As reported by ars technica, Fox is using federal copyright law and the DMCA process to bully author Cory Doctorow. His novel Homeland has the same title as the Fox television series, but otherwise has nothing to do with it. Having the same title is not a copyright violation as titles are too short to receive copyright protection:

Not that Homeland: Fox sends bogus takedowns for copyright reformer’s book

DMCA takedowns hit a surprising target: writer and activist Cory Doctorow.

by Timothy B. Lee – Apr 22 2013, 5:50pm CDT

Homeland is a television show produced by Fox that debuted in 2011. It’s also the title of an unrelated novel written by author and copyright reform activist Cory Doctorow. And evidently, the system Fox uses to send takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act can’t tell the difference between the two.

TorrentFreak first broke the news that Fox has been sending Google takedown notices for URLs like “http://tpb.piraten.lu/tag/Homeland-Doctorow” and “http://torrentreactor.net/torrents/6214335/Homeland-by-Cory-Doctorow.” Not only does Fox not own the copyright for these works, but because Doctorow published his novel under a Creative Commons license, distributing his work on BitTorrent is completely legal. This means that Fox’s carelessness may be causing legitimate content to be removed from search engine results.

“I have made inquiries about the possible legal avenues for addressing this with Fox, but I’m not optimistic,” Doctorow wrote on his blog. “The DMCA makes it easy to carelessly censor the Internet, and it makes it hard to get redress for this kind of perjurious, depraved indifference.”

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See also Doctorow’s post Fox sends fraudulent takedown notices for my novel Homeland, and the discussion of this topic on the latest episode of This Week in Law around the 40-45 minute or so mark.

Fox probably did this automatically without reviewing the claim closely, but this just goes to show how federal IP law turns companies into legal bullies who can harm individuals without liability: Doctorow probably has little  redress for any damage caused by the DMCA takedown here, since the statute doesn’t provide one. Fox can just say “oops” and move on. (Though I suppose it is possible Doctorow-as-author may, in the end, benefit from the increased exposure and attention.)

Some people say examples like this just show that the DMCA should be “tweaked” or copyright “reformed.” But given that the pro-copyright movie and music pressure groups despise the DMCA safe harbor that somehow snuck past their radar when it was inserted in 1998, it would be positively scary if Congress were to consider amendments to it, since, if anything, the DMCA safe harbor (which has permitted companies like YouTube to flourish)¹ would be scaled back or eliminated. So: almost nothing positive can be done. We are stuck with an ossified copyright system and its DMCA take down system that permits censorship and legal bullying.

(If we are to have any “improvement” to copyright, it would be: radically reduce the term; get rid of statutory damages and criminal penalties; make the losing copyright plaintiff pay.) ²

Copyright is an abomination and should, of course, be completely abolished. It’s frustrating to have fellow libertarians and civil libertarians who say they are all in favor of patent and copyright “reform” (which never comes—or always comes as a copyright term extension or addition of a DMCA, always making it worse), while saying they are against abolition of copyright because they don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I say we do want to throw the baby out with the bathwater—if it’s Rosemary’s Baby.

Case in point is the author of this very ars technica piece, Tim Lee, who poses as a copyright reformer but is not opposed to copyright.³ And the same is true even of the victim in this case: Doctorow. See, e.g., copyright abolitionist Nina Paley‘s post Paley & Doctorow argue over Non-Commercial licenses, where Doctorow makes it clear is not in favor of abolishing the state’s power to grant copyright (which he calls “exclusive rights”). As he writes:

I support regulating the entertainment industry’s supply chain. Copyright as presently or traditionally construed might be a suboptimal rule-set for that industry (I think it’s historically tilted to the favor of capital against the interests of labor), but that’s not to say that there shouldn’t or can’t be a set of rules that govern that industry to ensure fair dealing and to redress inherent power and negotiation differences.

…  lots of policy questions are hard to get right; that shouldn’t disqualify them from consideration for regulation (other rules that are hard to get right include finance, building codes, zoning laws, child protection, etc — I’m OK with the state having a go at them, though, because I’ve seen that in the absence of rules, many of the outcomes are very bad indeed).⁴

Copyright permits bullying, distorts culture, leads to literal censorship of books and movies, imposes hideous costs on artists like documentary filmmakers, and is being used by the state to slowly strangle internet freedom in a web of anti-piracy polices and laws. There is not a single good thing about copyright law; it is rotten to the core and totally incompatible with private property rights, freedom, and the free market.⁵

Pro-freedom, pro-technology copyright reformers should come out with guns blaring against the injustice of copyright itself. It’s time to end it, not mend it.

1. See Veoh Wins Important Case Against Universal Music Over DMCA Safe Harbors Again; But Is Still Dead Due To Legal Fees.  [↩]
2. See, e.g.,  How to Improve Patent, Copyright, and Trademark Law; The SHIELD Act doesn’t go far enough: protect victims of all patent aggressors, not just “trolls”; Proposed bill to make losing patent trolls to pay legal fees of victims does not go far enough. [↩]
3.  Tim Lee and Lawrence Lessig: “some punishment” of Swartz was “appropriate”;  Reason‘s Tim Lee on Two Decades of Attempts to Enforce Copyright. [↩]
4. See also Doctorow: What do we want copyright to do?; Libertarian Sci-Fi Authors and Copyright versus Libertarian IP Abolitionists. [↩]
5. See my posts Death by Copyright-IP Fascist Police State Acronym; SOPA is the Symptom, Copyright is the Disease: The SOPA Wakeup Call to Abolish Copyright; Where does IP Rank Among the Worst State Laws?; Should Copyright Be Allowed to Override Speech Rights?; Copyright is Unconstitutional.  [↩]

From QuestionCopyright.org, a great interview with Nina Paley. For some background on problems Paley alludes to re CC0, see my post Copyright is very sticky!.

Make Art, Not Law.

Submitted by admin on Fri, 2013-04-19 15:56

QCO Artist-in-Residence Nina Paley’s interview with at Baixa Cultura, conducted by email with journalist and photographer André Solnik. The English below is the original; Baixa Cultura translated Nina’s answers.

1. When your interest on free culture has begun?

For a long time I thought copyright terms were too long and the law could use reform, but I didn’t really understand Free Culture until October 2008, after months on the film festival circuit with my then-illegal feature Sita Sings the Blues. Free Culture was too audacious a concept for me to think about clearly until then. One morning I finally got it — freeing my work would be better for the work — and I spent the next half-year preparing for a Free, legal release of SSTB. That finally happened in March 2009, when I finally cleared all the necessary (and bullshit) licenses at a cost of about $70,000 to myself.

2. Tell me in short why artists should free their work. Is it a good choice for both renowned and new artists?

From my article How To Free Your Work:

Why should you Free your work? To make it as easy as possible for people to share your work — as easy as possible for your work to reach eyeballs and ears and minds — to reach an audience. And to make it as easy as possible for audience support — including money — to reach you…. Copy restrictionsplace a barrier between you, the artist, and most forms of support. By removing the barriers of copyright, you make it possible to receive money and other kinds of support from your audience, both directly and through distributors, thereby increasing your chances of success.

3. Creative Commons has recently released the final draft of the version 4.0 of its licenses. What changes would you like to see? Do you think CC should keep on supporting the nonfree licenses?

Yes, CC should stop supporting the non-free licenses. What kind of “commons” is that?

4. Although they are probably the most known alternatives to more restrictive ones, they still remain unpopular compared to the “all rights reserved“. Why is that? Do you reckon people get confused by the many possibilities given by the CC licenses?

Most people who use CC licenses don’t understand what the different licenses mean; they just call all of them “Creative Commons” as if that means anything. CC’s modular system was a good idea, I see it as an experiment that was worth doing. But the results are in: it didn’t work. What we have now are a mess of incompatible licenses, most of which fail to contribute to any real “commons,” and an increase of confusion and misinformation.

You can’t really blame Creative Commons though — the problem is copyright law. Nothing can fix it at this point. Even CC-0, a valorous attempt to opt out of copyright, doesn’t work in practice, as my experience with the Film Board of Canada showed — even after placing SSTB under CC-0, their lawyers refused to accept it was really Public Domain, and made me sign a release anyway, just to allow one of their filmmakers to refer to it. I will be saddled forever with permissions paperwork even with CC-0. I’ll probably keep using CC-0, of course, but I have no expectation it will work as it’s supposed to.

5. The BY-NC-SA license, although nonfree, it’s pretty popular. Why do you think so? What are the main issues about licensing a work using it?

People are high-minded when they choose the -NC restriction, but it accomplishes exactly the opposite of their ideals. They want to “protect” their works from abusive exploitation from big corporate players. They don’t realize those big corporate players LOVE the -NC clause, because it’s a commercial monopoly. Big corporate players are all set up to deal with commercial monopolies: they have licensing departments and lawyers. It’s the big corporate players who can afford to license your -NC works. It’s your peers, small players with no legal departments and limited resources, who can’t. The -NC clause screws over your fellow artists and small players, while favoring big corporations.

The way to avoid abusive exploitation is to use CC-BY-SA, a Share-Alike license without the -NC restriction. This allows your peers to use the work without fear, as long as they keep it Free-as-in-Freedom. Big corporate monopoly players, however, are unwilling to release anything Freely: if they want to use your work, they’ll have to negotiate a waiver of the -SA clause. For this they will pay money. It works like a regular licensing deal: for $X you waive the -SA restriction and allow them to re-use the work without contributing to the community. I have had many corporate licensors offer me such contracts, although I didn’t sign any because I was such a Free license booster.

The only reason BY-NC-SA is popular is because people really haven’t thought it through. [continue reading…]

Good news, but of course, it misses the fundamental problem which is the patent itself. The problem is not low quality patents or software patents or “abuse” of patents. Even if you get rid of these problems, the fundamental problem remains: the state is granting anti-competitive monopoly privileges that entrenched market players can use to stop competition and enhance their oligopolies.

German Parliament says: Stop Granting Software Patents

on: 2013-04-22

The German Parliament, the Bundestag, has voted on a joint motion against software patents. The resolution urges the German government to take steps to limit the granting of patents on computer programs.

In the resolution, the Parliament says that patents on software restrict developers from exercising their copyright privileges, including the right to distribute their programs as Free Software. They promote the creation of monopolies in the software market, and hurt innovation and job creation. [Correction 2013-04-24: Parliament did not yet adopt the motion, but rather decided to pass it to the parliament committees for further consideration.]

“Software patents are harmful in every way, and are useless at promoting innovation”, says Karsten Gerloff, President of the Free Software Foundation Europe. “We urge the German government to act on this resolution as soon as possible, and relieve software developers from the needless patent-related costs and risks under which they are currently suffering.”

Software patents are illegal under the European Patent Convention. Nevertheless, the European Patent Office has granted tens of thousands of patents covering software. As a result, software developers constantly risk being accused of patent infringement. This causes legal uncertainty which is costly for large companies, and potentially deadly for small ones.

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From Freedom to Tinker, on the “liberal” IP fascist Scott Turow:

Copyrights, Fundamental Rights, and the Constitution

APRIL 22, 2013 BY ANNEMARIE BRIDY 9 COMMENTS

There was a lot to take issue with in Scott Turow’s recent op-ed in The New York Times. Turow, who is currently President of the Authors Guild, took to The Times to criticize the Supreme Court’s decision inKirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, which brought physical books manufactured and sold abroad within the protective scope of copyright’s first sale doctrine. Turow cast the Court’s decision as another blow to authors’ rights, which, by his account, are being pitilessly washed away by the digital tides. He blames the usual suspects: e-books, Amazon.com, pirates, Google, and—this last one may surprise you—libraries. The coup de grace, he asserted, will be the extension of first sale rights to digital copies of books. (It may comfort him to know that the possibility of that happening is more remote following Redigi’s recent defeat in federal district court.)
[Read more…]

My monograph Against Intellectual Property is now available in a French translation, as Contre la propriété intellectuelle Écrit (PDF – bad link; local file; Amazon kindle). It was translated by Xavier Gillard.

Sad, especially given that Asia was traditionally better on copyright than the West has been (well, at least in China: “To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense” —Chinese saying).

From Crunchyroll.com:

Tokyo Man Arrested for Uploading “Accel World” Anime Episode

The battle between the Japanese police and illegal uploaders continues

Mikikazu Komatsu

April 18, 2013 12:07am CDT (13 hours ago)

As we have reported, the Japanese police have no mercy for illegal anime uploaders. On April 15th, Kanagawa Prefectural Police’s Cyber Crime Control Office and Minami Station arrested a 34-year-old male temporary dispatch worker who lived in Toshima-ward, Tokyo, on suspicion of using the file-sharing software Share to upload three anime programs including the 8th episode of Accel World to the internet without copyright holders’ permission between June to December in 2012.

My comment on Thoughts on the Great IP Debate:

“The argument against IP does not rest on being anarchist or even anti-legislation. It simply rests on the assumption that property rights in scarce resources are a good thing. Once you accept this, IP becomes impossible to justify. You cannot have both: property rights in scarce resources and IP. Rather, you can have property rights in scarce resources, but not allocated according to Lockean-libertarian principles (first-appropriation and contract). You have to introduce a new ownership rule to implement any form of IP, one that takes property rights in already-owned scarce resources from the libertarian owner and transfers it to a third party, just like any other socialistic welfare redistribution scheme.

This issue is clear. There is a reason libertarians have flocked to it; once they turned their attention to it, the answer is obvious–to those who are honest and have libertarian principles. And it was seen, very very clearly, long ago: by Benjamin Tucker over a century ago, and then in revived form by Sam Konkin, and Wendy McElroy, and then (partially) by Rothbard, and then by Tom Palmer, and, then, starting in the internet age, 1995-, when the issue gained renewed importance, by the bulk of libertarians: Austrians, anarchists, left-libertarians. Even honest utilitarians should oppose IP but… they don’t, making you wonder if they are really utilitarian (reminds of Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy: the liberals pretend to favor the poor but ignore evidence that their policies are counter productive; same with utilitarians who pretend to favor IP “because” it stimulates net innovation, and who turn their eyes aside when all the evidence points the other way).”

This is a transcription of my speech KOL037 | Locke’s Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Political Theory. I have cleaned up a few things and added a few links and notes.

This is discussed in Stephan Kinsella, Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), ch. 14, Part III.B; ch. 15, Part IV.C, et pass.

Update:

• The Superiority of the Roman Law: Scarcity, Property, Locke and Libertarianism (Mises, Aug. 17, 2010) (archived version with comments)
• Locke, Smith, Marx; the Labor Theory of Property and the Labor Theory of Value; and Rothbard, Gordon, and Intellectual Property

[continue reading…]

From the site for the C4SIF’s journal Libertarian Papers:

Libertarian Papers Ranked “A” by Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA)/Australian Research Council (ARC)

I was informed recently by that Libertarian Papers has received a quite good ranking from the Australian Research Council’s (ARC) Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA), an Australian Government body that deals with academic matters,  provides systematic evaluation of a large number of scholarly journals in different disciplines and generates a database and a variety of reports ranking the journals.  These ratings are often used by Australian universities to evaluate the contribution of their academics to various fields.

The ERA Journal Ranking List for all law and legal studies journals is appended below. The order of the rankings is A*, A, B, C and then not ranked.  Libertarian Papers  is highlighted in the list.  It is ranked at level A, which is the second best ranking on the list, which is considered quite good.

Needless to say, we are very pleased with this recognition of the excellence the journal strives for.

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Maria Fredenslund, the CEO of the Danish CopyrightAlliance, in a debate in which she argues for increased control of the Internet in the name of copyright, proclaims that “control is freedom.” She lauds the “highly controlled and regulated society we live in” and insists that “control gives us freedom.” You see, “Control and regulation creates innovation … and personal liberty.” She criticizes the Internet as being “undemocratic” because there is not enough “control” of it.

And people say I am exaggerating when I use the term “fascism” to describe IP.

Obviously the copyright advocates want copyright enforced online by turning the Internet into a highly-regulated and controlled zone similar to the way socialist democratic Denmark regulates its citizens’ lives. Can we still take seriously anymore the claims of pro-IP “libertarians” that copyright is just a type of free market property right?

(h/t Erik Lau Kelner)

As I note in my What Libertarianism Is, a property right is simply the legally recognized exclusive right to control a scarce resource. The question is always: who owns a particular, potentially contestable, scarce (rivalrous) resource?¹

The way the great legal systems of the world—e.g. the common law and civil law (Roman law, continental law)—deal with this issue is consonant with this perspective. As civil-law Professor Yiannopoulos explains:

Property may be defined as an exclusive right to control an economic good …; it is the name of a concept that refers to the rights and obligations, privileges and restrictions that govern the relations of man with respect to things of value. People everywhere and at all times desire the possession of things that are necessary for survival or valuable by cultural definition and which, as a result of the demand placed upon them, become scarce. Laws enforced by organized society control the competition for, and guarantee the enjoyment of, these desired things. What is guaranteed to be one’s own is property… [Property rights] confer a direct and immediate authority over a thing. ( (A.N. Yiannopoulos, Louisiana Civil Law Treatise, Property (West Group, 4th ed. 2001), §§ 1, 2 (first emphasis in original; remaining emphasis added). ))

The Louisiana Civil Code, at Art. 477, provides that “Ownership is the right that confers on a person direct, immediate, and exclusive authority over a thing. The owner of a thing may use, enjoy, and dispose of it within the limits and under the conditions established by law.”

The practical nature of the law results in its rules dovetailing with libertarian/propertarian rules of justice. But the common law and civil law are not perfectly libertarian.² They have to deal with arbitrary and unjust legislated (statutory) schemes: rights decreed by the legislature out of whole cloth. This leads to complications and absurdities. For example, in the civil law, as I explain in Against Intellectual Property,  the term “things” is a broad civil-law concept that refers to all types of items, whether corporeal or incorporeal, movable or immovable. As specified in the Louisiana Civil Code, Art. 448: “Things are divided into common, public, and private; corporeals and incorporeals; and movables and immovables.” So every “thing” has to be classified as either a movable, or an immovable. The concepts of immovable and movable arose because economic goods are either land (immovables; see Art. 462), or some more “movable” scarce resource (Arts. 471, 475). It makes practical sense to analytically separate these types of economic goods, since legal rules naturally treat them somewhat differently, because land has a unique and “non-fungible” aspect (e.g. its location)  that movable items do not share.

But the positive law arbitrarily introduces property rights in things that are not economics (scarce, rivalrous) goods, and the legal system must account for and classify this. So the distinction between “corporeal” and “incorporeal” “things” arises:

Corporeals are things that have a body, whether animate or inanimate, and can be felt or touched.

Incorporeals are things that have no body, but are comprehended by the understanding, such as the rights of inheritance, servitudes, obligations, and right of intellectual property. [Art. 461; see also Arts. 471, 473, 475]³

So the fundamental purpose of law is the same as that of property rights: to allocate scarce resources to some identifiable owner so that these scarce resources may be employed peacefully and productively (by the owner) as a means of action. When the legislature starts arbitrarily decreeing special positive rights, like patent and copyright, the law must not only have a concept for “corporeal” and “incorporeal”—it must now specify whether these incorporeal rights are movable or immovable. Of course this makes no sense whatsoever; knowledge, ideas, patterns of information, inventions, etc., even legal rights in these things like patents and copyrights, have no location; they have no body; they are incorporeal. So how can they be immovable or movable? How can an idea be considered movable? Or immovable? The notion is nonsense. The reason it is nonsense is because the law is trying to use conflict-avoidance mechanisms (property rights) whose natural purposes is to assign rights in scarce resources, for nonscarce resources like patterns of information. This creates a disconnect, an absurdity in the law.

Nonetheless, the law must have its answer.  It has to answer the question of whether incorporeal “things” are immovable, or movable.

The answer is arbitrary, but found in the way the code defines immovables and movables. Immovables are “Tracts of land, with their component parts.” (Art. 462). IP rights are not tracts or land or components thereof, so they cannot be immovables. And Art. 475 specifies: “All things, corporeal or incorporeal, that the law does not consider as immovables, are movables.” So if it’s a “thing,” and not an immovable, it has to be a movable. Ergo, IP rights—patent rights in inventions, copyright in original creative works—are “incorporeal movables.” Ideas, it turns out, are movable.

[Update: IP rights can also be legally classified as non-consensual negative easements, or servitudes. See Intellectual Property Rights as Negative Servitudes (June 23, 2011)

[Also: In the English common law, patents are apparently classified as a chose in action. See Peter Drahos, A Philosophy of Intellectual Property (Ashgate, 1996), p. 35 n.26, citing In re Heath’s Patent [1912], W.N. 137 [56 Sol Jo 538, 29 RPC 389]; W. S. Holdsworth, “The History of the Treatment of ‘Choses’ in Action by the Common Law,” Harv. L. Rev. 33, no. 8 (June 1920): 997–1030.]]

Isn’t this good to know? Whew!

And who really thinks the idea of property rights in nonscarce goods is coherent?

1. See KOL 037 | Locke’s Big Mistake: How the Labor Theory of Property Ruined Political Theory. Also Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Of Private, Common, and Public Property and the Rationale for Total Privatization”, sec. I, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, ch. 2, and The Great Fiction, chs. 2–4 et pass. [↩]
2. See my “Legislation and Law in a Free Society,” Mises Daily (Feb. 25, 2010) . [↩]
3. See also my Louisiana Civil Law Dictionary . [↩]

I received a query about IP from Aaron Easler, a student at Grove City College who had taken a recent course “Economics of Intellectual Property,” taught by my friend Jeff Herbener and covering my Against Intellectual Property. His message to me is reprinted below, with permission, as is my reply.

Hi Stephan, I don’t know how familiar you are with Grove City College and their economics department, but it’s very Austrian and at least Dr. Herberner, the header of the department and senior fellow of the Mises institute is an Anarchist.

Anyways, a few students were really interested in the IP topic and talked him into starting a 1 credit course in IP, which primary consisted of dissecting the various parts of your book and case studies through class-led discussion and debate.

I’ve come to have two main questions/points of contention with your argument. The first is more minor and concerns your criticism of Rothbard and his conception of Copyright though contracts and the other involves your definition of how property is established.

Your main concern with Rothbard’s copyright argument is that a third party who gets ahold of the work cannot reasonably be subject to same contract and had no way of knowing which of two identical works, one with copyright enforced and one without, was copyright protected. Isn’t it fairly reasonable to assume that the copyright-protected one would simply have “copyright” written in it on the opening couple of pages, as they do today? In that environment, why wouldn’t someone who finds a book and accepts the copyright as legally-recognized proceed as he does when finding someone else’s physical property in much the same way?

The second, and more consequential, argument I found unclear was your assertion that ownership of property is established through homesteading. First of all, what is homesteading other than claiming ownership of something that previously hasn’t been claimed? Under that definition alone, couldn’t someone, seeking to legitimatize IP, make that same claim to new thoughts? [continue reading…]

From the Washington Times:

Monsanto, steaks, and chefs: Intellectual property and foodSunday, April 7, 2013 – The Business of Living by Joseph S. Diedrich

RELATED COLUMNS

• Even libertarians wrong on Monsanto Protection Act
• Dislike: Facebook Sued for Patent Infringement

MADISON, Wisc., April 7, 2013 ― With all the current controversy over agricultural biotechnology company Monsanto, many are missing the biggest problem: reliance on patents and monopoly protection.

Last week, President Obama signed into law the infamous “Monsanto Protection Act” as part of an Agricultural Appropriations Bill. The law, which essentially protects the agricultural giant against litigation, has caused opponents of Monsanto and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to erupt in a firestorm.

The opponents rally against Monsanto for numerous reasons.

GMOs are unsafe for human consumption; Monsanto should be required to extensively label all of its food products; the environment suffers from the widespread use of genetically modified crops; Monsanto is a big, scary, evil corporation bent on controlling and destroying the world. And so the list goes on.

These charges are largely hokum. There exists substantial scientific evidence debunking the claims of activists who suggest that GMOs are unsafe for humans or the environment. The call for mandated labeling is a call for increased government regulation, something at which everyone should shudder.

The big problem with Monsanto is its reliance on intellectual property. Rather than on innovation, the company’s entire business model is based primarily on patent protection and the monopoly power the patents have bestowed upon it.

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SEE RELATED: Even libertarians wrong on Monsanto Protection Act

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While all intellectual property protection is economically and ethically backward (see here, here, and here), a particularly malignant trend is its ever-increasing prevalence in agriculture and food. In 2011 alone, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office approved nearly 1,200 patents on or related to food.

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