Check out this controversy concerning the 'unauthorized' use of a photo which depicts the President smoking when he was a student:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/reliable-source/2009/08/rs-norml5.html

The person who snapped a photo of Obama smoking a cigarette in a manner similar to joint objects that others might use it to make "political" statements.

"They do not have my permission," said Jack, a psychology professor in Minnesota. These photos "are absolutely not to be used in this way. ... I really made a grand effort to do this properly, and I'm very irritated. If I'd wanted these to be used for political purposes, I'd have sold them to Hillary years ago."

Even under the current stifling copyright regime, the claim is problematic. The creators of the poster cropped a significant part of the original photo and put a green tint on it. The only 'creative' element they ultimately copied is the pose supplied by Obama himself - not any creative elements that are inherent to the underlying photograph. There would seem to be a strong case to be made that is an instance of 'transformational' fair use.

Regardless, some of the comments made at the Washington Post sight are sad to read. People are happy to censor political speech under the guise that such speech is somehow "stealing" from other people.

You just knew this was coming eventually:

TechRadium, of Sugar Land, claims it has patents to what it calls the "mass notification" concept. According to the complaint, tweeting infringes on its "systems and methods" of three patents.

More details at Wired.com here.

Via my colleague Michael Trick, Groklaw has an interesting post pointing out that the recently unveiled Wolfram|Alpha computation service makes some pretty strong claims if not to copyright, then to the right for attribution, for results the service returns.

For example, if you plug x^2*sin(x) into the search window, you will get back a graph of this function, as well as a number different series representations for the function. Wolfram|Alpha claims that these materials are protected. Individual use of them must be attributed, and any commercial use requires a specific commercial license. The problem with this, though, is that any table of mathematical formulas will provide both the graphs and series representations for this and many other functions. Furthermore, it could be reasonably argued that these are facts, which generally can't be copyrighted.

The Groklaw post contrasts this with Google's terms of service, which basically says you can't use the service to break the law.

I would also contrast Wolfram|Alpha's service with that of Economagic, which provides publicly available economic data, and, for subscribers, the ability to generate graphs, run regressions, download data to spreadsheets, and do other kinds of data analysis. None of these results are held to be protected, and Economagic requires no specific attribution. There are also no limitations or additional requirements for any commercial use of the service. The subscription fee is also easily within reach of any economics graduate student (which is the site's target audience).

So, I would have to agree with the Groklaw post that Wolfram|Alpha seems to be overreaching.

In What Are Words Worth?, the author writes:

I was listening to a podcast talk from Mises University 2009 the other night called "Intellectual Property and Libertarianism", in which speaker Stephan Kinsella made the usual Slashdotty-type case against IP from a libertarian perspective. This was novel for me, perhaps because libertarians tend to be very defensive of property rights, such as Ayn Rand's assertion of IP as a right to the products of a person's own mind.

Kinsella rejects Rand explicitly, saying her case offers little more than deification of the creator. His counter-argument is interesting: IP is inconsistent with property rights because it violates the rights of others to use their property. To wit, if I own a typewriter and a stack of paper, or a CD burner and some blank discs, then those should be mine to do with as I see fit. But because of copyright, I can't use the typewriter to transcribe a book, or to use the burner to copy a CD, even if I've bought original copies of the hypothetical book and CD. IP asserts a partial ownership enough to say "you can't do that" over this other property I own. That, according to Kinsella's argument, is inconsistent and therefore invalid.

Interesting, and tricky, and I don't quite know what to make of it.

It's important because, of course, my income is highly dependent on the idea of IP. If I couldn't charge for copies of iPhone SDK Development, I probably wouldn't have spent hundreds (possibly thousands?) of hours over the last year and a half co-writing it. If I couldn't charge for apps on the App Store, would I write them?

The counter-argument comes from the open-source crowd, who say to give away your content (which, by the earlier argument, you couldn't own anyways), and make your money some other way.

The author here is admirably open-minded. I think he is a bit confused when he says the "counter-argument" is to give away your content, but he also inadvertently hits on an important insight. It's not a "counterargument" of ours to say you "should" just give away content. This is rather a prediction that some business models may employ this approach. But note the author says: "If I couldn't charge for copies of iPhone SDK Development,..." Well, of course you can charge for copies. It's just that it might be hard to prevent others from offering it for free or for a lower price, if you don't find some means of exclusion. In other words, part of the entrepreneur's job is to find efficient means of exclusion. Drive-in movie theater owners employ ticket counters, pay for locks on the doors, and for the installation of hundreds of parking-lot per-car speakers to exclude free-riders. Every business has costs of exclusion. If, in the end, the entrepreneur finds that he cannot make a profit in a given endeavor, taking all costs--including costs of exclusion--into account, then that project would require an inefficient allocation of capital. Simple.

[Cross-posted at SK]

Via Robert Levine an an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times explaining that newspapers need to be able to copyright facts in order to survive!! (You didn't think they would publish an opinion piece explaining that newspapers need to go the way of the buggy whip did you?)

If ever there was an article at war with itself, this is it.

Today, newspaper websites attract millions of readers, so why can't newspapers successfully compete online? After all, they still originate most of the nation's news. Part of the reason is that online ad rates don't begin to match print ad rates.

Why? A big reason is what economists call free-riding. Practically anyone can start a website and get software that snags fresh online news from those who originate it. Website owners pluck the freshest, most interesting reports and quickly post condensed rewrites. That costs them little, and they then surround the rewrites with cut-rate ads.

Children...children - if you are attracting millions of online readers then apparently free-riding isn't costing you your readership. If you cut off the blogs do you think your readership will go up? Or down? Links to articles on blogs (this one for example) drive traffic.

Technological change obsoletes business models. Most likely it means the end of the daily newspaper as we know it. Does it mean the we will spend less money and effort gathering news? Unlikely...as reporting from newspapers disappears the demand for news won't go down. So demand for substitutes with different business models - weekly newsmagazines, television news, blogs, will go up. Many reporters and a few newspapers executives will make the transition to new business models. The rest will join automobile workers on the unemployment line.

I presented a speech last week at Mises University 2009 on "Intellectual Property and Libertarianism." The audio is available here; the video will be available later this month. This presentation was different than others I've done in the past on IP, partly because, as it for students, I tried to start from the ground up, and also to integrate the proper approach to IP with the essential principles of libertarian political philosophy. Thus part of the talk summarized my view of what libertarianism is, and then applied it to IP; this summary view of the libertarian framework was distilled from a more elaborated version, contained my chapter What Libertarianism Is, which appeared in the recently published Hoppe Festschrift, Property, Freedom and Society. An article based on my speech is forthcoming in Liberty magazine.

[Cross-posted at StephanKinsella.com]

Fred Vogelstein writes in Wired that Google is drawing increasing attention from anti-trusters link here. He notes that it has gotten too big to ignore and perhaps to tolerate but continues to provide excellent software and services, presenting the government with a dilemma. Break it up or regulate. Definitely worth reading.

I do not think we can reach a reasonable conclusion on a single all-or-nothing position. In many respects both Microsoft and Google are natural monopolies, given the advantages to consumers of having a dominant standard and of being first to market.

In operating systems, Windows is what most people used first when they started computing. Most of us are familiar with it and it works quite well. Apple's operating system is not really relevant, an expensive niche product without the large number of add-ons, many free. Google has now offered an alternative in the form of cloud computing and the Chrome OS. This follows up on its relationship with Mozilla and the Firefox browser and opens an alternative to computer makers, a market for cheap simple computers like the netbook whose sales have been surprisingly good. (HP announced today that its Compaq division will soon offer a basic full size laptop for $298.) Chrome will prosper or not depending on the software that becomes available. By giving the software away, Google really puts pressure on Microsoft. Whether Microsoft can come up with an equally good, fast, down-sized modification of Windows and free software will determine its position in this market. Even if it does, the home computer market will become a duopoly but the advantages of being the standard OS are very high. I tend to go with Google.

The second big competitive area is search. Google's has come to dominate, its quality having stayed consistently ahead of the competition. Microsoft is trying, as well as a number of other search services. Microsoft has worked out a 10-year partnership with Yahoo on search, but for the time being, Google effectively has a monopoly based on quality, tempered by the fact that innovative competition continues to put pressure on Google.

Book scanning is unique in that Google is all by itself for now, although others would like to enter the business. The proposed settlement with copyright holders is problematic. It looks as if others will have difficulty entering, if they have to negotiate licensing arrangements with the copyright holders or buy into a deal similar to what Google has worked out. In other words, the Google deal will be a monopoly with no visible alternative, unless the court forces a major change in terms.

A business we don't normally think of as separate is the server farms that Google has developed. They make possible much of what Google does--indeed, it becomes the cloud in cloud computing. Its technology appears to be leading-edge. When it owns the infrastructure, it is tough to compete with.

Vogelstein begins his article, alluding to the speech of Christine Varney several years ago in which she says that "For me, Microsoft is so last century.... They are not the problem. I think we are going to continually see a problem, potentially, with Google." Varney has now been appointed head of the Justice Department's antitrust division, making her the government's most powerful anti-monopoly prosecutor and in a position to do something about Google. Google will need to watch its behavior to avoid retribution. Watchful waiting may not be a bad solution in a market with two large and highly competitive players, as well as a lot of small ones. It still seems to be producing a rapid stream of innovation.

IP owners show no shame in seeking out additional advantages from their monopolies and what they can get away with. The self-styled English newspaper (anywhere else in the world it is called a magazine), Economist (no The), informs us that patent owners in the 27 members of the EU are after a single patent grant to cover all the members link here. They plead that the extra costs make it too expensive for small companies to register their patents, thus stifling innovation. They also object to the differing interpretations that the various patent granting authorities make. Good points only if one accepts that patents are a good thing, rather than a means to extract monopoly profits and impede innovation. Anybody want to bet that they won't get their way?

There's a great article in the NYT's Business section today by David Pogue on the various monopolistic practices of the cell phone industry. These range from the hidden subsidization of phone purchases, to double billing practices, to the fact that Verizon typically rakes in over $800 million each year by making customers waste 15 seconds listening to voice mail recording or retrieval instructions!

Well worth reading.