As explained by Lee Gomes in "Web Radio Battles Efforts to Expand Royalties for Music" in the Wall Street Journal.

There are two separate copyrights for every piece of recorded music. Who knew? One for the musical composition (covering composers and songwriters), and one for the recording of a song (for record labels and musicians).

Usually the labels and musicians negotiate royalties, but the songwriters and composers have to make do with fixed payments, via a system mandated by Congress.

In the U.S. the labels and performers don't receive royalties for radio play, but songwriters do. This exemption has saved radio stations billions. "Every congressional district has a radio station, but only three of them have record labels," according to Chris Castle, a music lawyer.

Inside Higher Ed reports that "legislation requiring NIH-supported research to be online and free is on fast track, encouraging those who want that requirement for all federally supported research". The legislation is receiving bipartisan support and is part of an appropriation bill that Congress wants to pass.

I believe the bill has potentially disruptive effect on the academic publishing model. Needless to say, publishers have mounted furious opposition. Read the article for some of the bogus arguments they are trying to make, such as the risk of lenghtening the time researchers would spend processing their papers (comparing it to the requirement police officers have to file their reports). As if the time we need to fine-tune our papers to comply to the minutia of each journal's different editorial requirement was well spent.

Via Mark Thoma, Paul Krugman's New York Times op ed for today observes that despite a considerable lead over Japan and Europe in broadband connectivity in the late '90's and early '00's, the U.S. now lags both Europe and Japan considerably in both percentage of population with broadband internet connections, and in bandwidth for those with broadband connections.

This is a classical example of the disincentive of monopolies to innovate. Various decisions by the Bush administration and its Congressional allies over the past 6 years -- particularly the decisions not to impose common carrier status on local telephone and cable TV companies with respect to broadband services -- left control over virtually all local U.S. broadband markets in the hands at most two service providers: the local telephonce company or the local cable company. The result has been predictable. Americans now pay more for internet connectivity and receive lower quality service than do Japanese or European consumers.

Krugman concludes his column by saying:

It's too early to say how much harm the broadband lag will do to the U.S. economy as a whole. But it's interesting to learn that health care isn't the only area in which the French, who can take a pragmatic approach because they aren't prisoners of free-market ideology, simply do things better.

I would add that economists need to work a little harder to make the public understand that economics itself has nothing to say about the benefits of free markets. The benefits economists associate with market allocations are those brought about by competitive markets, and this is precisely what is lacking in American broadband today.

Prince doesn't rely on sales of CDs. Instead he makes live performances, sells his music in ring tones and ads, sells perfume, and who knows what else. He recently gave away free copies of his latest CD, "Planet Earth," all in the name of building his brand name and fan base.

Here is the New York Times article "The Once and Future Prince" .

Hedge funds are financing IP lawsuits . Rembrandt IP Management is buying patents and aiming to bring lawsuits.

"We are focused on jury verdicts," says the head of Rembrandt.

Hopefully the juries will do the right thing and bring verdicts in favor of the defendants in all cases. (We can dream, no?) The rent seeking Rembrandt firm is going after the cable industry now and has sued Comcast and other outfits.

A Comcast lawyer says "this seems to be a perversion of what the system was designed to accomplish."

She overlooks that the system was flawed to begin with, and that the IP wars were inevitable, given the realities of our politicized legal system, and the rent seeking and financial stakes involved.

An elaborate compromise patent bill has cleared the house judiciary commitee. I am dubious that it will make much difference, although by making it harder to get and easier to challenge patents it may be a step in the right direction. Abolishing software patents all together would be a much better step.

Four federal inmates were indicted Tuesday on allegations that they copyrighted their names, then demanded millions of dollars from prison officials for using the names without authorization.

More details here.

The American legal community bears quite a bit of responsibility for this. For well over the last decade, they have encouraged and nutured a legal culture that rewards copyright abuse. Federal inmates take their cues from the world around them. Copyright law offered them a "get rich quick" extortion scheme. The sad part is that similar tales happen all of the time. But other people don't get indicted simply because they don't happen to direct their copyright extortion schemes towards federal prison officials.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - IP lawyers are the ambulance chasers of the 21st Century.

William Patry has an interesting blog post on the Statute of Anne and some recent research by a PhD student, Rufus Pollock, who maintains that an optimal copyright period is around 14 years.

However, his claim that

Mr. Pollock's paper is unique for looking at the larger picture, i.e., that is production costs and how those costs impact on the extent of incentives required.

overlooks the work of Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, including their book.

by Lior Zemer, The Idea of Authorship in Copyright . It appears to endorse a Lockean model of copyright. If so, it enters a growing field, which includes Adam D. Moore's Intellectual Property and Information Control .

The Zemer book is mentioned by Siva Vaidhyanathan at his blog .

According to an article in The New York Times, James Bessen, a law lecturer at Boston University's law school (and a former software executive), claims that the cost of filing and defending patents outweighs their benefits.

It notes that he stops short of the call to abolish patents by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine.

Count him in the reformist camp with Adam Jaffe, Josh Lerner, and the general counsel of Intel.