"We Can’t Afford to Just Be Consumers Anymore

In the classical model of economics, a self-interested consumer like Josh would readily accept Interstate’s offer, seeing no downside.

But Josh is part of a new class of consumers who understand the idea of “voting with your dollar”, and it goes well beyond which brand of toilet paper you bring to the checkout line. There are several immediate downsides to the “resolution” Interstate brought to the table:

Firestone would be rewarded for their ridiculous 2-hour-minimum policy to change the battery.

Interstate would continue to be unable to enforce their warranty.

The customer (Josh) would have no reason to believe he’d be able to get a new battery in the future without all of the nonsense implied by the resolution — namely, paying for the 2 hours of labor himself and then securing reimbursement from Interstate.
Josh looked at the options and decided not to enable the vendors in their bullying of Interstate, and not to encourage Interstate to bend over for them. And he realized his time in chasing down his due was worth more than the value of the product in question."

"The theory of patent law is based on the idea that a lone genius can solve problems that stump the experts, and that the lone genius will do so only if properly incented. We deny patents on inventions that are "obvious" to ordinarily innovative scientists in the field. Our goal is to encourage extraordinary inventions – those that we wouldn’t expect to get without the incentive of a patent.

The canonical story of the lone genius inventor is largely a myth. Edison didn’t invent the light bulb; he found a bamboo fiber that worked better as a filament in the light bulb developed by Sawyer and Man, who in turn built on lighting work done by others. Bell filed for his telephone patent on the very same day as an independent inventor, Elisha Gray; the case ultimately went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which filled an entire volume of U.S. Reports resolving the question of whether Bell could have a patent despite the fact that he hadn’t actually gotten the invention to work at the time he filed. The Wright Brothers were the first to fly at Kitty Hawk, but their plane didn’t work very well, and was quickly surpassed by aircraft built by Glenn Curtis and others – planes that the Wrights delayed by over a decade with patent lawsuits.

The point can be made more general: surveys of hundreds of significant new technologies show that almost all of them are invented simultaneously or nearly simultaneously by two or more teams working independently of each other. Invention appears in significant part to be a social, not an individual, phenomenon. Inventors build on the work of those who came before, and new ideas are often "in the air," or result from changes in market demand or the availability of new or cheaper starting materials. And in the few circumstances where that is not true – where inventions truly are "singletons" – it is often because of an accident or error in the experiment rather than a conscious effort to invent. "

"When I walked into the offices of Dr. Ken Cirka, I was looking for cleaner teeth, not material for an Ars Technica story. I needed a new dentist, and Yelp says Dr. Cirka is one of the best in the Philadelphia area. The receptionist handed me a clipboard with forms to fill out. After the usual patient information form, there was a “mutual privacy agreement” that asked me to transfer ownership of any public commentary I might write in the future to Dr. Cirka. Surprised and a little outraged by this, I got into a lengthy discussion with Dr. Cirka’s office manager that ended in me refusing to sign and her showing me the door."

"Patent Publication Eliminates Trade Secret: In a straightforward opinion, the appellate panel held once published, the information in a patent application should be considered “generally known and readily available” and therefore are no longer amenable to trade secret protection.  "

"…They then got attorneys who demanded that we settle for 2,000 or they would appeal. We again refused and told them we would see them in court. They filed an appeal and a hearing date was set. We prepared ourselves, deciding to forgo an attorney after discussing the case with one. However, two days before the hearing we received a notice from them informing us that they would not pursue the appeal and would be paying us. We received the money in April. This was our little moment of victory. Collection companies have no right to harass anyone. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act is very clear regarding calls to people other than debtor."

'In the majority opinion, the Ninth Circuit Court ruled that since Pineda-Moreno’s driveway wasn’t enclosed and was open to passersby like delivery men and neighborhood children, it didn’t pass the Dunn test for curtilage.  Never mind that in the Dunn opinion, the majority writes “we do not suggest that combining these factors produces a finely tuned formula that, when mechanically applied, yields a “correct” answer to all extent-of-curtilage questions.”'

The question, however, is whether that will happen anytime soon. And if it doesn't, music fans might be justified in putting the blame on copyright law. "The potential copyright liability that could attach to redistribution of these recordings is so large--and, more importantly, so uncertain--that there may never be a public distribution of the recordings," wrote David G. Post, a law professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, on the Volokh Conspiracy blog.

"In a landmark decision issued today in the criminal appeal of U.S. v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers. Closely tracking arguments made by EFF in its amicus brief, the court found that email users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored email as they do in their phone calls and postal mail."

"I strongly suspect these patterns are driven mostly by customers, i.e., that more accurate professionals would be less successful in inspiring confidence by others in them. If you are a successful professional, that is probably in part because of your unjustified arrogance."

"Now folks, it's pretty revealing when lobbyists have become so accustomed to their privileged access and backroom dealings with politicians --as went on in regards to Cheney's energy discussions, and each of the Bush tax cuts drawn up by a secretive group of GOP without any sunlight (or bipartisansip), for example, and too much with the health care bill as well--that they don't even bother to hide their scorn for the public's views and their hopes for getting that back room deal to go their way. No wonder Wall Street honchos have been so brazenly arrogant about their "entitlement" to bonuses, their rights to continue proprietary trading and hedge funds and derivatives desks--"doing God's work" says Goldman CEO Blankfein--when they are merely running a casino market to strip as much gold off suckers as possible with their "financial innovations" like synthetic CDOs that made the market many times more volatile than "real" securitizations…"

"Then they tested their model against reality: in a giant computing task, they took all the 15-nucleotide sequences from the BRCA1 gene, and searched for them, just on chromosome 1: they found 340,000 matches, roughly the same as their theoretical prediction, and the equivalent of 14 infringing sequences on every human gene. The BRCA1 gene, incidentally, is on chromosome 17.
The claims in this patent therefore extend, if properly enforced, to almost every single gene, in every single person on the planet. There is a moral and practical argument to be had about patenting nature, but the rights conferred in this patent are basically absurd."

"An end to frivolous patents for business processes will be a blessing to online commerce. Meanwhile, the loss of patent protection for software could make programmers realise at last that they have more in common with authors, artists, publishers and musicians than they ever had with molecular architects and chip designers. In short, they produce expressions of ideas that are eminently copyrightable."

"Lawyers representing Demi Moore sent a threatening letter to Boing Boing over the holidays which demanded that we remove a post I published in November, or face legal consequences. In the referenced Boing Boing post, I published photographer Anthony Citrano's speculation that a recent W Magazine cover image of the actress may have been crudely manipulated by magazine staff to alter her hip, and appear thinner."

"I can understand why a retailer would want to use my copyright as bait to lock in readers—but exactly how is this good for me? This is why I'm not selling digital downloads of the professional readings of With a Little Help. With so much friction and goofiness in the marketplace, I'd rather give the MP3s away under a Creative Commons license and solicit donations through PayPal. My listeners don't want DRM. They want to get their books with a minimum of hassle. But, for the record, I'd put my books in Audible and the iTunes Store in a hot second if only they'd sell them on the same terms that I'd be willing to buy them: no DRM and no license agreement except “don't violate copyright law.”"

"Inventors and practitioners will need to take these developments into account when preparing and prosecuting applications. For example, it may be necessary to review a broader cross-section of prior art than was previously necessary, or to consider filing evidence of unexpected results earlier rather than later in the course of prosecution. By being proactive, practitioners will expedite prosecution and avoid unnecessary fees and RCE filings. "

"I have signed up for multiple GA accounts and never took the time to read the TOS until now. Like any legal document, it’s dry and at times full of legalese and formality. Here’s what you need to know…in plain English (emphasis and italicized comments are mine):"

"American law does not similarly protect the moral rights of its authors. In fact, it has a legal convention called "work-for-hire" that is to moral rights what peonage is to citizenship. If you sign a contract with a "work-for-hire" clause, you agree that what you've written is a thing without any more integrity than a lump of coal, and that the purchaser can do whatever he wants to it, editorially, without any need to consult you, and that no matter how much or under what circumstances the work is republished, you have no rights to demand further payment. In my opinion, work-for-hire contracts are disreputable acts of force majeure on the part of publishers. Nonetheless, it is almost impossible for a novice writer to avoid signing them, and in the last few years, it has been difficult even for established writers to avoid them..."

"If sites really needed permission to link to others, the Web would be a very different place. It's hard to imagine there would be a Gawker, or for that matter a TMZ, a Wikipedia, or anywhere else that embarrasses the subjects of posts. In another example of an effort to stop linking, a city lawyer in Sheboygan, Wis., demanded that blogger (and political critic) Jennifer Reisinger remove from her site a link to the police department. Reisinger has sued various city officials for violating her First Amendment free speech rights. Her case is pending in federal district court in Wisconsin. Let's hope the judge in Reisinger's cases sees linking differently than Judge Darrah did. If cases like these come out the wrong way, the Internet could go from a Web to a series of one-way roads."

"There's also an unspoken class bias at work here, a bully mentality that chooses its targets based on who's likely to fight back and win. Consider commercial TV, which is filled with programs that routinely air copyrighted material without permission for purposes of journalism, satire or simple entertainment. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report don't ask permission to air any of the news clips they slice and dice each night for yuks; they consider a network's onscreen logo to be acknowledgment enough, and their assumption is almost never challenged."

"We see generally about ten areas you should consider in terms of what you should publish, such as (1) improvements to core technology, (2) innovations you might normally document elsewhere, like in a paper or conference, remember we want the PTO examiner to see these documents, or (3) where you might think others will patent, or (4) innovative concepts you see that “link” well know ideas or patents together , or (5) around your key new ideas you have, or (6) new uses for existing ideas, or (7) new potential technical standards, or (8) industry directions, or (9) how users use your idea or (10) the directions of open source"

"The Defensive Publications program, a component of Linux Defenders, enables non-attorneys to use a set of Web-based forms to generate defensive publications. It relies on substantial participation from the open source community using a "Wiki"-like contribution model. OIN plans to work with participants to ensure that each defensive publication is an effective disclosure. The completed defensive publication will be added by OIN to the IP.com database, which is, in turn, used by IP attorneys and the patent and trademark office to search for prior art when examining patent applications."

"Nesson argues that the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999 is unconstitutional because it effectively lets a private group — the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA — carry out civil enforcement of a criminal law. He also says the music industry group abused the legal process by brandishing the prospects of lengthy and costly lawsuits in an effort to intimidate people into settling cases out of court."

"Deregulate "the copy": Copyright law is triggered every time there is a copy. In the digital age, where every use of a creative work produces a "copy," that makes as much sense as regulating breathing. The law should also give up its obsession with "the copy," and focus instead on uses -- like public distributions of copyrighted work -- that connect directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster."

"Do you see, Thomson Reuters? Do you see? If you don’t settle this nonsense in a fashion that leaves Zotero intact, the open-source software development world will fear to interoperate with you. If EndNote isn’t already dead, this will kill it, because our little project is hardly the only one of its type. We are legion, and you have shut yourself away from us. You have no one to blame for this suicidal course but your own legal and executive team.

And if you take away Zotero, trust me, Thomson Reuters: it won’t be EndNote that I switch to."

"We urge Viacom to back off this overbroad request and Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users."

"The public domain is not an “unlicensed commons”. The public domain does not equal the BSD. It is not a licensing option."

"I’ll sing loud its praises and tell of its fame, / While starving to death on a government claim."

"We're just making sure that men and women of integrity can never hold public office." and there you have it

"A basic theory of human endeavor suggests that the smartest people who will ever work in a field are those who work in that field when it is new."

(My title)

via Hugh MacLeod, on Twitter

"Well, in many of those stores, the government never gets the money. The owners of the stores get to keep it. And who are the big beneficiaries of that?" Note the bit on Cabela's.

"What better way could there be to create a nation of constant lawbreakers than to instill in that nation a contempt for its own laws?"

"Law is the operating system of our society and today's agreement means anybody can read the source for a substantial amount of case law that was previously unavailable."

It's just another strange day in the increasingly strange life of a Pirate Bay admin.

Call or write. This is stupid.

Call or write. This is stupid.

"We are dealing with a 25-year degradation of everything public."

Summary of OK vs. CC similarities and differences

Copyright fear has chilling effect on educators

"Negotiators from the House and Senate are expected to meet to reconcile their respective bills this fall. The final, consolidated bill will have to pass the House and the Senate before being delivered to the President at the end of the year."

"If a foreign national is suspected of terrorist activity, the FBI will threaten to have a brutal foreign government punish his family."

"The state would prefer that every service dollar made in the state of Michigan would be employment dollar — rather than an independent contractor dollar."

"Perhaps you could try harder next time out. Pay a little more attention to the procedural questions, maybe."

"The merits of this reform are obvious. Much like patent law, StarCraft is governed by a system of arcane rules that are mostly irrelevant to the actual process of writing innovative software."

If there's a fraction of the truth in this, and not pure exaggeration, it will come down to Net vs. Gov in the end.

Extradited to the US, he faces a possible 10-year sentence and $500,000 fines

"One of the major changes to their selling agreements that will occur in 2007 is a requirement by eBay that anyone accepting consignments for auction who holds themselves out to be an auctioneer, who participates in auctioneering or who advertises that th

European Ministers calling for criminalization of copyright infringement are themselves demonstrably copyright-infringers.

BlackMask may (may) be coming back from the death of over-restrictive copyright enforcement.