C4SIF.org

My reply to: “4 Ways Intellectual Property Drives our Economy”

by Stephan Kinsella on May 16, 2012

My reply to this (ridiculous) post, 4 Ways Intellectual Property Drives our Economy:

I am a patent attorney. The patent system (and copyright system) are abominations. They are antithetical to the free market. They should be abolished.

This study is utter nonsense. The study does not prove IP generates any innovation or wealth. It just says that industries that are subject to IP generate wealth. So what? Every industry that generate wealth is subject to regulations, taxes, etc. Might as well say that taxes cause production, which is obvious nonsense. There is innovation and wealth production despite taxes and patent law, not because of it.

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The Economist: Copyright Is An Antiquated Relic That Has No Place In The Digital Ages

by Stephan Kinsella on May 16, 2012

As noted in a recent Techdirt post by Mike Masnick, economist Dean Baker, in his latest column about how The Pirate Party has got it right on copyright, argues:

Near the top of the list of the Pirate Party’s demons is copyright protection, and rightly so. Copyright protection is an antiquated relic of the late Middle Ages that has no place in the digital era. It is debatable whether such government-granted monopolies were ever the best way to finance the production of creative and artistic work, but now that the internet will allow this material to be instantly transferred at zero cost anywhere in the world, copyrights are clearly a counter-productive restraint on technology.

Problem is, Baker “goes on to suggest some alternative means to fund such creative works in a world without copyright, including ideas like ‘artistic freedom vouchers’ that would give people a refundable tax credit on supporting creativity, on the condition that any of the creativity funded by such money would not be able to protect it with copyright for a period of time.” So despite Baker’s pose that he is some radical supporter of pirate party ideas or an opponent of statist copyright grants—he is not. He supports these statist, ridiculous “artistic freedom vouchers.” This is pure theft: from taxpayer to state-favored “artist”. And he is not even against copyright. In my post Economist: Copyright Is An Antiquated Relic That Has No Place In The Digital Age, I noted that Baker, like Alex Tabarrok in the field of inventions, recommends taxpayer funded multibillion-dollar “artistic freedom vouchers” to promote artistic creation. See also William Patry on How to Fix Copyright and The “Artistic Freedom Voucher” [sic], where I note that Roderick Long here quotes Timothy Lee: “I can’t agree with Baker that all copyright and patent monopolies are illegitimate.” Baker poses as some maverick radical IP reformer, even though he does not oppose getting rid of these monopolies, and indeed favors adding to this abominable program tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer funded state-directed subsidies to the arts and innovation. With radical reformers like these, who needs socialists?

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C4SS: The IP Wars as “Competition”

by Stephan Kinsella on May 15, 2012

From C4SS:

The IP Wars as “Competition”

Posted by David S. D’Amato on May 15, 2012

On Monday (May 14, 2012), the Wall Street Journal published two stories on some of the major players in corporate patent wrangling.

The first story, featuring tech firms Nvidia and Intellectual Ventures, highlights the defensive role of patents as a strategic investment. Nvidia’s general counsel, David Shannon, remarks in the article that “[t]he acquisition of IP is a strategy every company is using right now.”

Elsewhere, in the litigation theater of the intellectual property wars Shannon cites, Apple and Samsung skirmished in a federal appellate court over whether Samsung could market its Galaxy tablet in the U.S. The case is just one in the constant and frenzied volley of IP-related lawsuits within the technology industries, whose most important assets are no longer physical goods, but special legal protections.

These stories and many more just like them hint at something at the core of the way that the economic ruling class employs the power of the modern state.

The role of the state in the economy is and always has been to allow a small elite to create gates and tolls around wealth and natural resources, to monopolize them and the products of labor. As a particular medium for this operating principle, the modern state is somewhat unique, built upon quite specific thinking as to roles and capabilities of bureaucrats working within centralized, hierarchical organizations.

It is in that way very similar, in both its philosophical assumptions and in its functioning, to the modern corporation. Narratives that position business and government as rivals ignore not only the similarities of the two, but their mutual interdependence. Indeed it would be practically impossible to neatly separate the two from one another in the history of the modern, total state.

Technology represents the proverbial double-edged sword within such a paradigm. On the one hand, in its relation to the do-it-yourself realm, technology has thrown wide potentialities of self-sufficiency and independence that few could have imagined, new ways to live and to thrive in a world outside of the state-corporate economic and social structure.

At the same time, the emergence of new industries and new technologies must be regarded as central in the evolution of the kind of state we know today, the reach and scope of authority seeming to lengthen and expand daily.

Discussing the international law framework around “intellectual property,” specifically the TRIPS agreement, economist Donald G. Richards notes the ways that international IP rules “reflect the real and perceived interests of cross-national classes.” Richards argues, as do market anarchists, that worldwide protection of patents and copyrights “facilitates the expansion of global capitalism while reinforcing the currently prevailing hierarchy of production and power relations.”

On a fundamental level, patents and copyrights dictate the ways in which people are allowed to use their own tangible property, from pens and paper to scrap metal and computer chips. They thus represent the kinds of coercive, monopoly privileges that genuine free markets stand against in principle. Using the restrictive power of the state to limit competition raises the prices of our computers, automobiles, food and clothing — virtually all of the good and services we buy.

“Competition” today is no more than a clash between rich, monolithic global corporate titans who would rather use the legal system to ban competitors than actually compete. Competition between Samsung and Apple may be fierce enough in the courtroom, but what would happen in a real free market, one where no one was entitled to special privileges through IP?

Then the consumer might not be merely a consumer; she might just be an autonomous individual with more capacity for self-sufficiency than we can imagine in a today shackled to millions of pieces of paper housing corporate patents.

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Judge.me, Private Arbitration and Intellectual Property

by Stephan Kinsella on May 14, 2012

Tom Woods blogs about an intriguing new service, in I Love People Who Actually Do Things I Only Talk About:

Check out Judge.me, a new Internet-based dispute resolution website, being touted as an equitable and affordable alternative to government courts. The creator sent me a note alerting me to it, and I’m very interested. He also did an AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) at Reddit. Here’s how it works.

Jeff Tucker also wrote about it in Small Claims for the Digital Age:

Judge.me seems like an amazing idea. It’s a arbitration system for the digital age. It is especially useful for international disputes, resolved in days. The site owner answers detailed questions on Reddit. It raises an intriguing possibility that the real long-term results of the Ron Paul campaign won’t be political in the way people think of it but rather entrepreneurial. Many people have been inspired to start new businesses based on the idea of a pure voluntary order.

See the video below. This kind of simple, technology-based private arbitration should be of especial interest to anarcho-libertarians, who have long argued that private arbitration would play a significant role in justice in a stateless society.¹ In fact, its founder is a self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist, as noted in his Reddit AMA.

One interesting thing is their choice of law, which matters given that many of the disputes might involve parties from different countries:

For court litigation, which law to apply (called “choice of law”) becomes an issue as soon as the dispute crosses jurisdictional borders. Even when the parties specified their choice of law in the contract, good lawyers find ways to challenge this which leads to choice of law becoming a trial on its own. To avoid this issue, smart arbitration service providers such as judge.me specify that rather than applying a certain local law, the arbitration will be resolved based on common law and [equity principles]. The concept of basing dispute resolution on “fairness and equity” is known under its latin name [“ex aequo et bono”].

I.e., disputes are resolved by common sense principles of justice—the general rules developed over time in common law and equity courts. (This is similar in a way to international law’s appeal to “the general principles of law recognized by civilized nations”. See my post, The UN, International Law, and Nuclear Weapons.)

But if you stick to justice, common sense, and basic property and libertarian rights, then statutory law is out. You don’t appeal to it when making a determination—unless both parties have agreed to this artificial legal standard. (See my Legislation and Law in a Free Society.) Now this brings to mind the case of so-called “intellectual property”—primarily patent and copyright. Both are the explicit results of massive state legislative schemes–the Copyright Act and the Patent Act. Some anarcho-libertarians who are nonetheless pro-IP, such as J. Neil Schulman and L. Neil Smith, are clear that they do not favor state-enforced IP. As I wrote elsewhere, Schulman, “as an anarchist, to his credit admits that if it could be shown that his version of IP could be enforced only by state law, he would abandon it…” In fact, if they are anarchists, they cannot support any legislation since legislation is a creature of the state. But then they turn around and say that they think private arbitration in a free society would be resorted to, to resolve IP and “plagiarism” disputes. Let’s forget for a second that plagiarism has nothing to do with copyright, patent, or market competition. Let’s forget that if you could sue someone for “copying” you unfairly, then this would open up a whole new realm of anti-competitive protectionism—anyone who competes with you, especially “unfairly”, is “stealing” your customers and unfairly “harming” you.

Let’s just assume we have a private legal system largely based on arbitration, which itself relies on general principles of justice, not on legislation. To sue someone you need to allege they have harmed you—invaded your property rights. Some contract breach, tort, trespass, or even crime. Now if you make the text of a novel or the digital file of a song or movie public (for whatever reason), and someone else copies and uses it and redistributes it (for free; or for monetary consideration); or if someone imitates your product and sells a competing ones—what possible common law claim could you have? None. You could make a copyright or patent claim, but only relying on the legistatist quo. You could not appeal to any organic legal principle developed in a decentralized free market legal order. It is not wrong to learn. To compete. To emulate. To copy. To steal customers. To “deprive” a competitor of profit. To do “something similar.” To use information that is publicly available.

My point? If we had a free society with a decentralized, non-legislated legal order, it is impossible to imagine there being patent or copyright law or claims, any more than someone could make a minimum wage or Americans with Disabilities Act claim absent those federal statutory schemes.

[TLS]

See, e.g., Linda & Morris Tannehill, The Market for Liberty; David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism; and “Imagining a Polycentric Constitutional Order: A Short Fable,” chapter 14 of Randy Barnett‘s The Structure of Liberty. [↩]

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Hacking’s a snap in Legoland

by Stephan Kinsella on May 12, 2012

Hacking’s a snap in Legoland

By Daniel Terdiman
Staff Writer, CNET News

When Lego executives recently discovered that adult fans of the iconic plastic bricks had hacked one of the company’s new development tools for digital designers, they did a surprising thing: They cheered.

Unlike executives at so many corporations, who would be loath to let their customers anywhere near the inner workings of their software tools, the Lego honchos saw an opportunity to lean on the collective thinking of an Internet community to improve their own product while bolstering relations with committed customers.

All it took was being open-minded enough to see that their biggest fans weren’t trying to rip them off; they were trying to improve Lego’s products in a way that, just maybe, the company’s own designers hadn’t thought of.

“I was a little concerned at the beginning because I know there are companies that don’t respond favorably to this kind of thing,” said Dan Malec, a software engineer from Stow, Mass. Malec is an active member of the adult Lego community, a group of passionate Lego aficionados who build models far more elaborate and sophisticated than the kids’ versions most people are used to seeing.

To one toy-industry observer, Lego’s positive reaction to the hack is more than unusual.

“I can’t think of another instance in toys where it’s been basically ‘Do whatever you want,'” said Anita Frazier, an entertainment industry analyst at The NPD Group. “If it doesn’t ultimately hurt the intellectual property, and (the users) aren’t modifying the trademark or the core property at all, (Lego is) looking at it as it doesn’t hurt.”

Last month, Lego launched Lego Factory, a service through which users can create their own unique and customized Lego models–a cat, the Statue of Liberty, a tree or whatever else users choose.

Once the designs are created and uploaded through Lego Factory, the company manufactures the bricks necessary for the model and ships them to users so they can assemble their models. Customers can also buy the bricks necessary to build from other people’s designs, which are posted on the site.

h/t Redmond Weissenberger

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Washington Post on Patent Trolls, Software Patents, and Patent Reform

by Stephan Kinsella on May 8, 2012

From the Washington Post:

Where are the jobs? Ask the patent trolls.

By Vivek Wadhwa, Published: May 7

President Obama has been touting patents as a way to create jobs and increase U.S. competitiveness. “These are jobs and businesses of the future just waiting to be created,” he said of patent applications last September, “somewhere in that stack of applications could be the next technological breakthrough, the next miracle drug, the next idea that will launch the next Fortune 500 company.”The President is mistaken—at least when it comes to the patent system as it relates to software patents. These patents—and the patent system—aren’t creating innovation, they are inhibiting it and, by extension, job creation. Why? Because the breakthroughs aren’t in the patents, they are in the way ideas are commercialized and marketed. Because of flaws in the patent system and government leaders’ misunderstandings, there is an arms race of sorts happening in the tech industry that is sapping billions out of the economy and crushing technology startups. This system is enriching patent trolls—companies that buy patents in order to extort money from innovators. These trolls are like a modern day mafia. Given this, I argue software patents need to be eliminated or curtailed.

(h/t Gary Chartier)

Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, the author misdiagnoses the problem, given his mainstream but non-principled, non-radical, utilitarian approach. The problem is not software patents, or patent trolls, or even “bad” or low-quality patents. The solution is not patent reform, or reducing the term of or even getting rid of “software patents.” The problem is the good patents—”legitimate,” hiqh-quality, unassailable patents granted not to patent trolls (“non-practicing entities”) but to practicing entities who use these patents and the force of law to squelch competition.

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Kinsella Austrian AV Club Interview—Mises Institute Canada

by Stephan Kinsella on May 4, 2012

I was interviewed yesterday by Redmond Weissenberger, Director of the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Canada. We had a long-ranging discussion of intellectual property and libertarian theory, including a discussion about exactly how Ayn Rand and other libertarians got off track on this issue, in part because of flaws regarding “labor” and “creationism” in Locke’s original homesteading argument; inconsistencies between Rand’s support for IP and her recognition that production means rearranging existing property; and also the different roles of scarce means and knowledge in the praxeological structure of human action. (For more on these issues, see my blog posts Locke on IP; Mises, Rothbard, and Rand on Creation, Production, and ‘Rearranging’, Hume on Intellectual Property and the Problematic “Labor” Metaphor, Rand on IP, Owning “Values”, and ‘Rearrangement Rights’, and The Patent Defense League and Defensive Patent Pooling, and my article “Intellectual Freedom and Learning Versus Patent and Copyright.”)

The video is below; audio file is here (69MB). (Trivia: I used my iPad, running the Skype app, for this interview. More stable and better camera than a MacBook.)

[TLS]
[now podcast at KOL165]

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Patent Trolls Are Preferable to “Practicing Entities”

by Stephan Kinsella on May 2, 2012

I don’t know anyone who says we don’t need patent reform. We need to address various problems, they say–junk or low-quality patents, patent trolls, and the like. But as I noted in Gigaom: Can big data fix a broken system for software patents?,

The problem is not trolls, overbroad patents, junk patents, inept patent examiners, software patents, etc. The problem is the very idea of patents.

Or as I observe in Slate’s Farhad Manjoo: Use Crowdsourcing to Improve Patents and Kill Patent Trolls:

bad patents versus good patents has nothing to do with the patent troll “problem”. This alleged “problem” is a result of the fact that there is no requirement to use the invention your patent covers, or even to produce a working model of it. There is no working, use, or reduction to practice requirement. The patent statute requires that the claimed invention be novel, and non-obvious, and also have “utility”–i.e., that it function. But the latter is just assumed, except in rare cases where it appears to the Examiner that something impossible like a perpetual motion machine is being claimed. Filing a written description of an invention substitutes for the requirement to reduce the invention to practice–it’s called a “constructive reduction to practice.” Given this: improving patent quality has nothing whatsoever to do with the “troll” problem. Even if you get rid of the 58% crap patents, the remaining 42% “high quality” patents will still be granted to patentees, some of which are not using the claimed invention. There is no reason a patent troll cannot own and use a “high quality” patent! So what is Manjoo talking about?

Or in The Patent Defense League and Defensive Patent Pooling:

patent trolls usually just want money. So they just serve as a kind of tax. But competitors often want to get an injunction to shut down the product lines of their competitors. Having to pay a “tax” to a troll is usually less of an existential threat to a company than is the patent injunction threat from a competitor.

In other words, the problem is not low-quality patents, or “bad” patents, or patents enforced by trolls–so-called non-practicing entities (NPEs). The real problem is good patents enforced by practicing entities.¹ Even if you get rid of all “bad” patents, all software patents, all trolls, all business method patents–the fundamental problem remains: companies can acquire patents that they can use to squelch competition.

Yes, patent trolls (NPEs) are in several respects better than “practicing entities.” As noted in CE-Oh no he didn’t!: Tony Fadell calls Honeywell out on patent claims:

Smart thermostats might not be the cut-throat world of litigation like, say, mobile phones, but that doesn’t mean the odd feather doesn’t get ruffled from time to time. Nest CEO, Tony Fadell, is understandably protective of his company’s product, so when competitor Honeywell laid a stack of patent infringement claims at his door, unsurprisingly he was none too pleased. How displeased? Well, enough for him to drop this clanger: “Honeywell is worse than a patent troll.” Then going on to quantify with “They’re trying to strangle us, and we’re not going to allow that to happen.” We think that makes his feelings on the matter pretty clear. Well, when you’ve been SVP of Apple’s iPod division, it’s easy to see how patience with such things might wear thin.

A patent troll would merely ask Nest for a fee–like a polite mafia extorter, or Lysander Spooner’s highwayman, who does not pretend he is helping you and, after taking his cut, largely leaves you alone. But Honeywell, a Nest competitor, will do what they can to obliterate the competition posed by Nest. We see examples of this kind of patent-extortion every day. (And copyright too: Stupidity Of Licensing Demands Means The Wrecking Crew Can’t Help Sell More Music With Documentary.) So: Trolls are not the problem.² Complaints about trolls³ are confused. The problem is the patent system itself.

I was reminded of this when Domenic Scarcella in an episode of Haman Nature mentioned that it was the “good cops” not the “bad cops” who murdered Jesus. See HN 65. Of course, the analogy only goes so far because Christians presumably think it’s a good think Jesus was murdered, as I tweeted here. For more Scarcella, see Hn 113. [↩]
See my Patent Trolls and Empirical Thinking; Patent Law, State Courts, and Free Speech: The Case of Troll Tracker. [↩]
Andy Kessler, WSJ, Patent Trolls vs. Progress. [↩]

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Destructive Creation

by Stephan Kinsella on April 28, 2012

In my post Leveraging IP, I noted how various technology, markets, and products are made needlessly complex in order to take advantage of various IP law–copyright, patent, trademark–so that the seller can use state law to quash competition. For example, Omega puts a copyright-protected logo on the back of a watch to prevent arbitrage (when it’s bought by Costco for a lower price in Paraguay and then imported into the US to be sold at a lower price than the much higher US retail price, it’s copyright infringement since a quirk in the law says that due to the import from another country the standard copyright “first sale doctrine” doesn’t apply); clothes and purses and luggage have trademarked symbols made part of the design itself to prevent what would otherwise be legal “knockoffs” (i.e. competition); and laser printer manufacturers build in complicated mating but patentable circuits into the printer cartridges to prevent generics from making laser printer cartridges that can be used with a name-brand laser printer. This reduces the natural standardization and interoperability tendencies that would normally prevail on the market, and increases cost and complexity unnecessarily. A more recent example is found in How Intellectual Property Destroyed Men’s Shaving.

Daniel Ravicher’s Google Techtalk: The Patent Pollution Problem: Its Causes, Effects and Solutions

by Stephan Kinsella on April 28, 2012

In my post Patent Lawyers Who Oppose Patent Law, I include in my list “Daniel Ravicher, Executive Director of the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) and Legal Director of Software Freedom Law Center, and also a registered patent attorney, appears to be opposed to patents or at the very least has serious reservations.”

Here is a recent Google tech talk on problems with patents and some solutions, followed by an older talk. I would disagree with Ravicher that the problem with the patent system is low quality patents. The problem is high quality patents–patents that are not obtained by trolls, patents that are perfectly valid over the prior art, and that the patentee can use to stop competitors from competing with them. Still, it’s an illuminating talk with a lot of good information on the way the patent system (doesn’t) work.

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How Intellectual Property Destroyed Men’s Shaving

by Stephan Kinsella on April 26, 2012

h/t Jeff Tucker:

How Intellectual Property Destroyed Men’s Shaving | Callum Makkai
Well over a century ago, a salesman named King Gillette patented the design for his safety razor and went on to found the Gillette Safety Razor Company. His invention made him wealthy as American men rushed to buy his razor blades.

Update: See Mike Masnick’s post Do You Owe Your Crappy Shave To Patents?

See also my discussion, in Leveraging IP, of how manufacturers intentionally complicate products (such as laser printer or inkjet cartridges) just so that they can patent them so they can prevent competition; or Omega’s adding of a copyrighted logo to a watch back on purpose just to prevent import-arbitrage.

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Forbes: Apple (Mostly) Isn’t to Blame for the Patent Mess

by Stephan Kinsella on April 26, 2012

From Tim Lee writing at Forbes:

Apple (Mostly) Isn’t to Blame for the Patent Mess

Way back in October, I wrote a post for Forbes arguing that it’s a good thing that Google“stole” some key user-interface concepts from the iPhone and incorporated them into Android. Users benefit from this kind of copying because without it it would be impossible to buy a smartphone that incorporated the best features from across the industry.I was planning to do a follow-up post exploring the flip-side of this question: whether Apple “stole” ideas from previous innovators. That wound up being a much bigger project that I ultimately pitched to Ars Technica and finally published here on Thursday. I encourage you to read the whole piece, but to sum up: many of the key innovations we associate with Apple—capacitive multi-touch screens, gestures like “pinch to zoom,” touchscreen-only phones—were pioneered by other companies or researchers long before Apple brought them to the commercial market.

The story sparked a lot of discussion among Ars readers. We’re already over 500 comments with no signs of slowing down. I’ve been fairly disappointed with the response. A lot of Apple fans seem to be interpreting the piece as an anti-Apple hit piece, which wasn’t the point of the piece at all. The iPhone was indisputably a major advance over the mobile devices that existed previously, and I didn’t mean to minimize the accomplishments of those who created it.

Rather, the point of the piece was to point out the degree to which even for a revolutionary product like the iPhone, the process of innovation is incremental and cumulative. For many consumers (including me) the iPhone interface Steve Jobs showed off in January 2007 was unlike anything we’d ever seen. It’s not hard to imagine that the US Patent Office could grant Apple a patent on “the iPhone” and demand that competitors get permission before copying it.

The problem is that once you have the full context, it’s surprisingly difficult to draw a line between ideas Apple “invented” and already-existing ideas that Apple merely put to use in a new context. For example, NYU’s Jeff Han demonstrated a set of sophisticated multi-touch applications at a 2006 TED Talk. Apple’s genius was largely to recognize that these same multi-touch gestures could be usefully translated to the form-factor of a cell phone. So was Apple’s application of Han’s techniques to the cell phone context a new invention or just a relatively obvious translation of Han’s work to a new form factor?

For more on Apple, including its hypocrisy:

Apple years ago: Steve Jobs: “We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas”

Apple now: Tim Cook: “We just want people to invent their own stuff.”

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Americans for Tax Reform Uses Correlation Between Physical Property Rights and GDP to Argue for IP

by Stephan Kinsella on April 26, 2012

In the post A Picture Is Worth A 1000 Words, Americans for Tax Reform posts the graph at right, which shows a positive relationship between physical property rights and GDP per capita. That is: the stronger are property rights in scarce resources, the more prosperity there is. Basic free market economics. ATR writes:

The picture on the [right] proves it [the importance of private property rights] once and for all.

The Property Rights Alliance, an affiliate of Americans for Tax Reform, annually releases the International Property Rights Index (IPRI), an annual report sponsored by 54 organizations that tracks property rights around the world. It has found that that countries that protect their physical and intellectual property enjoy a GDP per capita up to nine times greater than those without legal protection.

Private property rights really are the only way forward.

Note how ATR combines physical property and IP together even though the very graph they use to illustrate this contention has the word “physical” right there in the very title.

As for the Property Rights Alliance, it no doubt does maintain that both physical and IP rights are important–it labels itself as “The Advocate for Physical and Intellectual Property Rights Around the World.” And it does have an annual index that ranks countries based on how strongly they protect both physical and IP rights. But so what? Correlation is not causation. PRA on its site has a post up “New Study Confirms IP’s Importance“–but as I discussed previously, in USPTO/Commerce Dept. Distortions: “IP Contributes $5 Trillion and 40 Million Jobs to Economy”, this study does not establish this at all. It only shows that industries that use IP generate jobs and wealth. It is equally true that industries that are subject to federal and state taxes and regulations generate jobs and wealth, but it would be wrong to attribute this to the taxes and regulations. Rather, these companies generate wealth despite state taxes, regulations, and IP.

The assumption that stronger or more IP rights generates wealth is just wrong; in fact IP imposes huge cost on the economy and reduces and distorts innovation and artistic creation. See, e.g., Yet Another Study Finds Patents Do Not Encourage Innovation; Software Industry Needs 2 Million Patent Attorneys and $2.7 trillion per year to avoid infringing software patents; Costs of the Patent System Revisited.

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Copyright Continues to Crumble; Ebooks Libertated from DRM; Gatekeepers Quake

by Stephan Kinsella on April 25, 2012

From Reason:

Science Fiction Publisher Liberates Its E-Books

Katherine Mangu-Ward | April 24, 2012

Tor/Forge, the rather libertarian science fiction publishing house I profiled in “Tor’s World Without Death or Taxes,” has decided to eliminate digital rights management from their e-books: […]

Other recent news:

Science Fiction Publisher Liberates Its E-Books

See also The wealthiest university on Earth can’t afford its academic journal subscriptions:

Yes, you read that right. According to a memorandum issued last week by Harvard Library’s Faculty Advisory Council, the cost of its peer-reviewed journal subscriptions has become prohibitively expensive.

What does it say about the world of academic publishing, the accessibility of knowledge, and the flow of information when the richest academic institution on the planet cannot afford to continue paying for its peer-reviewed journal subscriptions?

And see Glyn Moody’s Techdirt post: Open Access And The Art Of Contract Hacking:

Open Access continues to gain momentum, as more and more researchers seek to make their work freely available online. One way of doing that is by modifying the contract that academic publishers routinely send to potential authors, inserting a clause that allows digital copies to be distributed.

That’s been working quite well, but some publishers are starting to object, as Freedom To Tinker blogger Andrew Appel discovered recently (link found via BoingBoing.) The Association of Computing Machinery, which claims to be “the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society“, sent him an email that stated it “does not accept copyright Addenda that exceed the liberal rights retained by authors under ACM’s Copyright Policy and the exclusive grant of copyright to ACM as publisher”.

But Appel has come up with a neat idea for getting round this block: […]

Update: See Duke Scholars Join Boycott Against Elsevier; Even Harvard Can’t Afford Subscriptions To Academic Journals; Pushes For Open Access.

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Hacking’s a snap in Legoland

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Where are the jobs? Ask the patent trolls.

By Vivek Wadhwa, Published: May 7

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Apple (Mostly) Isn’t to Blame for the Patent Mess

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