Kevin Kelly has a long New York Times article about digitizing books, Google's solution to the orphan works problem, and the clash of the copyright monopoly business model versus the disruptive competitive digital technology model.
Kelly points out that the five publishers that sued Google last year are partners in the Google Book Search Partner Program. They want readers to be able to search books because it's good for their business. But like any monopolist, they don't want to give up their rents.

Here is the May 15 Business Week article "Hauling in the Hollywood Hackers".

The FBI, aided by a mole, did a sting operation against some movie file sharing entrepreneurs in California (including a programmer in Connectucut), who were convicted of "criminal copyright infringement," and are facing a total of 54 years in prison and large fines.

The article details how both the hacker-entrepreneurs and the FBI enforcers work. The enforcers mostly go after the top tier of the hackers' network instead of either the lower tiers or the end users, who presumably are also criminals, at least under the copyright statutes. The FBI did arrest an employee of a movie theatre in St. Louis, who loaded a copy of a movie onto the server of a hacker group.

FBI agent Julia B. Jolie compares it to a "gang war." Who's the gang and who's fighting the war?

Free the Hollywood Hackers!

Lilly lost its patent case to Ariad, as detailed in this story.

Lilly claims that Ariad's patent for drugs working through a biological pathway "is equivalent to discovering that gravity is the force that makes water run downhill and then demanding the owners of all the existing hydroelectric plants begin to pay royalties on their use of gravity."

The US PTO is rethinking the validity of Ariad's patent, at Lilly's request. Hopefully it will invalidate the patent. Presumably this would make the 50-odd firms Ariad has sent licensing letters to tell it to take a hike.

The May issue of SFO Stocks, Futures and Options Magazine has an interesting interview with Richard Sandor, Chairman and CEO of the Chicago Climate Exchange. He pioneered the creation of financial futures in the 1970s, including Ginnie Mae futures.
He states that "Financial inventions, like the limited liability corporation, were more important than the steam engine."

He also notes that commoditizing the market for home ownership undermined red lining against single women and minority groups. "You can get a mortgage in 24 hours--you hit the web, you get a certain rate and you close. I think the value of capital market inventions is often significantly underestimated."

Lynn Kiesling wrote an article about the economics of trading credits for greenhouse gases.

None of these innovations have been patented, unlike the steam engine.

Following on David's post about trademarks below, here is the story of the Anti-Defamation League's campaign against groups using "Anti-Defamation League" as a title, including the Anarchists Anti- Defamation League.
The Anti-Defamation League was helped by some court decisions that lowered the bar in determining what constitutes exclusive use of trade names. Its real name is the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. How on earth anyone could confuse it with the National Mexican American Anti-Defamation Committee or the American Italian Anti-Defamation League, Inc. or the Anarchists Anti-Defamation League is a mystery only a solon could unravel. And we know there are plenty of solons on the bench all over America.

Geoff Goodfellow appears to be the inventor of wireless e-mail, which he did not patent, according to this story. He has a properly jaundiced view of patents, as does Mitch Kapor, who notes that NTP's patents should never have been issued.

Big Pharma Wants More Time Expect a new skirmish between Big Pharma and the generics. Some leading drugmakers are preparing a push for legal changes to extend their period of protection from generic rivals. Industry executives say that Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY ) CEO Peter Dolan, who now heads the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America, an industry association, is likely to make the effort a top priority. A drug's patent protection typically lasts about 20 years. But it runs from the time a compound is discovered rather than when a drug gets FDA approval and comes to market, usually 8 to 12 years later. Generics makers aggressively attack patents on blockbusters, challenges that, if successful, further shorten the patent protection. There's also five years of "data protection," another right to exclusivity based on clinical trial results. This kicks in at approval. Pharma's complaint? Robert Armitage, Eli Lilly's (LLY ) general counsel, says the resulting exclusive periods under this system aren't long enough, given multiyear clinical trials. He wants 15 years of data protection, along with a 15-year patent, also granted at FDA approval. Such a scheme would effectively lock out generics since they would need to produce their own data in costly clinical trials. With the feds paying for Medicare prescriptions, any change likely to raise the bill will be a tough sell. Says Ira Loss, executive vice-president at Washington Analysis: "They are going to be hard pressed to move this very far." By Amy Barrett

The New York Times has an interesting article on a patent case making its way to the Supreme Court, LabCorp v. Metabolite Laboratories. The key issue is whether a patent can be granted for a procedure plumbing the relationship between between a substance in the body and a disease, or whether this is an unpatentable natural occurence.

As the article explains, court decisions have ruled against protecting natural laws and phenomena as well as abstract ideas; but in a 1981 case, Diamond v. Diehr, the Court decided for a patent on a rubber curing process using a chemical equation. An interesting aspect of the contest is that in the lower courts the plaintiff didn't raise the issue of patenting natural phenomena, instead arguing the case on other grounds, as the Burlington, N.C., firm doesn't wish to undermine its own patents, thereby hoisting itself by its own petard.

He who lives by the patent....