Joe Nocera discusses the suit by Viacom against YouTube and its owner, Google, for copyright infringement link here. It is a pretty good run down, but main-stream-media's requirement for balance forces it to avoid a clear conclusion that YouTube has complied with the take-down requests from Viacom as provided in the DMCA-–and instead seems to leave the case up to the discretion of the judge. That allows Nocera to conclude that there will be a compromise. But it seems to me that the only way that Viacom can win is to get the DCMA changed and that may be their real objective.

Viacom is caught committing an act of Copyfraud by demanding that YouTube.com take down videos that they (Viacom) have no rights over.

Here is a story from the New Scientist. A new drug is discovered that appears to cure cancer. So far, so good. Unfortunately, it is cheap and has no patent. As a result, nobody has an incentive to do tests on it.

Ideally, we need a drug that that can be made expensive.

Here is the article

Coghlan, Andy. 2007. "Cheap, 'Safe' Drug Kills Most Cancers." New Scientist (21 February). link here

"It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their 'immortality'. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe. It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs."

"Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks."

"DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up vast amounts of sugar."

"Until now it had been assumed that cancer cells used glycolysis because their mitochondria were irreparably damaged. However, Michelakis's experiments prove this is not the case, because DCA reawakened the mitochondria in cancer cells. The cells then withered and died."

"Michelakis suggests that the switch to glycolysis as an energy source occurs when cells in the middle of an abnormal but benign lump don't get enough oxygen for their mitochondria to work properly. In order to survive, they switch off their mitochondria and start producing energy through glycolysis."

"Crucially, though, mitochondria do another job in cells: they activate apoptosis, the process by which abnormal cells self-destruct. When cells switch mitochondria off, they become 'immortal', outliving other cells in the tumour and so becoming dominant. Once reawakened by DCA, mitochondria reactivate apoptosis and order the abnormal cells to die."

'The results are intriguing because they point to a critical role that mitochondria play: they impart a unique trait to cancer cells that can be exploited for cancer therapy,' says Dario Altieri, director of the University of Massachusetts Cancer Center in Worcester."

"The phenomenon might also explain how secondary cancers form. Glycolysis generates lactic acid, which can break down the collagen matrix holding cells together. This means abnormal cells can be released and float to other parts of the body, where they seed new tumours."

"DCA can cause pain, numbness and gait disturbances in some patients, but this may be a price worth paying if it turns out to be effective against all cancers. The next step is to run clinical trials of DCA in people with cancer. These may have to be funded by charities, universities and governments: pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to pay because they can't make money on unpatented medicines. The pay-off is that if DCA does work, it will be easy to manufacture and dirt cheap."

"Paul Clarke, a cancer cell biologist at the University of Dundee in the UK, says the findings challenge the current assumption that mutations, not metabolism, spark off cancers. 'The question is: which comes first?' he says."

If copyright only extends to actual "fixed" works and not ideas, then it seems to me that copyright should not extend to the concept of characters. A character is no more than an idea once you divorce it from the underlying fixed text. That is in fact one of the primary falsehoods in copyright law - any derivative work that does not contain an actual clone of the fixed underlying work is merely borrowing from an idea, not the protected fixed work itself. Ideas can admittedly have varying degrees of abstraction, and a fictional character is certainly less abstract than many other forms of ideas - but that does not change the fact that it is still just an idea. All literary ideas remain ideas until they are written down (or "fixed" as the law would say). Once it is written, the idea remains an idea. The copyright should only extend to the concrete writing itself. The entire concept of "derivative" works destroys the fundamental compromise behind copyright philosophy.

Unfortunately, the courts have never recognized this obvious falsehood. If X creates a suave spy named "James Bond", then all future authors are prevented from using a suave spy character named James Bond, even if they never actually copy from the previous works that Bond has appeared in. They may even be prevented from creating a spy character with a different name, but still happens to dress sharp and enjoy vodka martinis that are "shaken, not stirred" (since many would naturally identify such traits with the Bond character),

So what happens when the courts blur the distinction between ideas and fixed works? You get ridiculous lawsuits like this one - where Carol Burnett sues somebody for drawing an animated character wearing a blue bonnet, bucket and mop. Maybe even depicting janitors tugging on their ears is now off-limits.

Via Gerry Everding a a wonderful post by Larry Downes. The short version: the dissonance between law and practice is too large - it is the law that will change.

An op-ed at the Baltimore Sun best read from the bottom up. At the bottom the bio of the author

Peter J. Pitts, a former associate commissioner at the Food and Drug Administration, is director of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, which accepts donations from health care corporations.

Then the top

Imagine that you are an inventor and the government steals your highly lucrative idea. The next day, you are informed that the government plans to mass-produce your invention and give it away for free. If you're lucky, they'll give you a pittance for your efforts.

This is what happens, with increasing regularity, to the manufacturers of lifesaving medicines. The most recent example occurred in Thailand when the military-appointed government issued "compulsory licenses" to obtain two drugs.

The first, the HIV/AIDS drug Kaletra...

Since the author seems to have worked for the FDA and directs the "Center for Medicine in the Public Interest" I have to assume the article is deceptive rather than misinformed. Rather than fisk the entire article, let me just ask: Do you really suppose that the big pharmaceutical companies wouldn't have produced the blockbuster AIDs drugs if they had know that Thailand was going to put it under a compulsory license...

John has a post about a new "wiki" oriented system that the patent system is planning on a trial basis to get public input into patent applications. John has done quite a bit of work tracking down what is going on - there will probably be more later when the system goes into operation, encouraging us to participate.

Let me play devil's advocate here, and explain why I'm not at all convinced this is a good idea. Getting rid of obvious patents, and patents for which there is prior use would be a good thing to do. No doubt the patent office is pretty poor at its job (see this post for one of many egregious examples). No doubt there is a lot of expertise outside the patent office that if it could be tapped into would help eliminate some of the obvious and redundant ones.

But: the U.S. Patent Office shows 417,508 applications in 2005.

*Is it realistic for that many patents to get public scrutiny?

*Do we want Linus Torvalds spending all of his time scrutinizing patent applications to see what is obvious and redundant - or writing great software?

The actual system is (at least initially) intended to be a voluntary system in which applicants can opt for public scrutiny. That would serve to keep the applications to be scrutinized within bounds. Realistically, if this is to make sense then patents that undergo this scrutiny have to have some higher legal standing than those that do not. It is obvious why the large software companies who are pushing the idea would favor this - however beneficent their motives, can we doubt that they are different than the rest of us? We all want patents for ourselves, but not the other guy. So initially, the system just seems a way of getting superior status for the large companies that choose to participate. Of course if it works, then everyone will want in - and now we are back to 417,508 applications. Worse - if we get all the patents going through the system, most of them won't get any scrutiny at all - but of course when it goes to court the claim will be that the patents were available for scrutiny and nobody said anything at the time, so, however ridiculous the claims, they must be recognized.

What do you think? Good system or bad?

Much of the best science fiction is rooted in current reality, and then projects both its logical evolution and theoretical possibilities into the near future.

If the length of copyright terms are "life of the author plus 70 years", try to imagine the effect on the public domain if the average lifespan of a person becomes at least 120 years.

With that in mind, check out this science fiction short story entitled "Melancholy Elephants" (which was apparently written back in the day when copyright terms were "merely" the life of the author plus 50 years).

Fight the future...

The Newshour with Jim Lehrer had an interesting interview about Viacom's suit against YouTube. The interview with Cardoso Law School Professor Susan Crawford pretty much shredded Viacom's case, pointing out that the safe harbor or take-down provision of the DMCA thoroughly protected YouTube and its owner, Google. Conjectures to explain why Viacom sued seem unconvincing at this point. Anyway, give it a listen link here. She is one articulate lawyer-professor.

Via Gerry Everding: What were they thinking?

In creating a double standard for copyright and trademark law, the courts appear to have been influenced by the "romantic nature" of copyright law, Bartholomew says. "It's romantic to think about someone writing the great American novel or producing a hit song," he explains, "and the people who appeal for protection of these rights authors, movie stars, musicians are themselves very appealing."

When these romantic notions are combined with fears of widespread digital theft, you get "copyright panic," Bartholomew contends.

Complete article here