A story out of Korea today reports that the "Coalition of Anti-Privacy in the Korean Movie Industry" is pushing to close down eight P2P websites for pirating their movies link here. `Internet users illegally downloading movies and recklessly reproducing them is rampant here,'' said Kim Ji-hoo, spokeswoman for the filmmakers' rights group, as quoted by The Korea Times. The article produces some no-doubt-spurious statistics on the prevalence of such piracy and the cost to the industry to make its PR point. It also is reported to have started an education campaign to inform the public about the high cost and how wrong it is. Right out of the MPAA playbook.

This story makes the same point I just made in the comment on enforcing IP rights in China. These countries will enforce IP when they have domestic constituencies that will benefit. I wonder how the defense, that a site "making available" does not constitute piracy, will play in Korea?

TV network ABC's widely reported Obama-Clinton debate last week has produced some interesting IP related fallout link here. ABC tried to restrict outtakes by the other networks to no more than 30 seconds in order to protect its investment in the program from competitors. The restriction was widely ignored. Apparently, the other networks believe that "fair use" cannot be so narrowly defined.

Will ABC sue? Seems unlikely, but stay tuned.

This is a story that won't end here, but raises a lot of important issues for academia. As do many universities, Georgia State produces on-line study materials from published material, for use as course readings link here. It is now being sued by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Sage Publications for copyright infringement. The complaint, violating publishers rights, is based on the extent of the copying because it goes way beyond fair use. I would expect Georgia State to lose the case under current copyright law since it had not obtained permission or paid for a license.

In the absence of changing the law, the only way around this is to get authors to make the texts available on line, perhaps for limited uses, as our own David Levine has done and allow commercial publication with this understanding. As we have written before, academic authors need to be urged to adopt such an arrangement, perhaps using a little friendly collegial pressure. That will still leave a lot of published material that would be useful for courses but could not be used without permission. Would a change in copyright be feasible that made such use an exception? That seems unlikely, but worth thinking about.

Under the headline, "SAVE THE U.S. PATENT NOW! IT'S THE HEART AND SOUL OF AMERICA'S ECONOMIC SYSTEM" the Professional Inventors Alliance ran a two-full-page ad in the New York Times (Monday, April 7, p A10 and A11, not available on line). The alliance has a website link here which has a single webpage with some of the thrust of the ad, but tells little more about the group.

It is an attack on the Patent Reform Act (S. 1145) and an ostensible plea to unions to join the Alliance in opposing the legislation. It asserts that "the fundamental dependence of America's economy [is] on America's patents" and that "U. S. patented inventions have been the primary source of America's historically unparalleled wealth." It also claims that "the growth of America's GDP [is] generated by American manufactures products and that there is "nearly universal opposition to the IT sectors self-destruct proposals for patent reform." It then identifies the members of the Senate Judiciary committee who voted for the bill and those in the House who did so.

It finally gets to what it calls the patent destroying provisions of the bill: tipping off potential infringers by the 18-month publication of pre-issuance submissions; replacing the first inventor-to-file in place of the actual inventor; restricting the apportionment of damages to the incremental value of the invention, not its total value; giving priority to venue for suits where the infringer resides; and allowing post grant challenges of patents for their entire 17-year lifetime.

Here we go again with the same questionable claim that patents promote innovation. More clearly, they provide some with large incomes. Who else could afford a double-page spread like this. It also identifies the issues on which the losers from the pending bill choose to fight it.

Marilyn Monroe is dead but her image lives on as intellectual property and a source of wealth? link here Perhaps no longer. Photographers and other owners of her images have paid license fees to her estate under California law. Now, however, she has been declared a citizen of New York by the Los Angeles Federal District Court because the estate had argued to the California tax man that she was a New York resident. In California, the "rights of publicity" continue after death, but not in New York. The estate will appeal but grounds have yet to be stated.

Good decision in another trivial case. Who will end this plague?

Writing in the Washington Post, Melody Petersen reviews OUR DAILY MEDS by Shannon Brown link here. Little in the review is new to readers of this blog, but it is still eyeopening to read the history of Big Pharma. The review's begins, "Once upon a time there was an industry called pharma that was interested in doing well and doing good. Run by doctors and chemists, drug companies employed battalions of researchers whose scientific efforts resulted by mid-century in a flood of life-saving drugs, including antibiotics, vaccines, tranquilizers, antihistamines and steroids. As George Merck, president of the company founded by his father, put it in 1950, "We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow. . . ."

The review goes on to trace the development of Big Pharma's business model:

Develop or acquire a patented drug;

Forget further R&D as long as sales increase;

Identify a disease, real or imagined, which it treats but preferably doesn't cure for fear of cutting off a lifetime of sales;

Brand it for that condition;

Advertise the hell out of it, as ads are more important to sales than efficacy or developing new drugs;

Develop close competitor drugs to those which are very successful, like the more-than-10 anti-cholestoral drugs;

Ignore drugs for diseases which the rich world doesn't get.

There is more to the story, but that is enough for starters.

Here we have a hugely important and expensive industry that starts out with IP and then twists it to maximize profit. Business school students would regard that as highly innovative, but for the most part, what innovation there is doesn't benefit the consumer. The best I can say for it is that the ads pay for evening television news check them out.

A London appeals court has awarded the lead singer of Procol Harum sole royalty rights to the 1967 hit "A Whiter Shade of Pale" link here. It revoked an earlier ruling awarding 40 percent of the royalties to the group's organist for composing the organ theme, on the grounds that his claim was made too late. He had deferred making it, because he feared it would end his work with the group. It may be appealed to the House of Lords.

Whoever writes these little stories must have it in for the legal and intellectual property professions. Maybe we should retitle this category intellectual property law as a joke. If the plaintiff's claim was legitimate once upon a time and the copyright still applies, why shouldn't his claim be legitimate now?

Stephen Spear's post yesterday link here reminded me that I had started saving up ridiculous patent, copyright, and trademark stories. I'm not sure repeating these stories changes opinion since the basic rationale for IP protection, that it promotes innovation, is firmly embedded in popular thinking and assiduously promoted by the IP lawyers and owners. But it should, particularly when the legal process can't distinguish what is significant from the absurd.

Anyway, here is the story: T-mobile is demanding that gadget blog site Engadget Mobile stop using magenta in its logo on the grounds that it will confuse customers link here. This is a repeat of a suit that T-mobile brought last year against my-favorite-book.com, a book-on-demand-publisher launched in Germany last May link here. That was a particularly outrageous suit because my-favorite-book varies the color from one ad to another. Neither defendant appears to have stopped using the color.

How do we account for this loss of sense among the plaintiffs? Are they underemployed lawyers who need the fees? Or do they expect the defendant to back down out of fear of the publicity or unwillingness to risk the costs of a court battle? Assuming the case gets to court, why don't judges fine the plantiffs for bringing niggling charges?

Maybe we should have a contest for the worst example.

Timothy Lee at Ars Technica reminds us that the Patent Reform Act of 2007 is being debated behind closed doors in the Senate, after already passing in the House link here. He concludes that the bill is of little help compared to the long list of problems with patent law as currently experienced by business. And not even the modest proposals under consideration seem likely to go much farther, given the seemingly balanced alignment of business forces on opposing sides who see their interests hurt by one aspect of the legislation or another. Lee seems to think that the Supreme Court may be the most likely source of important changes.

Read the post for the details. But reconciling the differences on the opposing sides seems no solution to the monopolies that current patent law has created, at enormous cost to the consumer and imperceptible increases in innovation. We have simply failed to create real anger among the public who have been taught for generations that patents embedded in the constitution are good for them.

PoET has started a website to get instructors to take price into account when assigning textbooks link here. Their high prices have been the subject of this website on a number of occasions, but our preferred solution has been to get authors to post the books on a website and allow them to be downloaded.

PoET makes several points, starting with the fact that instructors have no incentive to take price into consideration and that their publishers do not advertise their prices or even make them easily accessible. With prices of basic texts running at more than $150 a copy, it is not a trivial cost for the student. By posting prices, the website would encourage some competition among providers.

We are happy that someone else is looking at the problem but still like our solution better.