Harvard's faculty has voted overwhelmingly to put it research on line link here. "Robert Darnton, the director of the University Library, wrote in an e-mail message, 'I hope this marks a turning point in the way communications operate in the world of scholarship.'" The library's site is expected to be up and running on April 1. It joins a free online legal research site (www.plol.org).

Free public access shows real progress.

Congress doesn't usually intervene in individual patent cases, but here it has taken the first steps to do so link here. Thereby, big banks would get immunity against a patent lawsuit potentially worth billions in costs to them. The object of their attentions is a Texas patent troll, Data Treasury, which is demanding damages "for infringing on its method of digitally scanning, sending, and archiving checks."

There are several issues here. One is whether the patent is valid as the Patent Office has found--it isn't, if the invention is obvious, as seems likely to this reader. Another is, assuming that the patent is valid and that patents have any real value in promoting innovation, whether the inventor hasn't been cheated. But now, in addition to lawyering up, the troll has had to lobby up. Guess who pays.

Picking up on the trend to online publication, publisher Harper Collins is using this device to promote books by putting six (including the Paulo Coelho novel David wrote about link here) each month at its website link here. Fantasy novelist Neil Gaiman has riffed on the idea by selecting his online novel for posting online, based on the votes of readers of his blog from a list of eight at his website . The books will not be downloadable or printable.

Want cheap advertising? make it a contest.

The Harvard faculty will vote today on whether to publish scholarly and scientific research on the web rather than in expensive journals link here.

"In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn," said Robert Darnton, director of the university library. "It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository."

There is more to the proposal, so read the article and arguments against as well as for. But hopefully, the proposal will be adopted by other faculties as well.

The Washington Post recently editorialized on the high cost to students of the textbooks they are often required to buy link here. That prompted me to write the editor a letter pointing out the virtues of free online availability to lower student costs link here. It also avoids the moral dilemma faced by faculty members in pursuing their share of the monopoly profits, as well as the high cost of revising printed publications when the subject matter changes rapidly.

We get too few opportunities like this to spread the word.

The anonymous Patent Troll Tracker posts his latest compilation of Litigation Statistics for January 2008 link here. "At long last, here are my January 2008 patent litigation statistics. In total, PACER/ECF showed 230 patent cases filed in January 2008, compared to 210 in January 2007. This is a 10% year-to-year increase." See the rest of the post for lots of details on who, what, and where.

So the broken system is still with us and still shows no signs of improvement.

Writing in today's New York Times, Joe Nocera picks up an old story about Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling suing RDR Books for copyright infringement because it was about to publish Steven Vander Ark's Harry Potter Lexicon link here. The publisher is getting an assist from Anthony Falzone of the Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project, which was founded by Larry Lessig, allowing Nocera to do a riff on the growth of criticism of copyright litigation.

It is a cheering thought that some of the criticism of intellectual property abuse is finally making it to the main stream media. We will need a lot more of that if we are to get the laws amended in a reasonable way, promoting innovation rather than stifling it.

Cho Jin-seo, Staff Reporter for the Korea Times, has written a puff piece for the Business Software Alliance, featuring Jeffrey Hardee, vice president and regional director of BSA link here. Hardee is flogging a study made by a research firm, IDC, purporting to show that piracy is rampant in Korea and costs the country billions. The study found that "about 45 percent of computer programs in use in offices were illegal copies in Korea in 2006." He goes on, 'The study demonstrated a 10-point drop in piracy over a four-year period can add an additional $1.4 billion to the economy. That is certainly an achievable target ... `For every $1 of software sold, it has a multiplier effect of $1 to $3 in the local industry, among channel and service providers. So the local contribution is nearly $1 billion out of $1.4 billion. $1 billion will stay in the country.'' An account of the benefits of piracy to the Korean economy is absent from this calculation.

I served as Economic Counselor in Korea in the 70's. We were continually harassing the Korean government to close the small shops that sold pirated software, but on the whole, the police were reluctant to prosecute poor Koreans, much less put them out of business. The Koreans I knew had little sympathy for poor Microsoft and that seems not to have changed.

We opponents of patented software have a problem, however, in pointing out how crazy the current American law on intellectual property is. Few in the American public, much less in the Korean, are aware how screwed up the system has become. In Korea and elsewhere, they also need to learn how IP as promised in our constitution to foster innovation has lost its way.

Picking up on Bill Stepp's previous post, the alternative way of publishing, posting a book on line and allowing downloading without charge is slowly expanding. Bell's book "Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good," is available that way here . This follows David's model.

A more trivial but perhaps economically more important variation is represented by a comic book now free to download here. This mode of distribution seems to have been a success; "The comic book publisher Boom Studios announced about 2 weeks back that they were going to release the full first issue of a new comic called North Wind online free the exact same day as it was released in shops. The hard copy sold out almost immediately and a second printing had to be ordered link here."

A variation on this for those who want to read a hard copy is to print it on a laser printer. I am also intrigued by the idea of having it printed by lulu press, which will print single copies at a competitive price link here. Public Domain Books Reprints Service has announced it will make available some 1.7 million books in the public domain, using lulu link here. Admittedly an experiment to test the demand for the service, it has the possibility of being expanded to new books.

Who knows what kind of copyright provisions would be necessary for this? Public Domain Books publishes with this disclaimer: "NOTE: There is no warranty of any kind with this service. Use it at your own risk. Please also note that we are not affiliated with any of the archives that the digital images are being obtained from. We are simply using these sites in accordance with their terms."

I posted about the Swedish Pirate Party last weekend, but failed to follow all the links. It turns out there is a Pirate Party here in the US and that it has a website here. More interesting, Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the Swedish party has been in the US giving speeches. They are pretty strong statements of how broken the patent and copyright system is. You can see and hear Falkvinge in an hour-long statement of his and his party's views here. There is also a long Wikipedia entry on the party here.