The Conference Board of Canada has released a series of reports concerning Canada's state of intellectual property protection. According to this theoretically non-partisan group, "Canada's failure to strengthen intellectual property rights in the face of digital technology has given it an unwelcome reputation as the file-swapping capital of the world."

Michael Geist posted an assessment of the reports, drawing attention to the questionable methodology employed. The conclusions were drawn through a selective reading of data, with some data prepared by copyright industry associations. One of the reports, National Innovation Performance and Intellectual Property Rights, states that Canada ranks 19th worldwide. As Prof. Geist writes, "...the report fails to mention that Canada was actually tied with four other countries ranked 15th to 19th including the United States, which in the same paragraph is heralded as a leader in innovation whereas Canada is described a laggard."

Prof. Geist takes no prisoners and ably shows that the Digital Economy report borrowed heavily from the work of the International Intellectual Property Alliance without paying much attention to the courtesy of proper citation. In their rebuttal the Conference Board attempts to distance themselves from the charge of plagiarism. Moreover, they state "This report was produced as contract research. The Conference Board does not disclose the terms of its contracts without permission of the client." An ironic remark, given that Ontario taxpayers provided part of the funding for this venture.

John Spiers was recently in Hong Kong and has a report about IP problems there. Any of our readers who think they might interested in helping can get in touch with him through his website (below)

I bought your book and noted you've made anti-IP presentations in Hong Kong. I have one book on small business international trade, and am working on another which will feature an argument against the individual entrepreneur from seeking IP rights, or even exclusive contracts (I disagree even with your trademark exception, but that is for another day.) I am alarmed by the concerted efforts to promote IP law in Hong Kong and China.

I was there a few weeks ago and read this article: link here

I then emailed the reporter and he replied keen on a follow-up.

Mr. Spiers,

Thank you for writing in to the Standard.

The defendent's details were not revealed by Customs because he has yet to be charged while forensic investigations are still ongoing.

I will follow up with the Department of Justice and Customs at a later date on whether I can obtain his hearing date and location.

You're POV on IP rights is definetly novel and very interesting and look forward to reading what other developments you may have in the case.

Thanks again and I shall reply again to you sometime next week.

Sincerely yours,

Tim Chui The Standard Reporter

Dear Mr. Chui,

I enjoyed your article today on "Customs Nabs Second Cybercriminal" in the Hong Kong Standard.

I have been trading in designed goods with China since the 1970's, and there is a good argument against intellectual property rights, although the argument is not popular. I was interested in your article because it might offer an opportunity to put forth the argument in a legal setting.

I work with a small group of people in USA who endeavor to eliminate intellectual property rights law. The group includes academic, lawyers and business people in USA. I may be able to persuade this group to write a "amicus curiae" brief to teh judge in this case. An amicus curiae brief is where parties not involved in a case plead a point to the judge. One point among others would be the fllow was unemployed, could not afford to pay for the movie, nothing was really "taken" when he downloaded the movie, so, no harm no foul. The lawyers would do a better job of explaining of course.

If you could provide me the name of the defendant and the identifying court and case number, I would attempt to persuade my associates to prepare and submit sucha brief to the court. Should they do so, I would inform you first, so if you wish to have an exclusive story, you would have it. This all may do the defendant some good.

Please let me know if are interested. I look forward to your kind reply.

Sincerely,

John Spiers. www.johnspiers.com

Elsevier is a publisher which now owns the rights to most academic journals. This has been a sore point in the academic community for a long time. In effect because of the way copyright works, they own the rights to a large fraction of existing scientific publications, as well as the names (and reputations) of journals. Their business model is one of squeezing libraries for high subscription prices usually for a package of journal, including one reputable one, and a lot that are not so much so. You can read about efforts by economists in general and Ted Berstrom in particular to end this situation here. There are two key points: first Elsevier makes articles expensive and difficult to access. Second, they recognize that they are a dying industry - the model of authors, editors and referees providing their services for free and Elsevier collecting from the libraries is obsolete now that redistribution is possible via the web. So (smartly from their point of view) they are squeezing out the last drops of blood. But it is worse than that - they apparently have a new business model in which they are paid by lobbyists to create fake journals to publish articles supporting the lobbyists point of view. You can find detail on the Economic Logic Blog,

Nicholas Gruen has a post about social interaction and the web 2.0. I'm doubtful that creation and innovation can ever be a purely social enterprise (I'm an economist after all) - but it would be a mistake to underestimate the strength of free software type approaches to knowledge. While the core workers are well-paid, creation benefits enormously from the contributions of volunteers. The ability to tap into those who work for love rather than money as well as those who work for money is a great strength of the non-IP model of creative innovation.

One of the more scandalous forms of patents are patenting portions of the human genome. The BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes are known to be correlated with breast cancer in women. Unfortunately they have been patented by Myriad Genetics who take the idea of monopoly seriously - leading to a stoppage of genetic research in this area, as well as restricting access to genetic tests for breast cancer. Researchers - and women - finally got fed up with this and filed a lawsuit against the patent. You can find the complaint here. The plantiffs include the ACLU, the Association for Molecular Pathology, The American College of Medical Genetics, The American Society for Clinical Pathology, the College of American Pathologists and a number of individual researchers and women. Steve Silberstein draws our attention to The New York Times coverage.

In light of empirical evidence that patents do little to encourage or discourage innovation, I'm sometimes asked - why should we get rid of them? They don't seem to do any harm. If you'd like to see what harm they do, read the complaint.

Spotted over the xerox machine in the economics department office at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

There's been much talk lately of the imminent death of copyright, due in part to the increasing digitization of information and media, the Internet, large bandwidth, and encryption. Nora Ephron, for example, recently observed, "We're in the last days of copyright, if you want to be grim about it...." And see The Death of Copyright, Item #241, Encryption, Strong Privacy, and the Death of Copyright, The Death of Copyright, and many other such comments.

Imagine a world 150, 200, 500 years from now--when virtually every work of art, every novel, ever movie, song, and recording ever produced until today--and many years after--is public domain. Now imagine you want to play muzak in your elevators, or nice background music in your dental office, or car repair waiting room, or restaurant. Or imagine you want to publish a book (or website) of great paintings. If you want to do these things today, most of the works you'd be intersted in are still covered by copyright. Sure, there are older recordings on scratchy 78 rpm LPs, and musty tomes from the time of the Civil War or earlier--but modern stuff, in color, stereo, hi-fi, with modern acting and special effects--most is still subject to copyright. So to play muzak in your elevator or pipe in nice background music to the ceiling speakers of your waiting room, you have to pay annoying royalties each month.

But even now we are starting to see, with the advent of Google Books, The Internet Archive, and Gutenberg, and so on, increasingly modern books entering the public domain. Imagine 400 years from now, and every movie, song, painting, novel published from the dawn of time, every movie made in the 20th and 21st and 22nd centuries, plus hundreds of thousands or even millions of songs, photographs, paintings, ... and the last 100 years or so is still locked up. Now let's say you want to put up a website the 10,000 great paintings; or stream a music or movie station playing great songs and films--will you pay out the nose for the rights to publish the recent stuff? Well, maybe, but if you have an almost unending cornucopia of great, free stuff to choose from--methinks this might exert a strong downward pressure on the ability of copyright holders to extort much money from you. (And this is disregarding practical problems they face, such as some kid downloading all the world's media into his petabyte thumb drive in 17 seconds via a totally secure encrypted link.)

No - not King's civil rights legacy, but rather the tragicomic copyright legacy which prevents others from hearing his words and has now reduced King's historical significance in today's news to a question of who controls the money generated by having his image on a T-shirt.

If such restrictions can be placed on King's words and image, then why couldn't they be placed on any other public figure including Presidents and other elected officials?

The implications for historical inquiry are staggering.

Russell Roberts and Michele Boldrin having a conversation about David's and my book.