The front page of today's NYTimes carries Daniel WAKIN's story on making sheet music available for download on the internet link here(log-in required). It is quite a saga. The site is the International Music Score Library Project or imslp.org. It was started by Edward W. Guo, a music student, computer geek, and now a law student. It makes tens of thousands of scores free to download.

It started with scores that were out of copyright but has expanded to those made available under Creative Commons license. Guo was sued in 2007 by a commercial publisher of scores in Europe and had to close for a time because he didn't have the resources to fight. His solution is ingenious. He set the website up in Canada where copyright is less onerous in a separate corporation to remove personal responsibility and disclaims local legal responsibility. He warns downloaders that they are responsible for complying with their local variants on copyright. The organization is now run largely by volunteers. It arranges low cost printing services in addition to free downloads.

The economics of this is that the old line music publishers are about to become largely technologically unemployed, as their business will be increasingly reduced to publishing current works or copyrightable corrected versions of those out of copyright. Wakins quotes both Guo's public service logic in promoting a much cheaper innovation and the defense of music publishers that their profits helped induce publishing new music. That excuse sounds pretty feeble.

Public Knowledge, the IP blogging site, is once again organizing to get people to weigh in on current policy debates over patents, copyright, net neutrality and other issues of concern to us users. It is currently organizing a call-in-your-Congressperson effort to support net neutrality link here. You can sign up at their website for the big call-in day tomorrow.

If you want to beat the big business lobbyists, you need to act.

If you want to see how broad and deep the "copying" business has become, you need to take a look at Kirby Ferguson's Everything is a Remix link here. Part 1 considers music, Part 2 looks at movies like the James Bond series, and Part 3 and 4 have yet to be produced. The point of this is how hard it has become to justify copyright as applied to music and stories. Look at the Vimeos to see how compelling the argument is. The material is highly entertaining as well.

Matt Yglesias does a neat skewering of Obama's State of the Union self-congratulatory allusion to our patents: "No country has more successful companies, or grants more patents to inventors and entrepreneurs."link here

He then does a riff on what would have happened if Newton had got a software patent on calculus. He would have sat on the patent "until Leibniz published his superior method and then sued the pants off anyone who tried to take a derivative without coughing up a hefty license fee."

Yglesias manages to get in other digs over what is currently patentable and the likely lower quality of today's patents. He concludes by noting patents do not create "property' but rather are a regulation which creates a monopoly.

Read it. It is nice to have such a good writer on our side.

PAUL BOUTIN writes in the New York Times online about Google's latest move in its evolving corporate strategy link here. It uses the Chrome OS and the cloud to strip users of the need to have a hard drive, allowing the computer to be simpler and perhaps a third or more cheaper than comparable machines that require a hard drive and an expensive proprietary operating system like Windows OS. Since the Chrome OS is free, buyers will not have to pay for it either, if they are able to give up the proprietary programs.

A lot of this still needs to be worked out, like a printer and the software for other activities that is so widely available for Windows or Apple. But if the OS becomes popular, I suspect this will be the greatest challenge Windows or Apple has yet faced. Their choice is to keep innovating ahead of Google to keep their OS's and other apps competitive or create their own hard-drive-less machines.

Interesting times are ahead. But I would put my money on Google whose speed of software innovation has been well ahead of its competitors.

The New York Times David Leonhart drinks the IP piracy Kool Aid when he writes that our most important economic problem with China is its piracy of our intellectual property link here.

Instead, he says "The No. 1 US problem with China's economy is probably intellectual property theft. Technology companies, for example, continue to notice Chinese government agencies downloading software updates for programs they have never bought, at least not legally."

He then goes on to add, "Next on the list, say people who work in China or do business there, is the myriad protectionist barriers China has put up. These barriers make this country's recent efforts at 'buy American' protectionism look minor league. In some cases, Beijing has insisted that products sold in China must not only be made there but be conceived and designed there. The policy goes by the name "indigenous innovation."

Such trade policies don't guarantee an export surplus however. Instead, the yuan still has to be relatively cheap.

Leonhardt is right that the exchange rate isn't the only trade problem. But he ignores the full effect of the rate. When the rate is right, the US not only exports to China but becomes more competitive making import substitutes for Chinese exports to markets in the US and around the world.

Finally he totally ignores the effect of China's intervention to weaken its currency, in leading other big Asian exporters to keep their currencies low. The list of such countries includes Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia, all of which add to the US trade deficit.

The response to a drop in foreign currencies will not be instantaneous, because it will take time for US producers to expand output. Thus, it is unlikely to have a rapid impact on current unemployment, but our exchange rate is important in our current large job losses and in worsening our income distribution.

The Director of Harvard's University Library, Pforzheimer University Professor Robert Darnton, is pushing it link here. In a meeting of 42 representatives from research libraries and other institutions from from around the country, the idea was strongly backed.

"[T]he library would be "the digital equivalent of the Library of Congress…bringing millions of books and digitized material in other media within clicking distance of public libraries, high schools, colleges, universities, retirement communities, and any individual with access to the Internet."

The project would "digitize all books in the public domain (no longer in copyright) as well as so-called orphan books (those published between 1923 and 1964 for which no copyright owner can be found)."

"Darnton hopes that bipartisan support in Congress may eventually lead to some sort of accommodation or change to copyright laws that would allow more books still in copyright to become part of the digital library. Innovative technological solutions that enable limiting the number of loaned copies of books in digital form may also play a role in facilitating a digital public lending library."

Other countries are ahead on this. The Dutch, for example, are on course to digitize every Dutch book, newspaper, and pamphlet from 1470 to the present.

This activity will put new pressure on copyright, particularly of books, given that ebooks may replace hard copies for most readers. They are much cheaper but can still be profitable for authors when the publishers cut is eliminated.

The Facebook story has attracted a lot of attention (for example, link here at Wikipedia). The boy genius programmer and now billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg, remains in the news with the Winklevoss legal suit link here. They want to reopen the negotiated settlement they accepted some time ago for several millions, thinking that they might now get billions, given the rise in Facebook's stock price.

Their claim for any cut, much less a bigger one, seems questionable, given their argument that Zuckerberg stole their idea while he coded for their idea (actually a dating site rather than the social network that Facebook has become).

I wasn't aware that an idea was property, much less protected property, so I suppose that Zuckerberg capitulated rather than carry on fighting to avoid unnecessary unpleasantness. He must regret that decision now.

In any case, the real story with Facebook is how this kid created this major success story in websites. The idea for it is a tiny part of the total. The real genius was in creating the organization that has gone on to be so hugely popular -- finding the right people to staff it and the financing for a really expensive investment -- to become the major public spokesman for the company, to get the technology right, and to make most of the many difficult decisions along the way. Unless he had a guiding partner, he has to be considered brilliant.

This is a case in point, supporting the thesis of Techdirt's Mike Masnick that concept always plays second fiddle to execution. Someday, the story on how it was done will have to be written in a lot more detail than we have been given so far. It should be a great read.

It also seems to be a lesson in how intellectual property rights can get abused by the threat of legal proceedings that lead the party in the right giving up.

You can see all the Nina cartoons at http://mimiandeunice.com/