"DRM on ebooks is dead. (Or if not dead, it's on death row awaiting a date with the executioner.)
"It doesn't matter whether Macmillan wins the price-fixing lawsuit bought by the Department of Justice. The point is, the big six publishers' Plan B for fighting the emerging Amazon monopsony has failed (insofar as it has been painted as a price-fixing ring, whether or not it was one in fact). This means that they need a Plan C. And the only viable Plan C, for breaking Amazon's death-grip on the consumers, is to break DRM.
"If the major publishers switch to selling ebooks without DRM, then they can enable customers to buy books from a variety of outlets and move away from the walled garden of the Kindle store. They see DRM as a defense against piracy, but piracy is a much less immediate threat than a gigantic multinational with revenue of $48 Billion in 2011 (more than the entire global publishing industry) that has expressed its intention to "disrupt" them, and whose chief executive said recently "even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation" (where "innovation" is code-speak for "opportunities for me to turn a profit").
"And so they will deep-six their existing commitment to DRM and use the terms of the DoJ-imposed settlement to wiggle out of the most-favoured-nation terms imposed by Amazon, in order to sell their wares as widely as possible.
"If they don't, they're doomed. And all of us who like to read (or write) fiction get to live in the Amazon company town."

Indeed. I am very happy with switching to electronic books for novels & c., but it is exceedingly clear to me that _somebody_ is profiting here, even at $0.99, and it is not the authors, but rather the intermediaries who act as centralized controls over the flow, and make sure that their monopoly status is hard to challenge.
(Or: Amazon self-publishing as the Elsevier of electronic books; discuss.)

" if some policy increases consumption of something with zero marginal cost (an idea, an academic paper, a song, an e-book, etc.), a minimum, necessary condition to restrict that policy is that the variety of affected new goods must decrease. So if music piracy increases the number of songs consumed (and the number of songs illegally downloaded in any period of time is currently much higher than worldwide sales during that period), a minimum economic justification for a government crackdown on piracy is that the number of new songs created has decreased (in this case, they have not). Applying The First Law to open access mandates, a minimum economic justification for opposing such mandates is that either open access has no benefits, or that open access will make peer reviewed journals economically infeasible."

"The problem with a rights-based liberalism is precisely that it is not and never can be the end of history, that it is never secure or stable, that every liberty claimed through toil and protest, no matter how acclaimed and cherished and generative, is one day away from the firing line when some powerful interest decides that some right or practice is inconvenient.

"It doesn’t even matter if the end of a right, a freedom, a possibility will ultimately hurt that powerful interest. The contemporary businesses who have registered a powerful stake in exceptionally restrictive monopolies over intellectual property have themselves been enormous beneficiaries of a conception of the public domain as a fundamental and irreversible right of a free society. No matter: they would now see it ended. Better to kill the future than live in a present where you can only have two Ferraris in the driveway."

"The Motion Picture Association of America, chief sponsor and financier of SOPA and PIPA, addresses Wikipedia, Reddit, and other major sites going dark tomorrow, accusing them of “abuse of power.” “It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.” In related news, the mutilated body of Irony was found washed up against a pier in the East River. She was pronounced dead at the scene."

"ormer chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, assesses the current state of the arts in America and finds cause for alarm. Even as he celebrates our ever-emerging culture and the way it enriches our lives here at home while spreading the dream of democracy around the world, he points to a looming crisis. The expanding footprint of copyright, an unconstrained arts industry marketplace, and a government unwilling to engage culture as a serious arena for public policy have come together to undermine art, artistry, and cultural heritage--the expressive life of America."

Hear, hear!

"a running theme in empirical work on IP: it is very, very difficult to show that patents, copyrights, and other government granted monopolies are somehow good for welfare. ... I would guess that the welfare benefits of moving from the current regime to the optimal IP regime are more substantial than the welfare benefits of moving from the current trade regime to the optimal one. So why then do economists write a ton about trade rules but so little about ,,, the deleterious effects widespread in innovation policy? ... I really wish economists would restrict the use of the term “intellectual property” to the legal monopolies granted by copyright, patents, and the like, reserving an alternative term – I like “knowledge goods” ... – for the actual creative works themselves. ... the term “intellectual property” was rare until the 1970s, and was deliberately introduced in order to induce linguistic equivalence between knowledge and physical property."

"collects data on research papers about genotype-phenotype links, as well as ... tests for diseases associated with certain genes ... Celera-held genes saw roughly 30% fewer scientific publications about genotype-phenotype links, and a similar decrease in availability of genetic tests ... more pronounced for Celera genes that the public effort found in 2003 than [in] 2002 ... even today, genes once held by Celera see fewer publications per year ...
"... Bayh-Dole Act ...incentivized publicly-funded research to be patented. ... argument was that ... downstream innovation might increase because [it] would be protected by a license of the original patent. [Instead,] increasing the price of using already discovered knowledge ... decreases downstream product development..."

"Right now there are two ebook versions of my novel The Mall of Cthulhu available. One is the kindle edition, the other is the version on webscription.net. Though it's priced higher, I know some folks may want to buy the webscription version because of concerns about Amazon's DRM. Here's the problem, though-- the webscription.net version is an unauthorized edition. Nobody connected with that edition has the right to sell an electronic version of my book, and at this point, it's not at all clear that I will ever get paid for what amounts to the theft of my intellectual property. Nobody's returning my emails, and let's be honest--we're not talking about big money here, so it's not worth anybody's while to involve attorneys or anything." Therefore, Cooper has made the PDF of the advance reading copy free online, which is certainly one way to undermine the competition! (I paid for my paper copy and recommend it.)

This seems like a nice custom.

I am no great friend of patents, but already from the abstract I am suspicious. With the knapsack problem, everyone understands from the beginning what the goal is, what counts as a solution, and the range of all possible solutions. Technological discovery is NOT LIKE THIS AT ALL. I suspect we are back at "assume a can-opener/complete set of markets", which was fine for Arrow and Debreu doing moral philosophy, but not to be taken seriously. Still: the first tag applies.

The common patrimony of mankind, as it were.

Memo to self: see if library has copy of Heller.

Possibly the longest set-up for an groaningly awful punchline ever to appear in the New York Times.

Really: "a calm look at the evidence". Steve doesn't make it sound like they consider the costs of using patents as such vs. other discovery-funding schemes (potentially large for, precisely, pharma)

(looks guiltily at hard-drive)

"examines the cultural meaning of artistic

The cover is a stroke of genius.

Two word, one hyphen: Reed-Elsevier.

Replacing patents for pharmaceutical innovation with gov't prizes