90.

And of the inter partes re-exams that have been completed, the patent claims were invalidated 88 percent of the time, according to the PTO.

Read more about it here.

Reputation, or more precisely the alleged ownership of one's reputation, is a first cousin of the monopoly formerly known as intellectual property. In a free market with a libertarian legal framework, no one owns his reputation, which is a function of other peoples' subjective opinion. That's why in a free market there would be no such thing as libel and slander.

Tell that to Indonesia's Supreme Court, which overruled a lower court's dismissal of a libel suit against Time magazine by former President Suharto. In a May 1999 article, Time allegedly libeled Suharto. Time is now on the hook for $106 billion in "damages," as this article says.

Business models change over time, as recent years' experience has proven. A new one may hopefully be coming to medical publishing. Reed Elsevier, a publisher of medical and scientific journals, is now allowing doctors access to some of its journal articles on the web, paid for by advertising link here. This is good news for the doctors, since they have been forced to pay high subscription prices for the journals, even when the research was based on government grants.

Competition hopefully will force other journal publishers to go the same route, driving down the cost of access. Guess who will benefit (ultimately the consumer?)

We don't often write about trademarks, but here is a case of some modest interest. An online video joint-venture fiddled around for some time and finally came up with the name, Hulu link here and here. It is a strange choice, as it conveys nothing to me. Then an online custom book publishing company called Lulu sued for trademark infringement because the name was too similar. Does that strike you as confusing? Still, strange things happen with IP. One conjecture is the companies will pursue the case for all the media attention it draws. In any case, another lawyers' delight.

"Google Files Patent Application for Mobile Payments" strikes me as bizarre link here. The first "mobile payment" was a piece of paper saying to your bank "Pay to the order of" and allowed you to write in the name of the recipient and give it to a messenger or send it through the mail (and hopefully still does, unless Google's patent stops that too, when and if it gets it). Does Western Union or whoever have a patent on a wire transfer?

Can patent applications get any sillier? Don't answer.

I am always amazed at what one encounters by accident on the internet. Knowing the general views of my colleagues on this blog and their opposition to DRM as bad public policy, it strikes me that our readers will find this an interesting free software download, designed to remove DRM from legally acquired material. I haven't tried it because I haven't been bugged by DRM except as an idea limiting my rights, but the reference is offered for those who want to experiment. The download is here link here and the instructions are here here or here.

Here is the 1998 exchange between the thuggish--there is no other word to describe it--Anti-Defamation League and the Anarchist Anti-Defamation League.

This is the laugh line from the ADL's general counsel:

In fact, it appears to us that you may have selected a name so similar to our name in an effort to draw upon the good will and national success that people associate with the ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE.

Anyone who knows anything about anarchism (which obviously the writer of the quoted words doesn't) knows that anarchists stand opposed to the statism of the ADL, including the Progress Clause of the U.S. Constitution, and all enabling legislation, both state and federal, as well as court decisions, such as those cited in the ADL's e-mail, that allow this sort of thuggery to stand.

As for the alleged good will and national success of the ADL, that is irrelevant to the AADL's using the designation "Anti-Defamation" in its name, which it has a natural right to do.

The House passed the bill amending patent law on Friday, but the Senate has not yet acted on similar legislation introduced simultaneously with the House version, OMB has expressed opposition, and the President may well veto it link here and here. Some of the House rhetoric for and against the law bordered on the extreme, while behind the scene were beneficiaries like Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel and opponents like Caterpillar, Eli Lilley, and Proctor and Gamble. Its not clear which will prevail.

The bill would make several sensible changes: switching from first-to-invent to first-to-file patent grants like other countries; allow post-grant patent challenges for up to a year; allow third parties to introduce evidence against a patent grant; limit where a patent suit can be filed to cut down on jurisdiction-shopping; limit damages to reflect how much the patent violation contributes; and allow immediate appeals of court rulings while a case proceeds. Similar past bills have been introduced only to fail, and no one knowledgeable seems to be predicting the outcome this time either way.

A potentially important court decision discussed here. The First Amendment has been traditionally rejected as a defense against a copyright infringement. Although the door has only been opened a crack at this point, that may be about to change.

Since nearly all creative works build upon previous works on some level, I would think that the devastating effects on free speech would be obvious when you attempt to take a public domain work and try and reassert copyright protections on it. All of the subsequently created derivative works that were created during the public domain window would presumably have to be repressed and/or destroyed.