The Amazon one-click patent examination is now over - you can read here what our friend igdmlgd who forced the reexamination has to say about it. I think there are a couple of lessons here. First the patent office is hopelessly corrupt. This is an expected consequence of a regulatory system - money talks. Second, it is possible for a determined and principled individual to have an impact - even if igdmlgd didn't get the patent properly overturned, he was able to limit some of the ill-effects. In the end - the system just doesn't do what it is supposed to - which is why it would be best to do away with it.

Ok,music with copyright. Billboard released its list of top money making acts. It doesn't give a systematic breakdown of earnings by category - but it did for Metallica (you know Lars Ulrich, the gas station attendant turned drummer who says he'd never have made the switch without copyright forever)

Along with touring revenue -- the band pulled in $22.8 million from 55 arena shows reported to Boxscore that drew more than 968,000 fans -- Metallica sold 694,000 albums in 2009. The majority of those sales came from its Rick Rubin-produced 2008 release, "Death Magnetic" (297,000). Album sales revenue totaled $1.6 million. And most of Metallica's track download earnings came from its 1991 hit "Enter Sandman," which sold 450,000.

Hmmm...think it would make a lot of difference to the world if they lost the $1.6 million from the albums? Without copyright they'd only make $22.8 million from touring...You might almost think it would be worth it to them to give the recorded music away for free to promote their concerts...

The mainstream blogs occasionally cover intellectual property. Andrew Sullivan, for example reproduced a few letters from his readers criticizing commentary on Yglesias's blog. I suppose he picked these letters because he thought they were the most sensible? I thought just for fun I would fisk one of them, mostly because it is the kind of nonsense I hear at seminars all the time:

I just wanted to weigh in on the budding IP debate to say that anyone who takes a firm stand on the specific meaning of IP law doesn't really understand IP law.

David: No clue what that means.

Copyright, patent, and trademark law all serve different purposes, and have different statutory regimes precisely because the issue is multifaceted, complex, and must meet various and sometimes opposing interests.

David: Wow, it is complicated? Who'd have thunk it?

Conflating three separate legal regimes as "IP law" can make arguing about it's purpose inherently impossible.

David: You mean the way that the U.S. Constitution conflates copyright and patent? I suppose this letter writer is merely dishonest. Few if any people conflate trademark with copyright and patent law, and in the United States the legal purpose of copyright and patent as established by the Constitution are indeed the same.

For instance, Yglesias points to the Constitutional requirement that the protection be for a "limited time." Well, over the last 200 years as IP laws have evolved, we've decided that "limited time" means something very different in patent law and copyright law. Patents generally last for 25 years, copyrights last for the life of the author plus 75 years (this is a gross simplification, but good enough for our purposes).

David: A very gross simplification unless they recently increase the length of patent protection from 20 to 25 years. I know they keep changing the length of copyright protection at a dizzying rate, but it appears to still be life of the author plus 70 years. I guess this stuff is multifaceted and complex.

Patents cover inventions that increase our standard of living and move society forward.

David: You mean like the swinging on a swing patent?

The inventors of those things should be protected, but only for a short time; after that society as a whole should be allowed to benefit from the increased utility of the technology's wide dissemination.

David: Why is it exactly that they "should" be protected?

More to the point, copyright law protects expression -- the words or notes an artist uses in creating his work.

David: I hear this repeatedly at seminars. How does protecting "expression" give the author the unique right to write a sequel? What does "expression" have to do with Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin lawsuit over The Wind Done Gone? With the lawsuit over the Harry Potter lexicon? Copyright protects ideas not merely the expression of ideas. Where on earth did this myth that copyright only protects the expression of ideas start?

Though I agree with him on many things, Yglesias is wrong here. Copyright law is very much in the business of protecting the rights of the author. That's why a copyright term lasts so long (copyright terms have been increasing steadily over time, indicating that we are becoming more and more concerned with protecting authors as time goes forward). That's also why copyright protects such a wide range of expressions and has so few formal requirements for securing one. Our copyright scheme is actually quite expansive in its protection of producers' interests.

One could say, as Yglesias does, that copyright protects consumers, but only with very roundabout logic: copyright incents producers to produce copyrightable works, and that allows consumers to consume those works, thus protecting their interest in listening to music, etc. It's much more logically satisfying to accept the basic truth and say "copyright law protects an author's interest in his copyrightable works," and then derive whatever ancillary benefits you want from there.

David: There is a telling difference between what copyright does protect - the interests of the intermediaries involved in distributing copyrightable works - and what copyright is intended to protect - the rights of the public at large. As it happens it does not and is not meant to protect either authors or consumers.

Save the whales and solve all other social ills...

Talk last week by Larry Lessig in Amsterdam. (via Jeff Racine)

Via my WUSTL student Dirk Doebler, news of a video by an unknown Uruguayan producer Fede Alvarez. All $300 worth. Modern technology empowers the creative. If not for the dead-hand of the copyright lobby trying to keep everything ever made in the past under lock and key (think "sound track" or "mashup" or "sampling") this would be the age of golden creativity. With plenty of money for the Fede Alvarez's of the world too.

This is the true cost of copyright law: we have but a pale reflection of the golden age of creativity that we could have.

A nice post by Jeffrey Miron on drug reimportation. I don't think we have him completely convinced about patents yet, but we're getting there.

Just a remark on drug reimportation. There seems to be this naive view in Congress and by lobbying organizations that if we allow drug reimportation from Canada that means we get cheap drugs. Which is more likely: the pharmaceutical companies suffer a large drop in profits on the large US market, or that they just raise prices to Canadians?

One of the best empirical economists working on patents is Petra Moser of Stanford. She has an extraordinary ability to find unusual data that answers really hard questions. Her most recent paper Compulsory Licensing with Allessandra Voena does just that.

There is - a frankly rather ridiculous view, one held only by lawyers for whom the distinction between 10 ^ -6 and 10 ^ +6 is invisible - that somehow compulsory licensing in a country will reduce innovation because it will be every so much more attractive to "steal" all those great foreign inventions. In this view - which crops up in these pages occasionally in anecdotal form - the great thing about patents is that it increases innovation by forcing people to "invent around" patents.

The "Compulsory Licensing" paper attacks this question directly - looking at an episode where the US "stole" a bunch of inventions by compulsory licensing after World War I. The consequent effect on innovation in the areas covered by the licenses? It went up by 20%.

In my view debunking the rather silly view that compulsory licensing would diminish innovation is not this papers main contribution. We recognize that patents have two effects (ignoring "invent around" and "revealing secrets" both of which are of at best minuscule significance): increasing innovation by increasing incentives to innovate, and decreasing innovation by making it more costly to innovate. This paper gives us a pretty clean measure of the latter effect: the benefit of being able to access existing ideas without negotiation or licensing raises innovation by around 20%.

Pipapics: A Case Study in Innovation by Glenn Thorpe

For the past couple of months I have been working on developing the pipapic concept and the tools to generate pipapics - you can find out about it at my website www.pipapic.org.

Here is the idea: Take a color cube. Pull out an evenly spaced palette. Place it on a screen canvas just the right size. Re-arrange the pixels as desired. Into say, the Mona Lisa, or into irises. This is a pipapic. So a pipapic is pixel art with constraints: call it the haiku of color. All pipapics have a well balanced brightness and colorfulness. Any image can be converted to many many pipapics that retain some semblance of the original. Some existing images have the color balance close to being a pipapic without any editing. Examples include some images of parrots and flowers.

The concept is probably patentable. My attitude is...well I read this blog every day, so I don't believe I need say more. But what I would like is for all pipapics to be virally free. So if anyone creates a pipapic it is free, full stop. I would really like to impose a moral patent, and say: I have the legal right under the current system to gain monopoly rights over the entire concept. I do not want monopoly rights nor your stinking money. All I want is freedom for me, for my kids, for your kids, for Chinese kids and for Talibani kids to use this as they wish. If you don't actively support the no intellectual property concept leave pipapics alone. Go. Now. There is nothing for you here. And don't use the pipapic balance in your fashion, in your makeups, in your colorful foods or any other place.

I am concerned about the legality of the pipapic tools. These tools take existing images, images that will often be "owned" by other people, and manipulate them. This is in fact even against some Creative Commons licence conditions on derivative works. By releasing tools to enable people to create pipapics I am enabling them to break the covenants imposed by copyright. It can be viewed as being worse than Napster. And to be blunt, I am seditious, I consider IP laws to be garbage and I am most definitely encouraging people to treat these laws with the contempt that I believe they deserve.

Copyright law is a huge problem. There are examples of pipapics that I have derived from original images. The original images have been well and truly butchered - large portions have been discarded to provide an image with the pipapic balance, the remaining portion has been reshaped and resized to provide a pipapic canvas, and then every picture has had at least 100% of the pixels recolored. I also display the original for comparison purposes. I consider this to be fair use. In the context of my website they are demonstrative and educational.

I'm eager to get examples from the public, and want to display those examples as well. These may also be modified from existing images that are under copyright. Do I have to request the pedigree of every example? What if the examples are collated from many sources? They could be doctored in many ways before I get them, including being modified to look like another image. Is it me who must devise the questions to be asked of any submitters? If I ask the wrong questions will I later have to discard the images until they are re-certified as meeting the new compliance standards?

Look at all the legal opinion needed just to release and promote a artistic imaging scheme. All in order to comply with undemocratic laws devised in an undemocratic country and imposed undemocratically on the entire world through secretly negotiated treaties. The rule is: Before you can start to be creative you must pay for a legal opinion. This is supposed to stimulate creativity and enrich the public. Surely you jest!