Columbia Law School hosts a great website that attempts to catalogue and analyze every major published court case involving music copyright infringement claims.

The site is put together brilliantly - cross-referencing song titles involved in the cases, and (in some cases) providing audio files of the disputed works in question. Anyone who wishes to educate themselves about this subject should definitely consider bookmarking this site.

One of the unforeseen problems of having a single textbook on a subject, provided by the government, surfaces in this story from Korea link here. When the education ministry tried to publish a new economics text for middle and high school, financed jointly with the Federation of Korean Industries, a big business association, the unions protested and the ministry removed its support. The draft clearly was critical of unions. Business, on the other hand, complained "that the current textbook is hostile to businesses, and emphasizes enterprises' social responsibility too much."

Monopoly isn't good for textbooks since trying to find a solution acceptable to all parties is unlikely to succeed or to be dull or both. Trying to write texts by the Wiki formula may fail for the same reason.

You all had to see this one coming.

Big Media took its first big swing at YouTube Tuesday as Viacom Inc., the owner of MTV, VH1, Comedy Central and other cable networks filed a $1 billion copyright lawsuit against the video-sharing site and corporate owner Google Inc.

The lawsuit marks a sharp escalation of long-simmering tensions between Viacom and YouTube and represents the biggest confrontation to date between a major media company and the hugely popular site, which Google bought in November for $1.76 billion.

The question remains if the Internet will remain a truly revolutionary invention that forces us to re-think the traditional parameters of IP, or if it will simply devolve into another Pay-Per-View medium for media conglomerates to control. Actually, it isn't even just the conglomerates.

[Update]: Lessig has some good analysis about this - along with a link to the actual complaint.

Thanks to David K. Levine (no relation to me) and the rest of the gang here at Againstmonopoly.org for inviting me on as a guest blogger.

Brief background about myself: I produce a radio show in Los Angeles. I am also a licensed attorney who still occasionally dabbles in law on the side (mainly in defamation defense - but also with some experience in copyright infringement defense). Before that, I worked in film and television post-production which helped to form my views that current IP schemes overburden artists and stifle creativity.

I have previously guest blogged for other sites, including: Patterico.com, The Southern California Law Blog, and Calblog.com. I still occasionally guest blog for the first two sites listed, but I thought it best to bring over my posts about IP to this site for the sake of thematic consistency within blogs. If you still have an interest in other areas of law and/or media bias - feel free to check out those sites as well.

I have previously written a series of posts concerning IP entitled The Tyranny of Copyright Law, The Tyranny of Trademark Law, The Tyranny of Patent Law, and the (somewhat related) Coming Legal Superstorm Against Bloggers. [Each post is a multi-part series that is often spread out over multiple blog sites. Click on the links and they will provide further links to other parts of the respective series.]

I welcome all feedback and debate regarding my posts and the ideas that are generally put forth by this site. I know that many readers of the other blogs I have written for have a difficult time accepting the difference between real (tangible) property and so-called intellectual property. They would often roast me over the coals in their comments with delightfully amusing abuse. I hope that they will follow me over to this site on occasion to continue it (and in that process, hopefully become exposed to some new ideas that will change their thinking over time).

:-)

An article on information week is going the blog rounds. Title of the article: "If You're Going To Steal Software, Steal From Us: Microsoft Exec." Most likely they'd rather have you steal their software than use legal open source/free software as well.

Larry Lessign draw our attention to footnote 33 of Sony v. Universal.

Furthermore, "[t]he error in excusing such theft [copying for personal use] as noncommercial," we are told, "can be seen by simple analogy: jewel theft is not converted into a noncommercial veniality if stolen jewels are simply worn rather than sold." ... The premise and the analogy are indeed simple, but they add nothing to the argument. The use to which stolen jewelry is put is quite irrelevant in determining whether depriving its true owner of his present possessory interest in it is venial; because of the nature of the item and the true owner's interests in physical possession of it, the law finds the taking objectionable even if the thief does not use the item at all. Theft of a particular item of personal property of course may have commercial significance, for the thief deprives the owner of his right to sell that particular item to any individual. Time-shifting does not even remotely entail comparable consequences to the copyright owner. Moreover, the time-shifter no more steals the program by watching it once than does the live viewer, and the live viewer is no more likely to buy prerecorded videotapes than is the time-shifter. Indeed, no live viewer would buy a prerecorded videotape if he did not have access to a VTR.

Greg Mankiw link here points us to Joe Stiglitz' piece on Prizes vs Patents link here. Mankiw argues that prizes aren't so great, as they will require taxes, presumptively distortionary, and the prize awarding committee is composed of fallible humans. The argument gets ideological, particularly in the comments at Mankiw's site where some have a dreamy view of patents costs, but like most things in life, there are tradeoffs and the best choice isn't always clear initially. There ought to be room for both.

This website has long advocated digitizing books and making them available on line, at either low prices or free. I would be curious to know if that happens very often. I stumbled on one, the Wiley - Ubuntu Linux Bible at link here.

It is also available from Wiley for $39.33 in hard copy. I think it may be available as a free download for only a limited period of time. The book comes with a CD but Ubuntu will mail you one for free or you can download it, burn a CD and then install it.

This move by the Ubuntu distribution to promote the use of its linux-based operating system reflects an interesting business model, one in which sale of the software is secondary and primary is the sale of follow-on services. But it all depends on the spread of linux, which has had an uphill battle with Microsoft.

Korea's eduction ministry announced plans to greatly expand its use of digital textbooks in public schools, going from the current 14, all in math for grades 5 and 6, to 100 by 2011 in all subjects link here. "Digital textbooks have many advantages, like multi-media functions such as videos instead of printed illustrations," a ministry official said. Studies there show that students pay more attention to lessons when they use digital textbooks, he added.

If you want to amuse yourself, go check out patent 6,025,810