Mike Masnick recommends you listen to this podcast about today's preeminent Patent Troll, Intellectual Ventures link here (or read the transcript link here).

It covers a lot of familiar territory but brings the facts up to date. You will be appalled. But I was pleased to see it laid out with both precision and persuasive art. Just what is needed to get some political change on patents, particularly on software patents. The courts aren't going to change the law nor repair the incredible mess they and the Patent Office have created.

Cialis For Sale

Sexual pleasure is one of the things that most men need to make their lives interesting. Unfortunately, millions of men on this planet are deprived of that pleasure thanks to a medical condition called erectile dysfunction. This condition, perhaps better known as impotence is one of the leading causes of failed relationships and even broken marriages. If a man cannot satisfy his girlfriend, fiancee or wife in bed, she could leave him and search elsewhere. And if he can't have a good or any kind of penile erection, no amount of sweet talk or presents will help him.

Don't take me wrong, I'm not a sexist and I'm not trying to say that your loved one will leave you if you can't get her happy in bed, but you are making her quite disappointed here and she doesn't like it. Okay, maybe she won't go after another man, but this will drive a wedge between you two and, before you know it, you are sleeping in separate beds and only say "good morning" and such to one another. Do you want to spend the rest of your relationship with her like this?

Having an erectile dysfunction is not a matter to be taken lightly as you can see. It has to be taken care off quickly and with determination. One thing that you should never do in a situation like this is to deny the problem. Maybe you're right, who knows, but you are not an expert in these sort of things, so how would you know? Go see a doctor and ask for his opinion about this.

Don't take it as the end of the world if he says that you are indeed suffering from erectile dysfunction. Twenty or more years ago it might have been a big problem, but this is the 21st century and treating ED is a piece of cake with drugs like Cialis.

The "weekend pill" as it is known, because it lasts so much longer than other pills for erectile dysfunction is just the thing you need if you want to start impressing your partner in bed. Just one of these small yellow pills every day and pleasure is always there for the grabbing.

You don't even need a prescription if you want to buy Cialis. All you have to do is check a few online pharmacies and order some from them. Of course, you have to make sure that they are reputable and must feel out some forms, so they can be sure of your condition, but once you are through that little matter, you can order your Cialis. The package will be delivered to you in a quick and discreet matter. Most online pharmacy will make sure that your privacy is well protected by packing the bottle in a simple brown bag. Not even the post man will know what he just delivered.

Once you have your Cialis, you can begin using it right away and start impressing your loved one. Just remember that you only have her to impress, so don't overdo it.

Read her story on how it has hurt her here:

http://laurelrusswurm.wordpress.com/2011/07/21/copyright-and-me/

Rhianna and Def Jam Music must stand trial for being inspired by David LaChappelle's ideas regarding photographic images.

They didn't copy a damned thing. They were only inspired by someone else's work which influenced they way in which they created a new work - the same way all creation happens on some level.

For that, they must now stand trial.

The court will try and tell you that the Defendants here have "copied" what amounts to "fixed expression" and that copyright doesn't cover "ideas" - but please scroll down to pages 31-34 of the PDF file of the decision below and then try to say the following to yourself with a straight face: "Copyright doesn't protect ideas, only the fixed expression of ideas."

This decision is an absolute farce and outrage. But what it is not is an aberration. It is instead an accurate and standard application of what our current monstrous copyright laws have become, and why anyone who cares about free speech, civil rights and basic human freedoms must now support serious copyright reform in order to roll back its scope.

Read and see for yourself just how far copyright goes in placing a stranglehold over ideas here:

http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/07/21/LaChapelle%20Rihanna%20lawsuit%207-21.pdf

A Boston Tea Party for the Digital Age anyone?

Mike Masnick at Techdirt points to the blowback over JSTOR's creeping attempts to monopolize the distribution of academic works.

Check out his comments and links to the torrent of free public domain research that was formerly hidden behind JSTOR's pay walls:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110721/11122615195/aaron-swartz-indictment-leading-people-to-upload-jstor-research-to-file-sharing-sites.shtml#comments

Greg Maxwell's announcement is worth reprinting in its entirety here:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1

This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling 33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and which should be available to everyone at no cost, but most have previously only been made available at high prices through paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR.

Limited access to the documents here is typically sold for $19 USD per article, though some of the older ones are available as cheaplyas $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Also included is the basic factual metadata allowing you to locate works by title, author, or publication date, and a checksum file to allow you to check for corruption.

ef8c02959e947d7f4e4699f399ade838431692d972661f145b782c2fa3ebcc6a sha256sum.txt

I've had these files for a long time, but I've been afraid that if I published them I would be subject to unjust legal harassment by those who profit from controlling access to these works.

I now feel that I've been making the wrong decision.

On July 19th 2011, Aaron Swartz was criminally charged by the US Attorney General's office for, effectively, downloading too many academic papers from JSTOR.

Academic publishing is an odd system -- the authors are not paid for their writing, nor are the peer reviewers (they're just more unpaid academics), and in some fields even the journal editors are unpaid. Sometimes the authors must even pay the publishers.

And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously expensive pieces of literature you can buy. In the past, the high access fees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals, but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete.

As far as I can tell, the money paid for access today serves little significant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models. The "publish or perish" pressure in academia gives the authors an impossibly weak negotiating position, and the existing system has enormous inertia.

Those with the most power to change the system--the long-tenured luminary scholars whose works give legitimacy and prestige to the journals, rather than the other way around--are the least impacted by its failures. They are supported by institutions who invisibly provide access to all of the resources they need. And as the journals depend on them, they may ask for alterations to the standard contract without risking their career on the loss of a publication offer. Many don't even realize the extent to which academic work is inaccessible to the general public, nor do they realize what sort of work is being done outside universities that would benefit by it.

Large publishers are now able to purchase the political clout needed to abuse the narrow commercial scope of copyright protection, extending it to completely inapplicable areas: slavish reproductions of historic documents and art, for example, and exploiting the labors of unpaid scientists. They're even able to make the taxpayers pay for their attacks on free society by pursuing criminal prosecution (copyright has classically been a civil matter) and by burdening public institutions with outrageous subscription fees.

Copyright is a legal fiction representing a narrow compromise: we give up some of our natural right to exchange information in exchange for creating an economic incentive to author, so that we may all enjoy more works. When publishers abuse the system to prop up their existence, when they misrepresent the extent of copyright coverage, when they use threats of frivolous litigation to suppress the dissemination of publicly owned works, they are stealing from everyone else.

Several years ago I came into possession, through rather boring and lawful means, of a large collection of JSTOR documents.

These particular documents are the historic back archives of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society--a prestigious scientific journal with a history extending back to the 1600s.

The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones published prior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain, total some 18,592 papers and 33 gigabytes of data.

The documents are part of the shared heritage of all mankind, and are rightfully in the public domain, but they are not available freely. Instead the articles are available at $19 each--for one month's viewing, by one person, on one computer. It's a steal. From you.

When I received these documents I had grand plans of uploading them to Wikipedia's sister site for reference works, Wikisource--where they could be tightly interlinked with Wikipedia, providing interesting historical context to the encyclopedia articles. For example, Uranus was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel; why not take a look at the paper where he originally disclosed his discovery? (Or one of the several follow on publications about its satellites, or the dozens of other papers he authored?)

But I soon found the reality of the situation to be less than appealing: publishing the documents freely was likely to bring frivolous litigation from the publishers.

As in many other cases, I could expect them to claim that their slavish reproduction--scanning the documents--created a new copyright interest. Or that distributing the documents complete with the trivial watermarks they added constituted unlawful copying of that mark. They might even pursue strawman criminal charges claiming that whoever obtained the files must have violated some kind of anti-hacking laws.

In my discreet inquiry, I was unable to find anyone willing to cover the potentially unbounded legal costs I risked, even though the only unlawful action here is the fraudulent misuse of copyright by JSTOR and the Royal Society to withhold access from the public to that which is legally and morally everyone's property.

In the meantime, and to great fanfare as part of their 350th anniversary, the RSOL opened up "free" access to their historic archives--but "free" only meant "with many odious terms", and access was limited to about 100 articles.

All too often journals, galleries, and museums are becoming not disseminators of knowledge--as their lofty mission statements suggest--but censors of knowledge, because censoring is the one thing they do better than the Internet does. Stewardship and curation are valuable functions, but their value is negative when there is only one steward and one curator, whose judgment reigns supreme as the final word on what everyone else sees and knows. If their recommendations have value they can be heeded without the coercive abuse of copyright to silence competition.

The liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientific inquiry. More than in any other area, the application of restrictive copyright is inappropriate for academic works: there is no sticky question of how to pay authors or reviewers, as the publishers are already not paying them. And unlike 'mere' works of entertainment, liberal access to scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind. Our continued survival may even depend on it.

If I can remove even one dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonous industry which acts to suppress scientific and historic understanding, then whatever personal cost I suffer will be justified--it will be one less dollar spent in the war against knowledge. One less dollar spent lobbying for laws that make downloading too many scientific papers a crime.

I had considered releasing this collection anonymously, but others pointed out that the obviously overzealous prosecutors of Aaron Swartz would probably accuse him of it and add it to their growing list of ridiculous charges. This didn't sit well with my conscience, and I generally believe that anything worth doing is worth attaching your name to.

I'm interested in hearing about any enjoyable discoveries or even useful applications which come of this archive.

- ---- Greg Maxwell - July 20th 2011 gmaxwell@gmail.com Bitcoin: 14csFEJHk3SYbkBmajyJ3ktpsd2TmwDEBb

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Direct link to Maxwell's file and announcement here:

https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosophical_Transactions_of_the_Royal_Society__fro

Via CourtHouseNews.com:

MANHATTAN (CN) - Major record labels must face a consolidated class action lawsuit claiming they fixed prices on digital music, a federal judge ruled.

The defendants include Bertelsmann, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Sony Corporation of America, Capitol Records (dba EMI Music North America), EMI Group North America, Capitol-EMI Music, Virgin Records America, Time Warner, UMG Recordings and Warner Music Group, which allegedly control 80 percent of the digital music in the United States.

Consumers claim in the proposed class action that all of the labels signed distribution agreements with two joint-venture entities called MusicNet and Pressplay, through which they allegedly conspired to fix the price, terms of sale and restrictions on digital music.

Each licensing agreement allegedly included publicly hidden Most Favored Nation clauses, guaranteeing that one licensor would receive at least equivalent licensing terms as another licensor. In effect, these agreements set wholesale price floor at 70 cents per song for Internet music, increasing prices as the cost to distribute Internet music fell to essentially zero, consumer class says.

More details here:

http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/07/19/38289.htm

A copy of the ruling itself can be found here:

http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/07/19/Digital%20Music%20Antitrust.pdf

In my mind, "ethics" and "law abiding" are not always synonymous. Witness this:

BOSTON (AP) -- A Harvard University fellow studying ethics has been accused of using the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's computer network to steal nearly 5 million academic articles.

A federal indictment released Tuesday accused 24-year-old Aaron Swartz of stealing the documents from JSTOR, a subscription service that offers digitized copies of articles from more than 1,000 academic journals. ... Prosecutors say he intended to distribute the articles on file-sharing websites.

Because Lord knows that if he got away with this, the incentive to write academic articles would completely collapse.

Shouldn't the AP put the word "steal" in quotes here? Amazing how the whole "theft" lingo false meme has so causally pervaded discussions of IP. Might I suggest he has been accused of "liberating information without authorization"?

AP copy editors, take note.

This guy faces 35 years in prison.

Read the story here:

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_ACADEMIC_PAPERS_HACKED?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-07-19-14-09-49

Matt Yglesias fantasizes about a world without resource limits link here.

The fantasy depends on unlimited energy and the Star Trek replicator which produces an unlimited supply of whatever goods are desired. The dream becomes a nightmare when intellectual property is introduced, followed by lawyers, and bureaucrats to enforce these rights.

The fantasy originated in Peter Frase's blog, where he writes, "In the process of trying to pull together some thoughts on intellectual property, zero marginal-cost goods, immaterial labor, and the incipient transition to a rentier form of capitalism, I've been working out a thought experiment: a possible future society I call anti-Star Trek. Consider this a stab at a theory of posterity." link here.

Both are entertaining to read, but they also have a moral. As the cost of goods is reduced, we can contemplate a world in which for all practical purposes, necessities are free so that people only work to spend their lives in entertaining or educating themselves.

There is a discontinuity, however, as we are experiencing even now. As invention goes rapidly ahead, we find ways to assure that marginal costs do not fall to zero. Monopoly comes to mind as the biggest cause.

And doesn't this help explain the decline in growth hypothesized in Tyler Cowen's recent book, The Great Stagnation link here?

As reported previously on the sale of Nortel patents link here, six of Google's rivals most importantly, Apple, Microsoft and Research in Motion worked together to make a combined bid and won Antitrust officials probing sale of patents to Google's rivals"> link here. Now, "Federal antitrust enforcers are scrutinizing whether Google, often accused of abusing its Web search power, is facing an unfair coalition of companies that could block its popular Android mobile phone software, according to a source close to the matter."

Unusual for it, the Washington Post's report goes on to raise questions about the wisdom and legality of the increasingly dysfunctional patent system "where even the most amorphous ideas can be rubber-stamped by the government and protected for years."

It goes on, "...companies are increasingly arming themselves with ever-growing patent portfolios to initiate or shield themselves from costly lawsuits.'

"The result, ...companies with formidable patent portfolios can use them as cudgels against rivals, while those with fewer patents risk being eaten alive in court."

"For years tech companies did not go after one another in patent lawsuits. But that has changed recently as the battle to dominate the mobile phone space has grown fiercer. Google's Android operating system has rocketed to the top slot as the most popular in the world, just ahead of Apple's and RIM's BlackBerry."

"The battle to beat Android has already turned into a legal bonanza. Apple is suing HTC, Samsung and Motorola, all makers of phones with the Android platform. Oracle is seeking up to $6.1 billion in a patent lawsuit against Google, claiming Android infringes upon Oracle's Java patents. And Microsoft is suing Motorola over its Android line."

Stay tuned, but there is (some?) hope when the Post can actually be critical of this tragi-comedy in which the United States commits hara kiri by a thousand cuts, in the slow motion expansion of patent monopolies.

Kevin Drum says: So then, a question for people who think that software patents are out of control: what should the rule be? No patents at all on software or business processes? Probably not. But if patents aren't flatly banned on business processes, is there some kind of rule that would raise the bar in a reasonable way on just how novel something has to be to deserve a patent? I hear a lot of complaints about software and business process patents, and I'm sympathetic to them. But exactly what kind of reform would improve things?

"No patents at all on software or business processes? Probably not." Interesting that he doesn't explain why not. In the case of software patents the case for getting rid of them entirely is clear. The work of James Bessen leaves no scope for doubt.