Prince doesn't rely on sales of CDs. Instead he makes live performances, sells his music in ring tones and ads, sells perfume, and who knows what else. He recently gave away free copies of his latest CD, "Planet Earth," all in the name of building his brand name and fan base.

Here is the New York Times article "The Once and Future Prince" .

Hedge funds are financing IP lawsuits . Rembrandt IP Management is buying patents and aiming to bring lawsuits.

"We are focused on jury verdicts," says the head of Rembrandt.

Hopefully the juries will do the right thing and bring verdicts in favor of the defendants in all cases. (We can dream, no?) The rent seeking Rembrandt firm is going after the cable industry now and has sued Comcast and other outfits.

A Comcast lawyer says "this seems to be a perversion of what the system was designed to accomplish."

She overlooks that the system was flawed to begin with, and that the IP wars were inevitable, given the realities of our politicized legal system, and the rent seeking and financial stakes involved.

William Patry has an interesting blog post on the Statute of Anne and some recent research by a PhD student, Rufus Pollock, who maintains that an optimal copyright period is around 14 years.

However, his claim that

Mr. Pollock's paper is unique for looking at the larger picture, i.e., that is production costs and how those costs impact on the extent of incentives required.

overlooks the work of Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, including their book.

by Lior Zemer, The Idea of Authorship in Copyright . It appears to endorse a Lockean model of copyright. If so, it enters a growing field, which includes Adam D. Moore's Intellectual Property and Information Control .

The Zemer book is mentioned by Siva Vaidhyanathan at his blog .

According to an article in The New York Times, James Bessen, a law lecturer at Boston University's law school (and a former software executive), claims that the cost of filing and defending patents outweighs their benefits.

It notes that he stops short of the call to abolish patents by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine.

Count him in the reformist camp with Adam Jaffe, Josh Lerner, and the general counsel of Intel.

In 2000 pre-recorded music accounted for two-thirds of musicians' income; concert tickets and paraphenalia sales earned the rest. Now, in "A Change of Tune" the percentages are reversed.

The record labels aren't happy. Pre-recorded music has become a marketing tool for live performances and T-shirt sales. (No wonder the Grateful Dead, which no longer tours but still has its name emblazoned on T-shirts, is suing Wolfgang's Vault. John Perry Barlow, if you're reading this, call off your attack dog lawyers, if you haven't already.)

The labels have invented a new business model, the 360 degree contract, encompassing live performances and other income sources, which are important in places where "piracy" reigns.

Artists are less receptive to the new model, recognizing that they could be better served by management agencies.

Artists are giving away their music as a promotional vehicle. Prince will give away his new album in England July 15.

The Economist shows why the pharmaceutical industry is gradually overthrowing its blockbuster model in "Beyond the Blockbuster".

As many of Big Pharma's drugs go off patent, it is becoming increasingly difficult for drug firms to replace their lost revenues and earnings, let alone to meet the market's growth expectations. In 2006 $18 billion in revenues from these drugs disappeared.

That's why they are turning toward targeted therapies that are an important part of personalized medicine. Sales from specialty drugs have doubled since 2000, and were two-thirds of new revenue growth in 2006. Meanwhile only 25 per cent of new drugs treat chronic diseases, which seems to indicate that they are producing more specialty drugs.

A group of institutional investors produced a report questioning the viability of the blockbuster model, and expressing doubt that Big Pharma's business model can produce targeted drugs. Change is in the air.

Robert Friedel's new book "The Culture of Improvement" is reviewed in the Wall Street Journal today by Adam Keiper.

The contributions of famous entrepreneurs, including James Watt and Robert Fulton, are surveyed. Are Watt's legal strategems part of the story? What about patents as innovation blocking mechanisms?

The reviewer quotes a passage stating that patents can divert attention away from the cumulative history of creativity.

Technology "proceeds by fits and starts;" R&D, best practices, and, yes, patents are part of the story. A visit to Amazon could be in order.

Publishers are creating speakers' bureaus to publicize authors and their books. It gives them a lucrative second platform.

The rise of the superstore, which created a marketplace where none existed, helped spur the demand for authors' lectures, as did the network effect of the internet.

In today's Wall Street Journal Business World column, "Yes Logo", Holman Jenkins, Jr. writes that China's disregard of "intellectual property," such as trademarks, will cause firms to underinvest in "reputation" (his parentheses) and quality "and won't take place if they can be freely expropriated by knock-off artists."

Mr. Jenkins adduces not one iota of evidence for this remarkable claim, and ignores the fact that software firms such as Microsoft and many others continue to invest billions in producing new products and brand building. Could it be that they earn much more than their cost of capital even in the face of the rip-off artists thanks to their first mover advantages and ability to sell complementary services, not to mention their already strong postions in the market, strong brands, etc.?

So who needs intellectual property?