The attorney general of Connecticut is investigating whether e-book makers Apple and Amazon have engaged in pricing fixing with book publishers. In this article on the investigation, I am quoted saying:

Alleged price-fixing agreements in cases like this have but one source: the government's monopolistic grants to e-book makers and publishers through so-called intellectual property laws. In a fully free economy, where ideas cannot be locked up and competitors are free to enter the market, such agreements would have no force whatsoever.

From the BBC:

Earlier this week, a federal court in Sydney ruled that Men at Work had plagiarised Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree in its 1983 hit, Down Under.

"It's all about money, make no mistake," said Down Under author Hay.

But Norm Lurie, owner of Larrikin Music who filed the case, said it highlighted "the importance of checking before using other people's copyrights."

This is beside the point, but I can't hear the similarity in the two patterns of notes. (One cannot actually own a pattern of notes. But one can get the government to stop others from using a pattern one claims to own.) You can listen to both at the BBC site.

The Christian Science Monitor published this response to David and Michele's op-ed (sorry if it's already been posted):

Reform, but don't destroy, patent law

In their commentary, "The patent system: End it, don't mend it," David K. Levine and Michael Boldrin propose wiping out centuries of Anglo-American legal heritage in intellectual property (IP) rights because they don't like some features of the current American patent system. This radical proposal is based on an erroneous understanding of patent law's history and the economics of innovation. It would be akin to tearing down a house because the hot water heater broke.

The Founders explicitly recognized the advantages of using intellectual property rights national in scope to replace the state-granted rights that existed under the Articles of Confederation. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 43 "[t]he utility of [the IP clause] will scarcely be questioned. The copyright of authors has been solemnly adjudged, in Great Britain, to be a right of common law. The right to useful inventions seems with equal reason to belong to the inventors. The public good fully coincides in both cases with the claims of individuals."

There is no question that patent law provides critical incentives for innovation. Without the potential economic rewards and ability to facilitate commercialization patents provide, who would invest the millions of dollars needed for the development of new drugs, medical equipment, and medical devices? It is thus patent-driven innovation that creates the drugs that Messrs. Levine and Boldrin claim are locked away from the world's poor. It would be sadly ironic if an effort to provide access to essential medicines by eliminating patent rights destroyed the system whose incentives yielded those medications.

Levine and Boldrin also misunderstand the point of the Constitution's IP Clause. The issue the IP Clause settled was not whether there should be patents and copyrights, but which government would provide them. The expensive litigation the state IP system had spawned in the 1780s persuaded the Founders to adopt a national system. Even Thomas Jefferson, initially the Founder most skeptical about intellectual property, quickly changed his views and played a prominent role in the early development of American patent law. The system worked: Americans were inventing and patenting at a rate that astonished European observers within a few decades of the first patent act.

While the heart of the incentive provided by patents is restricting others from using an inventor's invention, this right to exclude is limited in time and scope. As a result, it balances rewarding early innovators and enabling later ones to create improvements. Patents' limited scope means they rarely provide their owners with an economic monopoly as there are almost always viable substitutes. Nor are patents "simply a ticket to lifelong litigation against a giant," as only 1.5 percent of patents are litigated.

Patents also provide more than incentives for innovation. Recent studies of start-up companies reveal that patents can play an important role in securing venture capital, capturing revenue through licensing, and enhancing reputational value. And patents serve as coordination tools among private parties, thus preventing many of the problems Levine and Boldrin identify.

For example, in information technology and life sciences, patent holders engage in considerable licensing activity, privately solving the problem of access. A recent National Academies of Science survey concluded that in both ‘‘the number of projects abandoned or delayed as a result of technology access difficulties is reported to be small" and that few investigators had to "revise their protocols to avoid intellectual property complications or pay high costs to obtain access to intellectual property.''

Patent law can undoubtedly be improved. But destroying widely held and valuable property rights in pursuit of short-term gains would truly be a case of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Neither the American economy nor the world's poor could afford such an ill-conceived up-rooting of rights deeply embedded in Anglo-American jurisprudence.

Craig A. Nard, Professor of Law, Case Western Reserve University Cleveland, Ohio

Andrew P. Morriss, Professor of Law & Business, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Urbana, Ill.

From BBC News:

Hacker cracks Kindle's copyright

An Israeli hacker claims to have broken the copyright protection on Amazon's Kindle e-reader, reports say.

The hack will allow the ebooks stored on the reader to be transferred as pdf files to any other device.

The hacker, known as Labba, responded to a challenge posted on Israeli hacking forum, hacking.org.

It is the latest in a series of Digital Rights Management hacks, the most famous being the reverse engineering of iTunes.

The Kindle e-book reader has been very successful since it was launched in the US in 2007.

Amazon hopes to have sold a million devices by the end of the year.

It leaves it to individual publishers whether they want to apply DRM but books in its main proprietary format .azw, cannot be transferred to other devices.

It did not immediately respond to the news but it is likely it will attempt to patch its DRM software.

DRM has long divided opinion. While rights holders regard it as a crucial tool to protect copyright, consumers tend to hate it because it limits what can be done with content.

"DRM is not an effective way of preventing copying nor is it a good way of making sales. There isn't a customer out there saying 'what I need is an electronic book that does less," novelist and co-editor of the Boing Boing blog Cory Doctorow told the BBC when the Kindle was launched.

As soon as a new DRM system is active, hackers begin to try and break it.

Most famously Jon Lech Johansen, known as DVD Jon, cracked the copy protection on DVDs in 1999.

He went on to break the copyright protection on iTunes, leading Apple to offer DRM-free music.

DVD Jon now runs a company with an application to take the pain out of moving different types of content between devices.

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.

I also wanted to shamelessly plug my own blog, Free Association. It covers more than IP issues, but those are definitely key.

The blog of the Foundation for Economic Education is Anything Peaceful. Obviously anything peaceful includes using your physical property peacefully even if that involves using ideas generated by others.

Dan Cohen had a frustrating time with his Kindle and iPhone relating to DRM. He tells about it here and here.

The "bottom line":

You are able to redownload your books an unlimited number of times to any specific device.

Any one time the books can be on a finite number of devices. In most cases that means you can have the same book on six different devices.

Unfortunately the publishers decide how many licenses, that is devices, a book can be on at any one time. While most of the time that will be five or six different devices there will be times when it's only one device.

At the present time there is no way to know how many devices can be licensed prior to buying the book. [Emphasis added.]

I guess we shouldn't be surprised.