19-0. There, I said it. The NFL Patriots are apparently pursuing steps to trademark "19-0" and thus hinder any team that would actually have a perfect season from using its actual win-loss result.

The trademark application would not prevent newspapers from using 19-0 in their columns, as the application is visibly only for silly knick knacks with a 19-0 mark. But the principle is vexing, like trademarking three-peat.

A story out of Korea today reports that the "Coalition of Anti-Privacy in the Korean Movie Industry" is pushing to close down eight P2P websites for pirating their movies link here. `Internet users illegally downloading movies and recklessly reproducing them is rampant here,'' said Kim Ji-hoo, spokeswoman for the filmmakers' rights group, as quoted by The Korea Times. The article produces some no-doubt-spurious statistics on the prevalence of such piracy and the cost to the industry to make its PR point. It also is reported to have started an education campaign to inform the public about the high cost and how wrong it is. Right out of the MPAA playbook.

This story makes the same point I just made in the comment on enforcing IP rights in China. These countries will enforce IP when they have domestic constituencies that will benefit. I wonder how the defense, that a site "making available" does not constitute piracy, will play in Korea?

TV network ABC's widely reported Obama-Clinton debate last week has produced some interesting IP related fallout link here. ABC tried to restrict outtakes by the other networks to no more than 30 seconds in order to protect its investment in the program from competitors. The restriction was widely ignored. Apparently, the other networks believe that "fair use" cannot be so narrowly defined.

Will ABC sue? Seems unlikely, but stay tuned.

China's patent regime (and I"P" system generally) is growing like a weed. Trademark applications there have increased 60% in five years. The number of patents issued has almost doubled to 850,000.

China has added 50 courts that handle I"P" cases. The lawyers are getting rich and, of course, are preventing non-Chinese firms from filing patents or representing clients in court. In fact, the lawyers are the main beneficiaries of the monopoly formerly known as intellectual property. Isn't monopoly great?

The Economist notes that under Mao private property was considered to be theft of the masses. However, it gets it wrong when it implies that the patent laws enacted in China starting in 1985 (and enforced starting in 2001) were consistent with private property.

Patents are a kind of theft of the masses. As Prodhoun should have said, "intellectual property is theft."

The site Make Textbooks Affordable has opened a petition already signed by 1000 faculty to declare "their preference for high-quality, affordable textbooks, including open textbooks, over expensive commercial textbooks." Well, that seems to be like an obvious preference, but I think the point here is to demonstrate that there is a demand for open textbooks, which should encourage some supply to form.

The fact is that there are already quite a few open textbooks. See the list on the site of the petitioners, or Textbook Revolution, or WikiBooks. Finally a list for Economics on IDEAS/RePEc.

This is a story that won't end here, but raises a lot of important issues for academia. As do many universities, Georgia State produces on-line study materials from published material, for use as course readings link here. It is now being sued by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Sage Publications for copyright infringement. The complaint, violating publishers rights, is based on the extent of the copying because it goes way beyond fair use. I would expect Georgia State to lose the case under current copyright law since it had not obtained permission or paid for a license.

In the absence of changing the law, the only way around this is to get authors to make the texts available on line, perhaps for limited uses, as our own David Levine has done and allow commercial publication with this understanding. As we have written before, academic authors need to be urged to adopt such an arrangement, perhaps using a little friendly collegial pressure. That will still leave a lot of published material that would be useful for courses but could not be used without permission. Would a change in copyright be feasible that made such use an exception? That seems unlikely, but worth thinking about.

Trademarking a name to prevent others from selling similar goods under a similar name makes only sense if indeed you were the first one to do so since the law was in place. In a fight that has now lasted a decade, the village of Champagne (Switzerland), which happens to be producing wine since at least the 17th century, has been told that it could not use its own name. That name is reserved for wine coming from the French region of Champagne.

Now, the French are big on "appellation d'origine contrôlée", that is, the origin of wines needs to be certified. Given the wide variety of wines, and the fact that some wine growing locations have a bigger reputation, one may want to pretend to be from a region. In your are not from the region, that is fraud that should be covered by usual commercial law (false advertising). Where it gets iffy is when the wine maker is located in the fringes of the region. Does he really belong? This is the core of the French regulation, trying to prevent the dilution of a name.

What the Champagne region (France) is enforcing is preventing the (non-sparkling) wine of Champagne (Switzerland) from diluting the reputation of the Champagne name. Demand for the sparkling Champagne is high, so this did not prevent the Champagne region from expanding its name definition, thus acting exactly against the principle of "appellation d'origine contrôlée" it says it is defending. Sad.

An interesting twist to this is that there is a bakery in the Swiss village selling sticks it calls "flûtes de Champagne", an obvious pun on the situation. They are wildly popular in Switzerland.

Stephen Spear's post yesterday link here reminded me that I had started saving up ridiculous patent, copyright, and trademark stories. I'm not sure repeating these stories changes opinion since the basic rationale for IP protection, that it promotes innovation, is firmly embedded in popular thinking and assiduously promoted by the IP lawyers and owners. But it should, particularly when the legal process can't distinguish what is significant from the absurd.

Anyway, here is the story: T-mobile is demanding that gadget blog site Engadget Mobile stop using magenta in its logo on the grounds that it will confuse customers link here. This is a repeat of a suit that T-mobile brought last year against my-favorite-book.com, a book-on-demand-publisher launched in Germany last May link here. That was a particularly outrageous suit because my-favorite-book varies the color from one ad to another. Neither defendant appears to have stopped using the color.

How do we account for this loss of sense among the plaintiffs? Are they underemployed lawyers who need the fees? Or do they expect the defendant to back down out of fear of the publicity or unwillingness to risk the costs of a court battle? Assuming the case gets to court, why don't judges fine the plantiffs for bringing niggling charges?

Maybe we should have a contest for the worst example.

The always invaluable Technological Innovation and Intellectual Property newsletter is out. This time a series of posts based on the new book by James Bessen and Michael Meurer, Patent Failure.

Writing in the Washington Post, Kim Hart notes that Imeem.com has made a go of its music sharing business by illegally sharing copyrighted music and building up a substantial following so that one copyright owner, Warner Music, decided to buy a piece of Imeem and make its entire catalog available for streaming (not downloading) link here. Warner found it an inexpensive way to advertise and increase demand for downloads. It also shared in Imeem's revenue from advertising on its website.

Part of Imeem's attraction is its role as "an online community where millions of fans and artists discover new music, videos, and photos, and share their tastes with friends." Hart reports that companies wishing to follow Imeem's illegal path are less likely to displace those first to market and to encounter more serious opposition from copyright owners who can look to increasingly expensive enforcement.

For example, "Sonific, an online service that allows users to stream music to blogs or personal Web pages, is trying to strike licensing deals with large record labels to expand its music library, which now has about 250,000 tracks from smaller, independent labels. But Gerd Leonhard, the site's founder, said it cannot get the interest of labels because of its relatively small pool of 100,000 users."

My first reaction to this story is that the web made copyright irrelevant. But in the end, we still have the problem that copyright gives the first or early to market suppliers an enormous advantage, for which the consumer pays. It effectively limits competition.