From Glenn Thorpe a true copyright horror story. Under U.S. law government documents cannot be copyright. Under British law they are automatically copyright, and that is true in places such as Australia which use the British system. Here the true nature of copyright is more clear: of course government agencies have no greater incentive to "create" new works because the get a monopoly. Rather copyright is used to control the flow of information. This turns out is true of maps in Australia. The details can be found in this ZD article. The gist is that Google Maps was extremely helpful to people who needed to escape the fire...except for the Government maps which Google was not allowed to access - access was allowed only through the government website, which needless to say got overwhelmed by people fleeing the fire. If someone did illegally copy those government maps? Glenn suggests "Maybe they [the government] should get the RIAA lawyers involved to sue anyone left alive that obtained information on the fires from any source other than their website!"

According to the Guardian there has been a promising development in the area of pharmaceutical patents: GlaxoSmithKline is starting a patent pool for neglected diseases and third world diseases, as well as substantially discounting medicines for the third world. On the one hand the need for a patent pool gives some indication of the R&D gridlock that has been caused by patents. On the other, patent pools have historically(for example in the steel industry) helped break some of the gridlock. (hattip to Ernie Berndt.)

Reading out loud is illegal? A great illustration of the negative impact of copyright on innovation - suppose you are a little guy, not Amazon...would you risk the lawsuit? The utter insanity of this is beyond belief: virtually every computer can do text-to-speech. Are all computers illegal now? Are we supposed to install special software to make sure text-to-speech doesn't read copyright materials? I hope there is a special place in hell reserved for the Author's Guild. They do their authors no good at great expense to everyone else. Look up "dog in the manger" on Wikepedia.

Economic logic proves Boldrin and Levine are correct

Albert Hu and Ivan P'ng say yes link here figures here. My own reservation about this study: patent strength has a large positive impact on foreign direct investment; we might expect this to increase growth rates in patent intensive industries. The paper also has a good summary of the literature that examines the impact of patents on patenting (!!) and R&D. By-the-way Michele and I redid the Kanwar and Evenson regressions (using their data which they kindly provided us with) link here: when you account for the size of a country - obviously an important determinant of per capita R&D when domestic markets matter - the results are reversed.

Jeffrey has been live-blogging our book over at Mises. There have been lots of interesting comments pro and con; and at least a few conversions. The final chapter is here and you can find the grand collection here. We all encourage you to go leave comments.

I previously pointed out that the ISPs like Verizon were dreaming if they thought they would charge Google for using their network - that if anybody paid anyone else, they would pay Google. Via Slashdot it seems I was right: see what ESPN is up to.