The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights is suing to overturn the the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation patents on stem cells. The organization site gives the URLs for the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times articles.

The former is especially good

http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/nw/?postId=6583 http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/nw/?postId=6573

As I've indicated in other posts 1 2 I'm skeptical about laws concerning network neutrality. Needless to say, although I agree with Larry Lessig about a lot of things, we don't see eye to eye on this, and I don't like being lumped in with

entities that either never got the Net, or fought like hell to control it telecom, and cable companies.

I think Felten has this right - locking things in with regulation is likely to do more harm than good. It isn't that I want the internet dominated by telecom and cable companies - but the fact is that they have to compete except over the last mile. So the solution isn't net neutrality and more government regulation, but fighting for less regulation and more competition over the last mile.

Ed Felten brings attention to a good op-ed by Tim Lee pointing this out. Despite the ridiculous claims of the large telecos that it is horribly expensive to wire the last mile, the fact is that it is the monopoly granted by local (and generally corrupt) goverments to the telecos and cable operators that prevents entry. Roger Noll has this right: it is wireless that is probably going to break the back of the last mile monopoly. So at the Federal level let's stop worrying about the side issue of net neutrality and fight to open up a lot of spectrum for wireless.

Thanks to Jim Harper who pointed me to the latest offering at the Technology Liberation Front. I got a kick out of it for reasons that will be obvious if you read the post. To whet your appetite for the original

You downloading wussies, sitting in your dorm rooms listening to the Tool song that you downloaded, you have no idea what the total Tool experience is like.

David gave me permission to flog my new book, Railroading Economics: The Creation of the Free Market Mythology (Monthly Review Press). Although the subject is not intellectual property, its relevance for this blog is the story it tells about the development of economics during the late 19th century.

The same people who created laissez-faire economics, such as John Bates Clark, insist that markets could not work for industries with high fixed costs. In particular, railroading at the time was a major industry in US. So these economists wrote textbooks arguing in favor of laissez-faire, especially with regard to labor markets, while at the same time promoting a Schumpeterian line about leniency toward oligopolistic industry.

In fact, Schumpeter seems to have cribbed much of his analysis from these economists, although all of them may have just been following the dominant German tradition -- dominant in the sense that the major figures among the young economist at the time all studied in Germany.

Centering around this railroading story is a thumbnail sketch of the economic history of the United States.

If any of you get the chance to look at the book, I would appreciate a dialogue.

Addendum: Michael is still learning how to use the posting system, so in response to Tim's request in the comments, here is the Amazon link for the book in clickable form [Posted by David.] .

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_27/b3991401.htm

Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft's first chief technology officer, has a plan for Intellectual Property. First he gathers leading scientists and patent attorneys to brainstorm and come up with ideas that his company, Intellectual Ventures, can license to others. They plan to produce nothing but patents. You know what comes next.

The company also offers to "immunize" corporations from patent suits for a $50 million fee. The company will go around and buy patents before other patent trolls do, thereby "protecting" the clients. Others, of course, will have to face the consequences of not having ponied up the $50 million.

Does the word "blackmail" have any relevance here?

Thanks to Michael Powell for pointing out the wonderful Patently Silly site reminding us of the great unique, non-obvious, and useful inventions our patent examiners have created monopolies over.

CleanFlix will take your dvd and replace it with another that removes all the dirty language. Needless to say they got sued for copyright violation and lost. There is a bunch of good commentary about this, I'm just going to link to it:

Ed Felten

Tim Lee (he has a series of updates as well)

You can traceback other posts from there. The bottom line - no one seems to think this is a particularly good idea, although it may be the correct interpretation of the law. For myself, I'm wondering how the judge's view of copyright law

The argument [that CleanFlicks has no impact or a positive impact on studio revenues] has superficial appeal but it ignores the intrinsic value of the right to control the content of the copyrighted work which is the essence of the law of copyright.

squares with the U.S. Constitution which allows these monopolies solely

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts

His view is that people are more likely to create things if they can control the subsequent content of the work? That seems absurd.

I noticed that the AP had a spate of what appeared to be MPAA/RIAA press releases about the horrors of piracy in China and Russia. I was going to post on this, but Mike Masnick beat me to the punch, so I'll just link to his post, and limit my comment to "what he said."

A few days ago I saw an article - possibly in the Wall Street Journal, but I can't find it there - in which some business type said that he or she took global warming seriously. The best approach would be to strengthen intellectual property rights so that companies would have an incentive to develop technology to help newly developing economies.

Have any of our readers seen this so I can track it down?

Claus Pedersen (ht: Lessig) has data about the Danish music industry. Because the royalties in Denmark are distributed by a monopoly, his data is quite detailed. Here are the salient facts about the industry since 2001

Nordisk Copyright Bureau (NCB) administers the royalties of authors concerning records and CDs...

The authors were divided into four groups in the analysis: Group 1, which receives DKK 1-10,000 from NCB annually, Group 2, which receives DKK 10,001-50,000, Group 3, which receives DKK 50,001-150,000, and finally Group 4, which receives more than DKK 150,000...

First and foremost, it turns out that the number of NCB recipients in the period after 2000 is consistently higher than at any point in time during the heydays of the recording industry from 1995-2000. Thus more authors were successful in releasing text and music in the period of declining sales than in the period of massive increase in sales. Furthermore, we may also conclude that the number of NCB recipients increases slightly in the three "poorest" groups. The number of authors who receive more than 150,000 is decreasing.

Less money shared by more people necessarily entails that someone is getting poorer. Since the number of NCB recipients in the high end (more than DKK 150,000) has declined and the other groups have more members now, a loss of income for the poorest artists would be expected. However, this is not the case.

NCB's own figures show that the average payment for Group 1 (less than DKK 10,000) has increased by 16.7% from 2001 to 2005. The income of Group 2 has decreased by 2.2%, the income of Group 3 has increased by 2.9, and the average income of Group 4 has decreased by 18.2%.

So, there are fewer artists in the high income Group 4 and they make less money than they used to. The low income Group 1 now contains more artists and they make more money than before.

I should clarify this somewhat confusing discussion about the distribution of payments. Less total money is being distributed to more people. Suppose that this took the form of a pro-rata decrease in income - so that the lowest 10% earn 10% less, the highest 10% earn 10% less and so forth. This would have the following effect: The number of people in the high end as measured by those earning more than a fixed cut-off would decline, and (if as is almost certainly the case, the density function is convex in the upper range) the amount of money they would earn per person would go down. At the low end the number of people would increase and if the density function is concave in the lower range, the amount that they would earn per person would actually go up. So basically, all the complicated distributional information Pedersen reports is basically saying that earnings per person went down.

Another salient fact is that while the sale of recorded music during the period has declined by a factor of about two, live performances have almost doubled. This may mean that income at the high end decreased less than in the recorded sales data if high end performers get a higher share of live performance revenue.

What does this mean for copyright? Copyright primarily serves to enhance the incomes of the top artists. So the fact that their income from recorded sales has dropped is pretty much what you might expect if file-sharing has weakened copyright. The rationale as to why it might be a good idea to enhance the income of top artists (as has been discussed in some previous posts and comments) is that it may provide more incentive to enter the industry in the first place. The key point is that the data here isn't consistent with that argument: the total number of people producing music has gone up rather than down.