Over at ZDNet, Ed Burnette discusses a blog post by James Gosling, who created Java while at Sun. He relates how Sun lost big on a court decision regarding a trivial IBM patent. Sun employees were soon after encouraged to flood the patent office with applications, and there seems to have been a competition on who gets the silliest patent.

Burnette conjectures that one of those goofy patents is in fact among those that Oracle, who recently acquired Sun, is suing Google over. Does this qualify as irony?

The New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a long article on enforcing fees for playing copyrighted music as background for bars and other establishments link here. As is so often the case, nothing in the article suggests that doing so is controversial. No reference is made to the constitution's basis for copyright, much less its reason, promoting innovation. Instead it notes only that copyright was amended in 1909 providing for "performance rights" and that the change was blessed by the Supreme Court, quoting Oliver Wendall Holmes, "If music did not pay, it would be given up. Whether it pays or not, the purpose of employing it is profit and that is enough."

The article goes on to quote Larry Lessig with the only dissenting view, and even that is equivocal: "If technology creates efficient ways to charge commercial users of copyright, then that's good, but what I fear is that we evolve into a permission culture, where every single use of music creates an obligation to pay. I wish the line could be as clear as commercial exploitation--you're running a dance club, using it in a movie. The author ought to have the right to be paid for that. But I don't think that that right should translate into the right to control whether my kid uses the music for a collage he makes for a class about his trip to Costa Rica."

The article also fails to note that there has been criticism of how the royalty administering organizations distribute the money and account for what they do, as is clear from the Wikipedia article on ASCAP link here. Instead it is an account of how one of BMI's enforcer's is really very nice and works hard to deal pleasantly but firmly with the poor bar owners and other small businesspeople that use music to attract customers.

To me this simply looks like a lot more lawyers and others with little or nothing to do with the original performance who have found another way to extract money for themselves with no increase in the public good. We are looking at the modern version of the highwayman and asked to admire him.

Interesting discussion on the struggle to maintain monopolies over classified information in the digital age here:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/08/chasing-wikileaks.html

You may recall that Eckhard Höffner has been examining the history of copyright in Germany - finding that in its absence there was an explosion of knowledge - that due to the late enforcement of copyright in Germany, Germany emerged from a poor agricultural country in 1800 to the leading science nation in 1900. The German media being more advanced than the U.S. media Der Spiegel,the preeminant German weekly news magazine with a print run of about 1 million, and one of the most widely circulated magazines in Europe has picked up the story.

Explosion of knowledge. Was the industrial rise of Germany caused, because copyright was unknown. If your German is not good you might try Google Translate.

Mike Masnick over at Techdirt highlights some interesting musings from the Copyright Office which suggests a slowly shifting emphasis on how to determine Fair Use (a legal test which is notoriously slippery and can be bent in many cases to suit any preconceived result a judge wants to reach ahead of time):

http://techdirt.com/articles/20100804/04102010491.shtml

Hopefully, this will signal a (too slow and small, but still valuable) move away from the very disingenuous "market" test, or the effect of copying on the work's "value". This factor is almost always applied in a fraudulent manner since many courts don't only consider the markets which currently exist, but also potential future markets that the original author could potentially exploit. This becomes a tautological argument since the author can ALWAYS say that he/she intended to exploit a new product market in the future, even though they made no steps to do so in the past. Under this scenario, any copying of a work in any context becomes a per se harm to some hypothetical market which might exist in the future.

Proof here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/us/03fbi.html

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/us/20100803-wiki-LetterFromLarson.pdf [PDF]

http://www.scpr.org/blogs/johnrabe/2010/08/03/jrblog-fbi/

From my spam folder:

You could be sitting on a potential gold mine!

It's right under your nose, in the form of intellectual property created by you & your lab. Don't let your invention representing millions in potential revenue sit idle simply because you aren't aware IP & patent protection laws and other key aspects of moving innovations from your lab to the market..

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Abstract:

This paper provides empirical evidence on how intellectual property (IP) on a given technology affects subsequent innovation. To shed light on this question, I analyze the sequencing of the human genome by the public Human Genome Project and the private firm Celera, and estimate the impact of Celera's gene-level IP on subsequent scientific research and product development outcomes. Celera's IP applied to genes sequenced first by Celera, and was removed when the public effort re-sequenced those genes. I test whether genes that ever had Celera's IP differ in subsequent innovation, as of 2009, from genes sequenced by the public effort over the same time period, a comparison group that appears balanced on ex ante gene-level observables. A complementary panel analysis traces the effects of removal of Celera's IP on within-gene flow measures of subsequent innovation. Both analyses suggest Celera's IP led to reductions in subsequent scientific research and product development outcomes on the order of 30 percent. Celera's short-term IP thus appears to have had persistent negative effects on subsequent innovation relative to a counterfactual of Celera genes having always been in the public domain.

The paper is here.

A claim arguing both copyright infringement and moral rights infringement looked for $27 million in damages. (Plus, amongst other things, the goods and services tax on the monetary awards.) By the end, the Honourable Mr. Justice Russell of the Federal Court of Canada determined that the defendants' copyright misdemeanor was confined to posting the plaintiff's work on their website, without his consent. Justice Russell did not conceal his opinion of the plaintiff's conduct; "The evidence adduced concerning infringement of copyright suggests that the Plaintiff's claims are disproportionate and opportunistic."

It reads like a work of fiction; a long-time business association that went sour, third parties caught in the crossfire, and a proposed corrective that involved transacting funds in a Caribbean country of the plaintiff's choice. The effort to secure significant statutory damages earned some choice words from Justice Russell, "There is no evidence of any market for the Report and the conduct of the Defendants during the proceedings has been consistent with parties simply trying to resist the Plaintiff's inflated demands for $27,000,000.00."

The $500 awarded to the plaintiff is the minimum permitted for statutory damages by Canadian law. The claims for punitive and aggravated damages were unsuccessful.

Indeed. Hopefully, this will get even more people to start to contemplate the bigger picture here:

http://claytonecramer.blogspot.com/2010/07/outrageous-lawsuit.html

[H/T: Instapundit]