February 5, 2012
- %26lt;a href="http://www.change.org/petitions/the-president-of-the-united-states-abolish-all-forms-of-intellectual-property-ip-law"%26gt;Alex Laird's petition%26lt;/a%26gt;.
- %26lt;a href="http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/LEO/LEO_Williams.pdf"%26gt;Of course we need to allow negative values of "beneficial"%26lt;/a%26gt;.
February 3, 2012
- Larry Seltzer writes a provocative piece in %26lt;em%26gt;Byte%26lt;/em%26gt; entitled "Is this Patent full of crap?" (%26lt;a href="http://www.informationweek.com/byte/news/radio/personal-tech/232500258"%26gt;link here%26lt;/a%26gt;) The ideas are those of patent lawyer Andrew Schulman, but the story is full of insight on a patent lawyer's thinking and offers real clues into why the patent system is such a mess--complexity compounded, full of precedents that ordinary humans will find...
February 1, 2012
- %26lt;a href="http://www.techdirt.com/skyisrising/"%26gt;The real state of affairs in the music industry.%26lt;/a%26gt;
January 26, 2012
- While waiting in my doctor's office with nothing to read, I picked up a copy of the %26lt;em%26gt;Washington Lawyer%26lt;/em%26gt;, the journal of the DC bar. It had a long piece on the "March Toward a National Digital Library" by Sarah Kellogg that I think worth reading. And pondering. It is online %26lt;a href="http://www.dcbar.org/for_lawyers/resources/publications/washington_lawyer/november_2011/digital_library.cfm"%26gt; here%26lt;/a%26gt; . A lot has been happening, but it remains slow...
January 22, 2012
- The last post might leave you wondering: if closing down small start up domains prevents competition, why were the big guys against SOPA/PIPA? That is the difference between a growing innovative industry and a dying industry. Music, movies and books may be thriving, but studios and publishing houses are dying. So: what is the last refuge of the desperate? Government protection - read SOPA/PIPA. In a dynamic growing industry the incentives are different. Sure: Google would get some...
- I want to elaborate on the previous post. The point of the SOPA/PIPA as well as the meguploads take down is that there is no accusation that the site operators were pirates, merely that pirates used their site to distribute pirated material. For the sake of argument let's just accept the law that piracy is illegal. People can easily use social networking sites such as facebook, and cloud storage sites such as dropbox to exchange links to pirated files and make them available. Nor can the site...
- Really I find what happened with the megauploads take down stunning. Bear in mind that there were at least some legitimate files stored on those servers: for example, a lot of xda-developer files were distributed through megauploads. Imagine I parked my car in a garage. Then when it was later alleged that some of the other cars in the garage were stolen the police seized my car along with the others. All the legitimate users of megauploads lost their files. Talk about guilt by association. What...
- Aleks Yankelevich drew my attention to an interesting patent case %26lt;a href="http://quimbee.com/cases/707595"%26gt;Gore versus Garlock%26lt;/a%26gt;. The Federal Circuit court decided %26lt;a href="http://www.shpoonkle.com/briefs?keyed=WL-Gore-Associates-v-Garlock-Inc"%26gt; to reverse a lower court%26lt;/a%26gt; reaching the stunning conclusion that prior art doesn't matter if it was kept secret. So if you invent something and keep it secret, someone else can patent it. To be clear: in...
January 19, 2012
- The Supreme Court has found Congress can extend copyright protection to works that had previously been in the public domain %26lt;a href="http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2012/01/golanscotusruling.pdf"%26gt;link here%26lt;/a%26gt;. The decision was 6-2 with one recusal. The story is covered %26lt;a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/business/public-domain-works-can-be-copyrighted-anew-justices-rule.html"%26gt; here%26lt;/a%26gt; and %26lt;a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-...

