A NY Times Article describes a recent arrest for making a mixtape. The article notes that mixtapes boost artists' sales. Recently I heard a great song from a mix tape at Starbucks, "The Light," asked the barista what the name of it was, then bought a copy of Into the Blue by The Album Leaf. (If you like Moby and the Icelandic group Mum, you'll like The Album Leaf.) I lent it to my neighbor the lawyer, who loved it and then bought an earlier work by The Album Leaf.

But the cops go on protecting our "civil liberties." Maybe the Libertarian Party should use this as a recruiting device.

The article notes a store in the East Village of NY where five employees were busted in 2005. Hopefully they are now libertarians if they weren't before.

Alan Cox, a Linux kernel developer, is reported to have filed for patents on some DRM technology (link here). Hopefully, it can be used to preclude others from imposing DRM restrictions on the public. With bated breath, we wait to see if the patents are granted.

Interesting strategy to limit the growing bane of the digital consumer.

Carlo over at techdirt has an interesting comparison of DSL service in Japan and the US (techdirt link here). The Japanese regulators in 2000 forced state owned “NTT to unbundle its local loop, didn't let it drag its feet and stymie competitive carriers, and didn't let NTT get the law chiseled away by lobby groups and lawyers.” The FCC which regulates these matters in the US, was almost totally ineffective so that competitive service was largely unavailable, and what there was was of lower quality, and more expensive.

Lucky us.

Randall Stross goes after Digital Rights Management (DRM) as invoked by both Apple and Microsoft (NY Times link here). He picks up on Melanie Tucker v. Apple Computer Inc. over what she calls factory installed crippleware for what Apple calls "FairPlay": "When you buy songs at the iTunes Music Store, you can play them on one and only one line of portable player, the iPod. And when you buy an iPod, you can play copy-protected songs bought from one and only one online music store, the iTunes Music Store."

Then he describes how MS does the same thing or tries - through its PlaysForSure copy-protection standard, which is now replaced by a new standard for the MS Zune player, not compatible with the old songs. As consumers, the "rights" enjoyed are few. As some wags have said, the initials D.R.M. should really stand for "Digital Restrictions Management."

Apple defends itself by claiming the music companies - Universal, Warner Music Group, EMI and Sony BMG insist on it. But there are independent companies that supply MP3 formatted songs. Stross thinks that may force users of DRM restrictions to give them up, but for the time being, Apple protects those songs as well on its iPod.

There is a lot more detail in the story, but Stross reaches an optimistic conclusion. He quotes Dave Goldberg, the head of Yahoo Music, who believes that "today's copy-protection battles will prove short-lived. Eventually, perhaps in 5 or 10 years, he predicts, all portable players will have wireless broadband capability and will provide direct access, anytime, anywhere, to every song ever released for a low monthly subscription fee." It has already happened in South Korea, but only after CD sales collapsed.

All true, but it doesn't get rid of copyright on music.

Slashdot reports that Pirate Bay, the widely celebrated file sharing website, is planning to buy Sealand, a former British naval platform in the North Sea in order to get round international copyright laws (link here). It previously established server sites in Holland and Belgium as well as its original home in Sweden. Sealand claims to be outside British jurisdiction by proclaiming itself a “micronation.”

For Pirate Bay's full history (two years), see (wikepedia). It argues it does not violate copyright because it only tells people where they can download the copyrighted material. Courts in many countries have ruled against the use of BitTorrent for this purpose, making Pirate Bay an accessory to crime in those jurisdictions.

Naturally Pirate Bay has infuriated software, motion picture, and recording companies which managed to take it down last spring but it was soon up again. It remains a perhaps forlorn hope of creating more sanity in our intellectual property law. But a lot of us are on its side on pure economic welfare grounds.

LINDA GREENHOUSE reports that the Supreme Court reversed the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the specialized court that hears all patent appeals, (NY Times link here). It ruled 8-to-1 that the holder of a patent license can sue to challenge the patent's validity without first refusing to pay royalties and putting itself in breach of the license agreement and subjecting itself to a patent infringement suit and triple damages if it loses. See the story for the specifics.

Greenhouse suggests this will make it easier for smaller start-up companies that rely on obtaining licenses for patented technology from bigger patent-owning companies to challenge the legitimacy of those patents. Who else has enough self-interest to sue?

The decision could be important but we will have to wait and see how it works in practice. Competition is usually good. Pray that is what we got.

Larry Lessig tells us that the election of Democrats, which was supposed to mean redefining copyright law, is not likely to mean much change. The House committee in charge is in the hands of a Democrat, Howard L. Berman, who "is a favorite boogeyman of advocates for copyright reform, many of whom say he is in the pocket of his Hollywood constituents" according to the NYTimes (link here). Lessig says a good bit more on his blog (link here). Look for his post dated Dec 24. Among other things, he wants to "to fit the legitimate objectives of copyright to assure that artists have the incentives they need to create great new work into the contours of digital technology."

I suspect most of us on this blog would like to see copyrights disappear but it isn't going to happen anytime soon. For now, we need to keep pointing out the deficiencies and push for incremental changes. Write your members of Congress, pointing out the bad results.

One of the criteria we use to judge intellectual property law is its effect on innovation. A recent study doesn't directly address this issue but it is suggestive because it says that only about ten percent of companies are highly effective in this area and that there are other ways than patents and copyrights to encourage innovation (link to NY Times article here).

The complete study is here, together with a short bulleted summary. The key finding is "Patents generally don't drive profits. Boosting R&D spending can increase the number of patents that a company controls, but there is no statistical relationship between the number or even the quality of patents and overall financial performance."

Microsoft Office 2007 is due out on January 30 and is favorably reviewed by Walter Mossberg for the Wall Street Journal, even while taking note of the shortcomings (link here). He likes the change in the radically new interface, is ambivalent about the new file formats which cannot be read in older Word versions without free conversion software, and then notes that the learning curve is steep, even for someone as computer expert as he. The much-cheaper but still expensive household version of the new Word lacks Outlook which must either be purchased separately or as part of the more expensive Standard version. His bottom line is, it helps business users but not the home user. Read the whole review for more details.

From where I sit, it is hard to see how this is worthwhile for most of us. In other words, it is standard Microsoft strategy to extract more money from us by creating obsolescence in the market place without really significant product improvements. Go for the free office suite, Open Office, downloadable at OpenOffice.org, which uses most file formats and is powerful at formating. It has made steady improvements to keep the program compatible with MS Office and no doubt will continue.

In a story you would prefer not to hear, talk radio station KSFO, a subsidiary of Disney and ABC radio, has forced a blogger to take down his site and cease sending audio clips from the programs to station advertisers on the grounds that it violated copyright (link to details on Daily Kos). His offense? He had sent advertisers clips of the talk-show speech which urged murder and torture of political opponents or trashed their products and suggested that they might want to consider pulling their ads on that station. He had some success in getting them to do so but decided to fold.

It is unlikely that Disney's suit would have succeeded in court but the defendant didn't have the resources to defend himself there. This is still another case in which copyright is used to offend the fundamental right of freedom of speech. Read the whole sad post.