There is an article by my colleague from the law school Scott Kief and Henry Smith arguing that there is no patent crisis. They don't have any data to back this up. They are very concerned about predictability. Here is a modest proposal: do away with patents - then it will be perfectly predictable, all litigation will fail. they do have some remedies - while I disagree with them about patents I think their remedies are generally better than those under discussion in Congress. In particular removing the presumption of patent validity seems a useful thing to do.

Just kidding. A good day for mail; a bad day for innovation. From Mario Stargard:

Here in Canada, Big Pharma won a case brought by Generic drug manufacturers challenging the constitutionality of protecting research results of drugs. Ironically, the companies whose drugs are being protected in this scheme are called the innovators. Seems to me that by preventing Generics from using study data for 8 years means that they have little to no chance to innovate further advances which in turn slows down everybody's innovation, except big pharma, of course, as they will always have access to their own data. As we've seen before, large companies with IP protection are not known for innovation.

link here

Mario

Richard Corsale write:

Hi David,

I wanted to point out one team of software developers thats doing this right now, and actually has been for some time.

link here

Thomas and Amy are framework developers that publish some of the most intense and widely used front end javascript frameworks on the web. As I'm sure you know every framework is released under the most liberal license that can be found, usually MIT or BSD and it would appear that its next to impossible to sell a copy of any framework these days. They seem to have found a really ingenious way to make a bundle selling ebooks! if you go to link here or link here you can see their ebook prominently displayed at the bottom.

I think this is a great way to profit from your endeavors without forcing your customers to pay up throat under boot. As a bonus, the level of notoriety they have reached in the framework community has brought them to speak at numerous conferences as well as co-author books.

I'm currently developing software that works on an alternative business model myself. It's based on affiliate offers, where in a user of my software is asked to use one of my affiliate links next time he/she buys something. We then unlock some minor feature that could also be had for free if they wanted to download the source from SVN and compile it.

--Richard Corsale

With Paul's permission I'll simply reproduce his very clear email on the subject

Hi.

I'm writing to you guys because you've been the most active recently on the copyright thread of the Against Monopoly website, and as I'm only an occasional visitor, I'm not sure how else to send a heads-up to the site.

Anyway, with apologies for this unsolicited email, I thought you might like to know about these batik makers in Solo. The point is that here's a community of artists who are thriving without copyright, and without even resorting to Creative Commons or any other legalistic solutions. Of course, they're now starting to get a lot of pressure -- but hey, wouldn't it be great if their inspiring attitude could be emulated (and encouraged and expanded and exported) rather than suppressed...??

The story surfaced for me in this Boing Boing post

Original Jakarta Globe story here

And yes, I've blogged about it.

I hope this is of interest to you. Please do with this information as you will. Keep up the good work.

Best,

Paul Barlow

For better or worse copyright is dead for music, and shortly for books and movies as well. This obsoletes existing business models. What will spring up to replace them? An interesting experiment is taking place over at TechDirt. They are selling of complementary goods - for example, for $150 you can buy a package of books signed by the authors...including of course Against Intellectual Monopoly. Go take a look.

The Korea Herald writes that Korea is now imposing its own version of the "three strikes and you are out of the internet." link here It will become effective this week, having been approved by the National Assembly in April. It requires web sites to ban for six months providers of copyrighted work. Sites that fail to enforce the law can be fined up to $8000 and also face possible civil suits. Current president Lee Myung-bak supported tougher enforcement after years of "loose enforcement of anti-piracy laws".

No trial? No facing your accuser? The copyright police win again.

I previously noted that NTP used the patent system to wring over $600M out of RIM, the manufacturer of the Blackberry smartphone. As noted by Mike Masnick, now RIM has coughed up another quarter billion dollars to another company, Visto ("coincidentally" a licensee of NTP). A quarter billion dollars--everyone yawns. Masnick asks, why did NTP have to pay Visto?

For being the loser in the market place. This is a tax on innovation. The loser in the marketplace forces the winner to hand over a nice chunk of profits. It's bad for everyone (except some lawyers and Visto shareholders).

Masnick is right: this is yet another tax on innovation. Patents are killing innovation (see Yet Another Study Finds Patents Do Not Encourage Innovation). This is the age of technocide.

[Masnick opined that one reason NTP invested in Visto to get it to take out an NTP license was: "That certainly looks like NTP paying a company to license its patents, just to make it looks like there were some legitimate licensees."

This may be right, but as I explain in "Impact of Patent Licensing on Patent Litigation and Patent Office Proceedings" (available on my legal site), "a license under the patent may be offered as persuasive evidence in rebutting a prima facie case for obviousness." In other words, one reason patentees seek to license their patents is to build up the case that the patent is not obvious--to use it in litigation later to help defend the patent.]

[Mises cross-post; SK cross-post]

A few years ago, I had the chance to go back to Viet Nam to teach. I was struck by the vibrant market in pirated material--books, software, art, and movies. Much of the stuff was in English and the market was mainly the young students, the largest group that knows English. The copyright police are striking back now, afraid that the materials will leak out into the world market and as reported here the growing domestic market will be lost link here.

The article suggests that the copyright police have learned from their experience elsewhere. Then local authorities were not sympathetic to arguments that they were depriving rich foreign copyright owners of their rights. In Vietnam the copyright owners have set up a local firm to print and distribute books, the HCM City Books Distribution Corp (FAHASA) and are seeking cooperation from the universities. They can now argue that piracy is hurting a local boy.

It's still a tough sale.

David Pogue of the New York Times reports:

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid -- for thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people's Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is "rare," but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we've been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we've learned that they're not really like books, in that once we're finished reading them, we can't resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final.

As one of my readers noted, it's like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we've been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.

You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony?

The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were "1984" and "Animal Farm."

Scary.

From ReadWriteWeb:

As reported in the LA Times' technology blog, the launch of Antigua-based media download site Zookz has raised the ire of the US trade commission as well as the RIAA and MPAA. However, according to the company, Zookz is permitted by the World Trade Organization under a loophole copyright sanction. You read that correctly. The US trade commission and the RIAA / MPAA is challenging Zookz the pirate with the WTO in its corner. Imagine the cage match.

Zookz is offering unlimited movie or music downloads for $10 per month (or $18 for both). The company's low prices can be attributed to the fact that it is not paying licensing fees to copyright owners. The justification as to why Zookz can ignore US claims to intellectual copyrights is a long and complicated one.

It seems the WTO ruled with Antigua after a long series of battles over the fact that US restrictions on online gambling were found to violate free trade agreements. Despite the decision, no new forms of offshore online betting were allowed in the US. In retaliation, Antigua received permission from the WTO to suspend US copyright obligations up to a value of $21 million dollars annually.

The rest is here.