Actually more like an hour. You can find Michele and I talking with David Levine (yes, we David Levine's have taken over the world) on his radio show Hearsay Culture about our book here and here. It was a lot of fun, and I would have liked it even if our interviewer hadn't appropriated my name.

Actually it was out a while ago, sorry for the delayed notice. You can find it here.

I love Scribd--what a cool new service for online books.

Saul Hansell, writing on the NYTimes Bits website and in today's paper, discusses the McCain campaign's "right to remix on YouTube" as fair use, observing that McCain introduced a new position on copyright law" link here. His commercial ads had used snippets of TV news broadcasts, the news organizations complained under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, YouTube took the ads down, and the campaign complained, asserting that the mashups were fair use.

The incident has led the campaign to assert that the election is upon us and it can't wait for the issue to be adjudicated, so it should receive priority treatment. YouTube doesn't want to be forced to make the judgment on fair use. The Electronic Freedom Foundation opposes special treatment for political groups and wants uniform and extended fair use for all.

Hansell observes that given the unlikelihood of McCain's winning the election, he may never have the chance to lead the move to change the DMCA.

But this experience once again illustrates the fundamental absurdity of this law and more broadly, of copyright.

Slashdot reports that Microsoft has received a patent for the Automatic Censorship of Audio Data for Broadcast link here. It sends us to the patent itself which describes "methods for muting offensive words" or making them unintelligible or replacing them with "less offensive words." A word or syllable is rejected when there is a probability above a threshold that it meets of test of "offensiveness" link here.

I ask myself if MS is serious with this patent. The probability of false positives or altering meaning is high so that I can see damage suits arising. I also read the patent as being a hunting license rather than an existing device and ask myself why it was granted. The patent itself notes that a delay in transmission with humans reviewing the speech to determine offense has generally worked. Is this MS in its latest guise as patent troll?

The Patent Office seems to have lost all sense.

Security theater.

From Patently-O:

Does the Piracy Paradox apply for Patents?

"A 2006 paper by Kal Raustiala (UCLA) and Chris Sprigman (UVA) titled the Piracy Paradox discusses intellectual property and the fashion industry. The authors conclude that the legal ability of manufacturers to create knock-off versions of fashion designs actually promotes innovation and investment in that industry. Similar phenomena have been explained in other industries. In music, for instance, some studies have shown that peer-to-peer file sharing of copyrighted work actually increases sales because of the increased popularity of the artist. Since the dawn of radio, record companies have paid stations to broadcast their music - even though the broadcast would be considered infringement.

"My question is whether there are patent specific examples of this process going on? Are there times when 'piracy' of a technology actually encourages further R&D?"

It isn't unexpected, either that they did it, or that they did it while everyone was distracted with the financial crisis...but we now have a cabinet level copyright czar to go with our drug czar. Let us hope that the war against copying will be as effective as the war on drugs.

(graph from the American Journal of Public Health)

The position of drug czar was created in 1982 (according to Wikipedia). The dark lines are the prices of cocaine and heroin which have been falling ever since. Does the creation of a "czar" position mean that they have given up hope?

Addendum: There is something else interesting in that graph. One industry that operates entirely without the "benefit" of patents and copyright is the illegal drug industry. Yet it is a very innovative industry. For starters, as can be seen in the graph, prices have dropped quite a bit - over 15 years by a factor of about 5 (a little more allowing for inflation). Few industries can match that. And we know that there have been significant innovations: the invention of crystal methamphetamine; rock cocaine; stronger strains of marijuana and so forth. And presumably there have been innovations in methods of smuggling drugs into the country. Clearly these have been widely imitated. Which brings up the question: maybe if the government legalized recreational drugs, but subjected them to the same type of patent restrictions as ordinary pharmaceutical products - the price would go up instead of down?

Lessig's blog has posted an interesting letter from the McCain campaign to Youtube about their take-downs of videos that "are clearly privileged under the fair use doctrine".

and figured out it was a dud BEFORE the house voted it in?

(The vote was at 1:30 pm Eastern time.)

Addendum on credibility: We were repeatedly told that various bad things would happen if the bailout bill was not passed by a certain date, usually tomorrow or next Monday. The banking system would collapse. ATMs would stop working. Firms would stop be able to meet payroll. None of those things ever happened. One of the promised bad things was the collapse of the Asian stock market which woke up a week ago on Monday, saw that no bill was yet passed and survived. The house turned down the bill later in the day; the Asian market survived again. Today...Monday October 6, after the bill passed...the headline is "Asian markets plunge on crisis fears."