See Douglas Green, **BREAKING NEWS** USMC files DMCA against content creators in Second Life, writing in Examiner.com: “The United States Marine Corps has filed a DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) notice against several Second Life residents who were recreating artifacts and uniforms bearing the USMC logo.” (h/t Skip Oliva)
More on the outrage of plant and seed patents: from the Mother Nature Network: Monsanto wins lawsuit against Indiana soybean farmer: “Monsanto claimed intellectual property infringement when a farmer used the company’s patented seeds from a commodity seed bag. … “. Some excerpts:
Monsanto Co., the world’s largest seed company, has prevailed in another lawsuit against a U.S. farmer, earning a ruling from a federal appeals court that protects Monsanto’s interests even when its patented seeds are sold in a mix of undifferentiated “commodity” seeds.The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington issued its ruling Wednesday, affirming the lower court decision that favored Monsanto.The St. Louis, Mo.-based company sued Indiana soybean farmer Vernon Bowman in 2007, accusing Bowman of patent infringement for planting and saving seeds that contained Monsanto’s genetically altered Roundup Ready technology even though Bowman said he bought those seeds as part of a mix of commodity seeds.Commodity seeds come from farms that use Roundup Ready technology as well as those that do not without differentiation. No licensing agreements are required with the sale of such seeds.Monsanto restricts grower use of its licensed Roundup Ready seed to a single commercial crop season. Roundup Ready seeds tolerate spray treatments of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide.The court found that while the technology agreements Monsanto requires growers to adhere to forbids farmers from selling the progeny of Roundup Ready seeds, those agreements do not extend to second-generation seed.In fact, Monsanto authorizes the growers to sell their second-generation seed to grain elevators as a commodity and does not require restrictions on grain elevators’ subsequent sales of that seed, the court said.But that still does not give growers a green light to replicate Monsanto’s patented technology by planting it in the ground to create “newly infringing genetic material, seeds and plants,” the court found.“The attempt to limit the applicability of patent rights was again squarely rejected by the court,” Monsanto said in a statement.
See also another Monsanto case in Canada from a few years ago:
Monsanto Canada Inc. v. Schmeiser [2004] 1 S.C.R. 902, 2004 SCC 34 is a leading Supreme Court of Canada case on patent rights for biotechnology. The court heard the question of whether growing genetically modified plants constitutes “use” of the patented invention of genetically modified plant cells. By a narrow 5-4 majority, the court ruled that it does. The case drew worldwide attention.
Mike Masnick Techdirt post:
While significant parts of the rest of the world include a “moral rights” component to copyright (which covers things like proper attribution), the US has always avoided it — even though it’s supposedly required by the Berne Convention, of which the US is a participant. The US has mainly gotten around this because it’s the US and it ignores international agreements when it wants to — but also because it put in a tiny bit of moral rights in extremely limited circumstances that are so rare you’ll almost never, ever hear about them. However, it does appear that some are trying to sneak in a form of moral rights via contract.
Copycense points us to the news of a writer, Matthew Jones, who is suing the people who optioned his screenplay (which was based on his own novel, Boot Tracks) for changing the screenplay without his permission. He apparently wrote into the contract that such changes could not be made without his permission — and yet the screenplay was changed to help get funding. There’s an obvious contractual breach in there, but Jones is also claiming copyright infringement, suggesting that, by breaking the agreement, they were also creating an unauthorized derivative work. In this case, it’s a little more confusing, because there’s some question as to when the producer and director actually exercised the option to buy the screenplay/make the film. Either way, it may make for an interesting case and it makes me wonder if we’ll start to see more efforts by content creators to enforce such moral-like rights via contract.
I’ll be appearing tomorrow on Agora I/O? The Liberty Unconference, at 2pm EDT, at the channel “Open Source Agorism: Prosper Without Patents or Copyrights.” Tune in!
Update: Just finished. The video(s) are below. Here is what is amazing. I was set to do the show, using Justin.tv, but for some reason neither of my MacBooks would work with the Justin.tv interface. I saw an option for “mobile device.” It was 5 minutes to showtime. I quickly downloaded Justin.tv app on my iphone, got out a little iPod tripod I had never used, signed in, hit the record button, and walla–I was on Justin.tv streaming live, using my iphone. I was using my MacBook to watch it live, and to monitor questions typed on a facebook stream by the 45 or so participants. Quite amazing. (There are three videos b/c I had a couple of glitches/crashes and had to re-start my iPhone stream twice.)
Watch live video from Agora I/O: Peaceful Evolution on Justin.tv
Watch live video from Agora I/O: Peaceful Evolution on Justin.tv
Watch live video from Agora I/O: Peaceful Evolution on Justin.tv
Well does it, punk? Does it?
See Mike Masnick’s post One Entertainment Business Publication Sues Another For Copyright Infringement For Having The Same Stories.
From Robert Lockett, Jr.:
It looks like the Bluebook is now seeking to prevent the use of its citation standards from being implemented in computer code under the guise of copyright: https://github.com/citation-
style-language/styles/issues/ . As a recent law grad, I find it amusing that I am apparently committing a crime anytime I use (too much of?) the Bluebook’s citation method, which they have fought to hard to get everyone to use.53
As Hans-Hermann Hoppe observes in the Introduction to his book Democracy: The God That Failed, America’s unnecessary entry into WWI caused it to convert from “an old-fashioned territorial dispute” into “an ideologically motivated conflict” which “quickly degenerated into a total war.” This led to the harsh war reparations imposed on Germany (only paid off last year), which ultimately led to the rise of nationalism in Germany, Hitler’s rise to power, and WWII. At the end of WWII, even more reparations were imposed on Germany–this included the transfer of much property, including “industrial” and “intellectual” property, from Germany, as well as forced labor, i.e. slavery.
In one interesting phase of the aftermath of WWII, the US initiated “Operation Paperclip,” a program from 1945 to 1990–basically coextensive with the Cold War–designed to
recruit the scientists of Nazi Germany for employment by the United States in the aftermath of World War II (1939–45). It was conducted by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), and in the context of the burgeoning Soviet–American Cold War (1945–91); one purpose of Operation Paperclip was to deny German scientific knowledge and expertise to the USSR and the UK.
… Throughout its operations to 1990, Operation Paperclip imported 1,600 men, as part of the intellectual reparations owed to the US and the UK, some $10 billion in patents and industrial processes.
As noted in the Wikipedia article on WWII reparations by Germany, “The Allies confiscated significant values of German patents, copyrights and trademarks.”
As noted in Wikipedia general article on war reparations,
Beginning even before the German surrender and continuing for the next two years, the United States pursued a vigorous program to harvest all technological and scientific know-how as well as all patents and many leading scientists in Germany (known as Operation Paperclip). Historian John Gimbel, in his book Science Technology and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany, states that the “intellectual reparations” taken by the U.S. and the UK amounted to close to $10 billion dollars.[2] German reparations were partly to be in the form of forced labor. By 1947, approximately 4,000,000 German POWs and civilians were used as forced labor (under various headings, such as “reparations labor” or “enforced labor”) in the Soviet Union, France, the UK, Belgium and in Germany in U.S run “Military Labor Service Units”.
Wikipedia’s article on Bayer observes:
As part of the reparations after World War I, Bayer had its assets, including the rights to its name and trademarks confiscated in the United States, Canada, and several other countries. In the United States and Canada, Bayer’s assets and trademarks were acquired by Sterling Drug, a predecessor of Sterling Winthrop.
[UPDATE: ignore this post; see now KOL164 | Obama’s Patent Reform: Improvement or Continuing Calamity?: Mises Academy (2011)]
This Friday, Sept. 23, at 6pm Easter time, I’ll be teaching a Mises Academy Webinar discussing the America Invents Act, signed into law last Friday by President Obama. I discuss this webinar in a Mises Daily article today: Obama’s Patent Reform: Improvement or Continuing Calamity?.
In the webinar, I will:
As both proponents and opponents of patent law recognize, these issues are of crucial importance for innovation and our economy. If you are interested in learning about the current direction of patent policy, you may find this class of interest.
P.s.: If you are interested in taking this course but cannot afford it (it’s $20), please email me at [email protected].
[Update: also at Christian Science Monitor: Patent system cost the economy $0.5 trillion since 1990: Why the U.S. patent system is draining the nation’s money]
I have previously estimated that the patent system imposes at least $42 billion in net loss to the economy annually (Costs of the Patent System Revisited). As Mike Masnick notes in his Techdirt post Patent Trolls Cost The Economy Half A Trillion Dollars, a stunning new study by James Bessen, Michael Meurer, and Jennifer Ford, The Private and Social Costs of Patent Trolls, concludes that companies sued by patent trolls have lost $500 billion from 1990 to 2010, with increasing annual costs of late, on the order of $80 billion per year over the last four years. It’s not clear how much of this cost would overlap with my conservative $42 billion annual estimate, but obviously not all of it can, as the sum is greater; and it does not even address non-“troll” wealth-destroying patent battles such as the smartphone wars between Microsoft, Google, Apple, Samsung, Motorola, RIM, and others.
My $42 billion estimate was intended to be conservative. I’d venture that even an estimate of $100 billion a year of net loss in the US economy alone due solely to patents is still conservative. That’s at least a trillion dollars of net loss in innovation and economic productivity every decade, people. A trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon you’re talking serious money.
[Mises]
A while back I began to collect Absurd Arguments for IP. Well, we have another entry. As Mike Masnick explains in this Techdirt post, Insurers Suggest Podium & Stage Collapse Tragedies Are The Inevitable Result Of File Sharing?, there have been several stage collapses and similar accidents at music concerts and festivals. One insurer is blaming this on file sharing and piracy. The argument apparently goes something like this: piracy reduces CD and song sales. This puts greater pressure on bands to make money from giant concerts, with “giant podiums overloaded with video equipment and spots. The rain and the wind do not destroy more often than before, but when they fall, the damage is much greater.”
Uh, yeah. And lack of copyright law killed Dickens, by making him give too many public performances.
Great post by Mike Masnick on Techdirt:
Innovation Doesn’t Just Come From Big Ideas
from the innovation-fallacy dept
There have been a number of stories lately from people complaining that US entrepreneurs aren’t innovating enough. A few months ago, we wrote about a reporter who came to Silicon Valley and complained about too many trivial startups. At the time, we noted that this is actually part of the process of innovation, and figured that maybe this was just a problem of someone “dropping in” on Silicon Valley without understanding the larger way in which innovation works.
However, I’m much more surprised to see Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, who have been around for a while and involved in a variety of Silicon Valley projects making nearly the same argument as a part of an upcoming book.
They maintain that we’re not solving hard problems anymore, and they lay the blame, indirectly, on the innovations that have gotten us to where we are. As Levchin says, it used to be that if the project you were working on was hard to do, you thought it was valuable. Now, it’s so easy to start a business or launch a company, that people have started thinking that if it’s hard to do, it’s not as smart as doing something much easier.
Both Levchin and Thiel remind us that you can take something that looks easy, make it hard, and change the world. As Thiel said, before Google, people thought search was solved, and uninteresting. Google, “reconceptualized it as a difficult problem,” and from that position won a near-monopoly on the space.
First, it seems a little ironic for Levchin to be making this argument, considering his last company, Slide, could be described in exactly the terms that he now condemns. But, more to the point, I think Levchin and Thiel confuse “difficult” with “innovative,” when that’s often not the case. Innovation comes from a variety of places, often unexpected. There are plenty of stories of people just “scratching an itch” and doing something simple… which later turns out to be massively innovative. But part of the process of innovation is that it’s unexpected, and one of the reasons why Silicon Valley tends to bring out really innovative companies over the long run is because of its ability to rapidly test out lots of different ideas — many of which seem silly upfront. Lots of those ideas “fail fast,” but the ones that can stick, can really stick.
If anything, Levchin and Thiel’s thesis seems like a nearly exact parallel of other elitist viewpoints in other industries, whining about how the internet made things “easier” for lowly amateurs to get into the game. It reads no different than the music snobs and movie snobs whining about how new tools have made it easier for “just anyone” to make music and movies. What they miss is that, yes, this creates lots of crappy music/movies/startups — but the bad ones go away quickly, and because of all that experimentation, some wonderful, and often extremely unexpected, things arise. Innovation is a long and always ongoing process. Judging the level of innovation based solely on the “difficulty” of the problem being attempted is like judging a movie based solely on the budget. It just doesn’t work that way.
As noted a while back on The Invent Blog:
Free the cases! http://bulk.resource.org [wayback version] is a project where they are creating a free database of federal case law decisions. Bob Ambrogi notes it already has 1,800,000 pages of case law. Cases you can download for free:
Google also now provides a way to search cases; my PatentLawPractice–IP and Patent Links wiki collects these and other useful online case databases.
Public.Resource.Org has a “Law.Gov” project: “A Proposed Distributed Repository of All Primary Legal Materials of the United States.” Its admirable goal is:
Law.Gov is an idea, an idea that the primary legal materials of the United States should be readily available to all, and that governmental institutions should make these materials available in bulk as distributed, authenticated, well-formatted data. To make this idea a reality, a series of workshops were held throughout the country, resulting in a consensus on 10 core principles.
Browsing around on the bulk.resource.org pages (specifically here), I found two interesting letters: a Request for Clarification [wayback] (Aug. 14, 2007) from Public.Resource.Org Inc., to Thomson/West, asking about the extent of West’s copyright in its caselaw reporters, and what portion was public domain; and Response to Request for Clarification [wayback] (Aug. 28, 2007), Thomson’s reply (Thomson is one of my own new publishers, incidentally, for two of the legal treatises I edit, Digest of Commercial Laws of the World, and Trademark Practice and Forms).
But I’m not sure what. The recent America Invents Act, perhaps? But, Sheesh. More of this guy’s rantings here.
Mr. Barack Obama
President of the United States of America
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Mr. Obama you are an asshole deeply fucking science on such incompetence to perform your duty and guide your country.
Son of a bitch Lawyer from Harvard, politely I told you many insistent times already that I do not want my science Hydrology dishonored and violated so shamefully harming the functioning of society as well as ignoring the RULE OF THE LAW! So now we go down to history when a SCIENTIST has to appeal cursing the US President ordering him compliance and respect to SCIENCE. I never cared about wealth or fame but seeing my ‘scientific breakthrough’ dishonored blatantly by greedy fat cats, lay inventors, and corrupt US officials is just untenable and harmful to human endeavors.
Killing the soul by cursing might be even more efficient than killing the flesh by empowering weapons. Brazilian President Ms. Roussef took weapons and served time to fight against dictatorship for the rights to choose. But the rights to choose our leaders degraded becoming mandatory as the candidates fail equally in the same corruption pattern making democracy something inefficient and expensive to protect the functioning of Brazilian society as our leaders seem so derailed on their guidance having no idea on what to pursue. In Brazil we have to pretend we are democratic but what is missing to all governments in general mainly in the US is just HONESTY.
Giordano Bruno was burned alive facing up the biased faith to protect knowledge while now I must step up to confront corruption harming Hydrology science functioning. I am not worried if you send people to shoot me and my family like you did to Osama Bin Laden just to increase your poll rates. Shit, if the goal was just to make money I suggested Roche just to bribe people at the Treasure Office by simply printing the bills instead of colluding with USPTO soiling science on intellectual property affairs poorly reinventing what I already did so grounded on classic scientific principles. China dictatorship has something that I personally admire as the power to send fast to death penalty those corrupt greedy criminals that spoil the functioning of society. It seems that China has to grow and personal individuals cannot derail it like the US is doing lately. China is so imposing that if the country figure out that obesity is a problem in few years everybody will get slim again and never ever a Chinese leader would assign an obese person to solve obesity problems simply because leaders must provide honorable and sound models to new generations on precious goals to pursue.
As you are aware I am a PhD scientist fucking your ass and not a teen 17 years old like Mr. Luke Angel that was drunk and quickly expelled from the country on September 2010 for calling you a prick. You are fucking your country and the world altogether for such incompetence and disrespect to society functioning. I am a scientist pursing a sort of SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY deeply rooted on government negligence, corruption, and collusion. I spent 12 years on a project that gave me no single penny because of HONESTY shortage on US government affairs. You are far more than asshole and prick as I carried out more than 3,000 trials to be sure that nature agrees with my new conceptions of Hydrodynamics. So, lay and corrupt people are overstepping my scientific acumen to harm what humans have the most precious – decency and glare. [continue reading…]
The Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF) is dedicated to building public awareness of the manner in which so-called “intellectual property” (IP) laws and policies impede innovation, creativity, communication, learning, knowledge, emulation, and information sharing. We are for property rights, free markets, competition, commerce, cooperation, and the voluntary sharing of knowledge, and oppose IP laws, which systematically impede or hamper innovation. IP law should be completely and immediately abolished.
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