"Europe's highest court has been urged to declare stem cell patents immoral and therefore illegal. Researchers warn this will destroy prospects for stem cell treatments in Europe, driving potential investors to patent-friendly China, Japan and the US." The article is here.

Wow! Patent friendly China....The rest of the article doesn't give you a lot of confidence in "scientists."

Via Tim Hull at CourthouseNews.com:

A federal judge blasted Righthaven's copyright-collection business model in a ruling that says an Oregon nonprofit was justified through fair use to post an article by the Las Vegas Review Journal.

"[Righthaven's] litigation strategy has a chilling effect on potential fair uses of Righthaven-owned articles, diminishes public access to the facts contained therein, and does nothing to advance the Copyright Act's purpose of promoting artistic creation," U.S. District Judge James Mahan ruled Friday.

Nevada-based Righthaven sues bloggers and websites for copyright infringement if it finds that they have not received permission before posting articles or photographs by publications it oversees. The Las Vegas Review-Journal assigns copyrights to Righthaven for the purpose of filing such lawsuits.

Read the rest of the coverage on this story here:

http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/04/25/36074.htm

Dear Professors Boldrin and Levine,

We are writing to you regarding your book, Against Intellectual Monopoly.

We have both enjoyed, and been stimulated by, your book, and are in considerable agreement with your overall thesis that intellectual property protection is not conducive to technological innovation, at least not in the way claimed in standard economics. One of us has found it an invaluable help in teaching and research.

However, we would like to bring to your attention some facts about the invention of the radio, which you discuss in chapter 8 of the book. In it you refer to Hong's work and mention the roles of Lodge, Tesla and Popov in undermining Marconi's claim to be the inventor of the device, but not the role of Jagadis Chunder Bose.

>From the very beginning Marconi was mired in controversy regarding his claim. The question was reconsidered in the early 1990s by Phillips (1993), who concluded that Marconi did not invent the detector that he claimed to have developed. However, Phillips was unable to locate the true inventor of the so-called "Italian navy coherer". The mystery was resolved in a paper by Probir Bandyopandhyay, who provided convincing evidence that the real inventor of this device was Jagadis Chunder Bose, Professor of Physics at Calcutta University (Bandopadhyay, 1998). The device is described in a paper that appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (Bose, 1899). In fact, somewhat earlier, Bose had developed what seems to be the world's first solid state diode detector for radiation and presented his findings at the Royal Society, London, on January 28, 1897. A report of this presentation appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (Bose, 1897).

The centennial of this last paper was celebrated in a special section attached to the special edition of the proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the invention of the transistor (IEEE, 1998). The papers by Bose, as well as that of Phillips, are reproduced in that publication. A brief summary of these developments appears in Mervis and Bagla (1998).

We find it extraordinary that Hong is apparently unaware of the IEEE publication. Although Hong does cite Phillips's paper, we find that he does so in a somewhat misleading way and makes only cursory references to Bose. In particular, he does not refer to the crucial papers of Bose cited above.

We hope you find these observations useful. We believe that they not only serve to debunk the claims of Marconi's priority, but also to provide another illustration of the fact that inventions do occur without the protection of intellectual property.

Sincerely yours,

Samir Bose Professor Emeritus Department of Physics

Amitava Krishna Dutt Professor of Economics and Political Science Department of Political Science

University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556

References

Bandyopadhyay, Probir (1998). "Sir J. C. Bose's diode detector received Marconi's first transatlantic wireless signal of December 1901 (The "Italian Navy coherer" scandal revisited), in IEEE (1998).

Bose, Jagadis Chunder (1897). "On the selective conductivity exhibited by certain polarizing substances", Proceedings of the Royal Society, vol. LX, no. 366, 433-36, reprinted in IEEE (1998).

Bose, Jagadis Chunder (1899). "On a self-recovering coherer and the study of cohering action of different metals", Proceedings of the Royal Society, vol. LXV, no, 415, 165-72, reprinted in IEEE (1998).

Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (1998). Proceedings of the IEEE, Special Issue: 50th anniversary of the transistor, including a special issue section: Centennial of semiconductor diode detector, January.

Mervis, Jeffrey and Bagla, Pallava (1998). "Bose credited with key role in Marconi's breakthrough", Science, Vol. 279, p. 476.

Philips, Vivian J. (1993). "The Italian navy coherer affair: a turn of the century scandal", Proceedings of the IEEE, Series A, vol. 140, no. 3, 175-85, reprinted in IEEE (1998).

IMSLP.org holds an extensive collection of public domain musical scores and is reputed to be the largest such collection world-wide. Established in Canada in 2006 by a music college student, and developed entirely by volunteers, the attention to copyright law was scrupulously maintained. Yet the site went offline in 2007 at the insistence of a European music publisher. The complaint was that while some scores may be public domain material in Canada, this may not be the case in Europe. As the BBC noted then, this raised the question of whether the public domain can only exist in an offline form. The site returned a year later and continues to thrive, despite some mistaken press on the part of the New York Times.

However, two days ago, the U.K. Music Publishers Association succeeded in blocking access to the site, via a notice-and-takedown complaint to Go-Daddy (the register of the IMSLP domain name). Go-Daddy immediately froze the domain name. Yet there was no legitimacy to the complaint; at issue was the status of The Bells, by Rachmaninoff. This composition is not only public domain material in Canada but also in the United States. IMSLP posted a detailed response here and filed a counter claim.

Go-Daddy has reversed the action, but this is a sad reminder of the ills of the notice-and-takedown regime. Due process is not the first step, it is the last.

James Boyle has written a new book--The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind--on IP which is notably available for downloading at no cost as well as for purchase in hard copy link here. There is much more to explore at his website, so read the book and visit his website. This is just what is needed to get more people on the side of rational public policy and against the monopolists.

Nina Paley blogs here She posts this on her cartoon site: "Copying is an act of love. Please copy & share."

Litigation continues between image content provider Perfect 10 and Google, with Perfect 10 claiming that Google is liable for caching websites that hosted infringing photos of nude models, and hosting infringing images uploaded by Blogger users (the free web publishing tool owned by Google).

Corynne McSherry at the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains the details concerning the latest round of litigation:

A quick recap: In 2004, porn company and frequent litigator Perfect 10 sued Google for direct and secondary copyright infringement. Perfect 10 claimed that Google violated its copyrights by linking to websites that hosted infringing material, caching websites that hosted infringing photos of nude models, and hosting infringing images uploaded by Blogger users. In 2007, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a preliminary injunction in favor of Perfect 10 on its direct infringement claims, and sent the case back to the district court for a determination of some of the secondary infringement claims. Google moved for summary judgment, asserting that it was protected from secondary liability by the DMCA safe harbors.

...Judge Howard Matz of the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles mostly agreed with Google, whittling Perfect 10's remaining case down to a small subset of allegedly infringing images. Why? Mainly because Perfect 10 didn't trouble itself to provide Google with the information Google needed to figure out what to take down in a form that Google could readily use.

Be sure to read Corynne's complete analysis here:

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/07/perfect-10-v-google-round-3-goes-google-no-sloppy

You can read Judge Mat'z full decision here (in PDF):

https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/Perfect10_v_Google/P10_v_Google_on_remand.pdf

Yesterday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments on Judge Matz's decision. You can listen to how it all went down here (* requires Windows Media Player):

http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/media/view_subpage.php?pk_id=0000007250

You gotta love the part about 15:50 in when the tech-savy Chief Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski asks Perfect 10's attorney in annoyance: "Have you ever heard of the word 'Yes'? Is your answer 'Yes'? I don't want a whole story."

Writing as Schumpeter, The Economist speculates on how far to push the idea that companies have the same rights as real people (Paywall workaround: enter the link in Google) link here. That started me off, speculating on civil rights for companies and trade unions as  court imputed rights notably lacking grounding in the constitution or in common sense. Who dreamed up the idea that companies are persons? That got me to thinking about how intellectual property in general is anchored in the constitution but it too has no physical dimensions; I can't see it or pick it up or lock it up. Therefore, intellectual property is a legal construct or attribute, also lacking in common sense.

One notable difference results; the civil rights of persons have a grounding in the constitution to the extent that personhood is clearly defined there. But it is not. A major further consequence is that personhood gets defined by the courts, hopefully applying common sense but with no guarantees.

In contrast, the constitution allows the Congress "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." No room for the courts in that until someone's rights are violated and he shows he has a substantial interest sufficient to satisfy the courts and they agree to hearing the case. Thus, changing the law pretty much requires getting the Congress to act.

Schumpeter has a lot of other interesting things to say, so read the article. Among them is a defense of the personhood of corporations which struck me as way over the top. But it is thought-provoking.

Reihan Salam of National Review weighs in and concludes that "the case against panicking over media piracy seems pretty strong."

Read his thoughts on the subject here:

http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/263965/rethinking-media-piracy-reihan-salam

Andrew Cohen over at the Atlantic has a good primer on the important argument taking place this week at the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals:

In a closely-watched oral argument Monday at a federal courthouse in Washington, the core questions of the case read like scripts from a college philosophy exam: are isolated human genes and the subsequent comparisons of their sequences patentable? Can one company own a monopoly on such genes without violating the rights of others? They are multi-billion dollar questions, the judicially-sanctioned answers to which will have enormous ramifications for the worlds of medicine, science, law, business, politics and religion.

Even the name of the case at the U.S. Circuit Court for the Federal Circuit -- Association of Molecular Pathology, et al. v United States Patent and Trademark Office, et al -- oozes significance. The appeals court judges have been asked to determine whether seven existing patents covering two genes -- BRCA1 and BRCA2 (a/k/a "Breast Cancer Susceptibility Genes 1 and 2") -- are valid under federal law or, instead, fall under statutory exceptions that preclude from patentability what the law identifies as "products of nature..."

Read the whole thing here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/04/nature-vs-nuture-the-continuing-saga-of-the-gene-patenting-case/73359/