You may enjoy

the illustrated history of piracy.

I've argued in the past that we should both get rid of patents and the FDA. Without the FDA, the problem of having to reveal the secret of a new product in order to get approval is gone. And the FDA does more harm than good anyway. This would seem to confirm that. It's hard to imagine that any benefit from their having kept unsafe drugs off the market will justify their preventing the development of new antibiotics in the face of increasing bacterial resistance. In this case the road to hell may literally be paved with good intentions.

From: Mullins, Daniel On Behalf Of Merrill, Steve Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2010 4:38 PM To: Mullins, Daniel Subject: First Public Meeting of the Committee on the Impact of Copyright Policy on Innovation in the Digital Era

Dear Colleague:

We have scheduled the first meeting of the NAS-STEP committee to develop a research agenda on the impact of copyright law and policy for Thursday & Friday October 14-15, 2010, at the Academies' Keck Center, 500 Fifth St., NW. We invite interested parties to present their views on the committee's task in an open session Friday from 8:30-Noon in room KC 100. We encourage presentations that identify priority issues in copyright policy that the committee should consider addressing. Some but by no means all of the possibilities are enumerated in the project prospectus attached, including * limitations and exceptions to copyright including fair use * secondary liability for infringement * technology mandates * statutory damages and * access to publicly supported scientific research

To discuss this invitation and/or schedule a time on the agenda, please contact me at an early opportunity. Project sponsors will be given their preference of time to the extent possible.

Sincerely,

Stephen A. Merrill, Ph.D. Executive Director Science, Technology, and Economic Policy The National Academies 500 Fifth Street, N.W. KC574 Washington, DC 20001 Tel. 202-334-1581 Fax 202-334-1505 Mob 202-731-1782 Email smerrill@nas.edu Web www.nas.edu/step

This is why I think government mandated DRM isn't merely bad policy, but crazy policy. On the other hand, if companies are foolish enough to want to lose all their customers by putting DRM in their products, well there thankfully isn't yet a law that mandates companies sell only things people want to buy. I don't give advice on buying stocks, but Microsoft surely doesn't have much of a future.

There is an interesting implication in the research paper from the British Medical Journal relating to possible tobacco advertising on YouTube. The part which struck me was this statement:

"Since content may be removed from YouTube if it is found to breach copyright or if it contains offensive material, there is scope for the public and health organisations to request the removal of pro-tobacco content containing copyright or offensive material."

It seems to be a suggestion that the ability to claim for copyright infringement should be available, not just to the author, but anybody who might find it useful as a tool for censorship.

Regards Paul Lockett

I've seen this before - it's very good (via Alex Khatchaturian)

I am writing an article for the Freeman "on the recent silly examples of intellectual property claims." I know of quite a few, but I'm hoping our readers and contributors will have some good suggestions - leave a comment or send me an email (david@dklevine.com). Short deadline though, I have to have the article done by October 11.

via George Leef - who knows the restaurant - we have the following insanity.

We previously mentioned Eckhard Höffner research showing how absence of copyright in Germany led to more rather than less output there than in England. This is being picked up by other blogs, here is a post on Kevin Smith's blog. (Thanks to Ruth Lewis for the tip)

Really, this is pretty funny.