Felix Salmon alerts us to two Kauffman Bloggers Forum lectures with short online video-lectures on drug patents link here.

Salmon writes, "Two highlights of the Kauffman Bloggers Forum were the presentations on the broken nature of the pharmaceuticals market. And they came from opposite ends of the left-right spectrum: Megan McArdle went first, followed by Dean Baker."

Worth watching.

The Economist takes a look at the movie business and calls it ailing link here. It sketches out the trends and competition-induced changes from the rise of new technologies and the responses of consumers. Consumption has gone from movie houses to homes, from tape to DVDs to Blu-ray, from sales to rentals, from video stores to kiosks like RedBox and now to streaming on line. One gets the impression that this is a vibrant industry with lots of innovation but the industry sees its revenues declining and profits under pressure. Competition has kept the adoption of new technology rapid despite attempts to suppress it.

The article fails, however, to mention the fact of copyright and the long and stringent monopoly it provides, far in excess of the minimum to induce investment or innovation. That is evident by the rush to reduce prices and expand the services. Nor does the author address how the creator of these stories and films gets a very small part of the total revenue generated by the industry. I almost forgot the lawyers and litigation as a significant barrier to competition and maintaining prices higher than they would otherwise be.

It is difficult to imagine what the industry would be like without copyright. Even more innovation and lower prices? In reaching a conclusion, it is hard not to conclude that the consumer would not be still better off; he pays for all of this, in the form of high theater prices, and expensive media sales and rentals. This could not occur without copyright.

Wired.com notes:

On March 7, Camelot Distribution Group, an obscure film company in Los Angeles, unveiled its latest and potentially most profitable release: a federal lawsuit against BitTorrent users who allegedly downloaded the company's 2010 B-movie revenge flick Nude Nuns With Big Guns between January and March of this year. The single lawsuit targets 5,865 downloaders, making it theoretically worth as much as $879,750,000 more money than the U.S. box-office gross for Avatar.

Read the rest of the article here:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/bittorrent/

That is law professor David Post's take on the continuing struggle between Viacom and Youtube which he writes about here:

http://volokh.com/2011/04/01/of-possible-interest/''

John Bennet draws our attention to a blogpost by Felix Salmon at Reuters.It's about a report by "Joe Karaganis and a big team of international researchers" which unfortunately I seem to be unable to access, at least without paying a fee. The report debunks all the made-up numbers used by the big media firms to direct U.S. antipiracy policy. The blog post is worth reading, and post a comment if you can figure out how to access the report. (There is link to scribd, but that site appears to be unusable.)

Some links:

from Michael Hills (Please note, the download link will expire after 120 hours from now or after 2 attempts, which ever event happens first.) the link works and I now have a copy - very good report

John Bennett gives a link to the movie.

Mike Masnick's blog post

John Fountain sent me an email about the first antibiotics, the sulfa drugs. I will quote (slightly edited) what he said:

I found an fascinating example of the way in which competition based on an old (1909) but expired (by 1930's) patent on a sulfanimide used in the dye industry ushered in in the antibiotic revolution in the mid 1930's.

The basics are contained in a wikipedia article.

The interesting facts are that the commercially developed chemical entity (Bayer I think) called Prontosil, for which patents were granted in the 30's, proved to be a flop commercially...because in the human body it broke down into bits and pieces. One piece - the "sulfa" - was the real "active ingredient. I like the authors description here "The result was a sulfa craze"! I guess at that time - 1930's - chemicals naturally occuring in the body weren't themselves patentable!!

Among the fastest growing problems within the realm of malignant monopolies is the disturbing frequency of abuse that lawyers now use to try and keep court documents under seal and away from public scrutiny. This results in a monopoly of information that is often abused by corporate powers within the legal system.

It is gratifying to know that the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has sanctioned at least one attorney for abusing that process in the course of a patent infringement lawsuit.

There are a few dense legal passages in the opinion, but its worth a read if you have the time.

The full opinion in PDF format can be found here:

http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/images/stories/opinions-orders/11-m976%20order.pdf

The latest issue of the American Bar Association Journal has a well written article explaining the most important patent case to reach the Supreme Court since the Bilski decision.

There's a major legal issue: To what extent should patents be presumed valid? [Microsoft] has been trying for years to get the Supreme Court to rule on this issue, and it appears the company is on the brink of success.

"This is a very important case," says Los Angeles attorney Glenn W. Trost. "The Supreme Court, for the first time, is going to squarely address the quantum of proof needed to establish the invalidity of a patent in patent litigation."

Read the full article here:

http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/court_may_make_it_easier_to_invalidate_an_invention/

It is especially funny to read the quotes from hard-core supporters of the current patent regime in this article, who all seem hell-bent on protecting their occupational turf (even if it means making it more difficult for genuine innovators to overturn weak or fraudulently granted patents).

However, the article does a good job at presenting both sides. Well worth the time to read.

John Diaz, editorial page editor at the San Francisco Chronicle weighs in on the censoring taking place from the overreach by copyright maximalists combined with fuzzy fair use guidelines.

His full editorial is well worth a read here:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/20/INMS1IBQU2.DTL

The opening paragraphs...

"Slaying the Dragon: Reloaded," a compelling new documentary that critiques the portrayal of Asian women in U.S. visual media, has drawn protests from an unlikely quarter. It wasn't from Hollywood, which was deservedly scoured for its depiction of Asian women in films from "Rush Hour 2" to "Sex and the City." It wasn't from conservative commentators claiming political correctness run amok.

Instead, the objection to the documentary by Elaine Kim, a UC Berkeley professor of Asian American studies, emerged from six Asian American filmmakers just before its premiere last week at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Their complaint: that she used clips of their work without seeking their permission.

Yet there are some who still insist that the current copyright regime doesn't pose a censorship problem (or minimize the importance of censorship if it doesn't involve grievances directed at the government). Presumably, these critics would consider documentarian Elaine Kim a free speech "opportunist" in her criticism of the current copyright regime.

It has been over a decade before Napster effectively ended copyright for recorded music. Music sales are down. But did copyright encourage creation of new music? Has the quantity of new music suffered on account of the effective elimination of copyright? We now have a detailed study. From the abstract:

In the decade since Napster, file-sharing has undermined the protection that copyright affords recorded music, reducing recorded music sales. What matters for consumers, however, is not sellers' revenue but the surplus they derive from new music. The legal monopoly created by copyright is justified by its encouragement of the creation of new works, but there is little evidence on this relationship...We assemble a novel dataset on the number of high quality works released annually, since 1960, derived from retrospective critical assessments of music such best-of-the-decade lists. This allows a comparison of the quantity of new albums since Napster to 1) its pre-Napster level, 2) pre-Napster trends, and 3) a possible control, the volume of new songs since the iTunes Music Store's revitalization of the single. We find no evidence that changes since Napster have affected the quantity of new recorded music or artists coming to market.