Here [PDF] is a legal opinion on trademark law that is well worth reading. [E.S.S. Entertainment v. Rockstar Games, Inc.]

The opinion contains several gems such as:

"A reasonable consumer would not think a company that owns one strip club in East Los Angeles, which is not well known to the public at large, also produces a technologically sophisticated video game like [Grand Theft Auto] San Andreas."

...

"[F]ans can spend all nine innings of a baseball game at the hot dog stand; that hardly makes Dodger Stadium a butcher's shop."

While the court's opinion is, of course, correct, I am continually amazed that the legal system still allows IP attorneys to even make such frivolous claims without being sanctioned.

In his helpful alert, Stephen Spear may have overstated the case "that business method and software patents are probably done for" in light of the Federal Court of Appeals decision in the Bilski case. It marks a significant step back from the brink of unhinged insanity in terms of patent policy, but it still isn't the true and thorough reformation that is needed.

However, everyone visiting this site should do themselves a favor and read Judge Mayer's sublime dissent in the Bilski case - arguing that the majority decision doesn't go nearly far enough in curtailing patent abuses.

Mayer's dissent starts on page 98 of this PDF document and continues on through page 122.

A few small tastes of an opinion that is worth posting in its entirety:

There are a host of difficulties associated with allowing patents to issue on methods of conducting business. Not only do such patents tend to impede rather than promote innovation, they are frequently of poor quality. Most fundamentally, they raise significant First Amendment concerns by imposing broad restrictions on speech and the free flow of ideas.

...

Business innovations, by their very nature, provide a competitive advantage and thus generate their own incentives.

...

It is often consumers who suffer when business methods are patented...Patented products are more expensive because licensing fees are often passed on to consumers...Further, as a general matter, "quantity and quality [of patented products] are less than they would be in a competitive market."

Patenting business methods makes American companies less competitive in the global marketplace.

Read the whole thing!

From Wired.com:

U.S. lawmakers approved the creation of a cabinet-level position of copyright czar as part of sweeping intellectual property enforcement legislation that sailed through the Senate on Friday.

Read the whole thing. This follows up David K. Levine's alert here.

You know things are bad when an organization like Public Knowledge is forced to essentially state, "Well, it could have been worse. Let's all be grateful for that."

Who do we have to pay off in the House to kill this monstrosity? Oh, that's right. I forgot. They have already been bought off by the other side...

A rather disturbing development -

A man accused of posting nine previously unreleased songs by the rock band Guns N' Roses on a website where they could be accessed by the public was arrested at his home early today on suspicion of violating federal copyright laws, authorities said.

Kevin Cogill, 27, is accused of posting the songs, which were being prepared for commercial release, on the Internet blog Antiquiet in June, according to an arrest affidavit. The site received so much traffic after the songs were posted that it crashed, the affidavit states.

More info here.

The ephemeral line between civil and criminal penalties in copyright is yet another bothersome abuse of the intersection between business interests and state power. Why are some accused of copyright violations merely sued by businesses while others are arrested by the state? What truly distinguishes one case from the other, and how do authorities make such a determination? On the surface, it seems that the only difference is how much political clout a particular business has with authorities.

I am of the belief that IP violations should never be considered as a criminal offense unless there are other criminal activities associated with the use of the IP itself (i.e., selling 'pirated' goods or fake knock-offs of trademarked products to help fund terrorist groups, organized crime, etc.).

Not only faster - but it might do away with the argument that file sharing networks need to be shut down because they use a disproportionate amount of the broadband network that slows the whole system down.

Details here.

Wired has a primer on Biden's views relating to IP.

Not good news. But then again, few Congressional leaders offer much in terms of better alternatives. (Sigh)

There are plenty of sad things to note about this story about the world's largest remaining vinyl records collection. But the one thing that really caught my attention was the curator's claim that less than 20% of the collection is available on CD.

Most people at this site know what has to happen to make sure that copies remain available in the future...

Details from the S.F. Chronicle -

In a victory for small-time music copiers over the entertainment industry, a federal judge ruled today that copyright-holders can't order one of their songs removed from the Web without first checking to see if the excerpt was so small and innocuous that it was legal.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel of San Jose was the first in the nation to require the owner of the rights to a creative work to consider whether an on-line copy was a "fair use" - a small or insignificant replication that couldn't have affected the market for the original - before ordering the Web host to take it down.

The decision isn't as far reaching as it ideally needs to be, but its a small positive step.

Read the whole thing here to learn more.

Details from the L.A. Times:

Caltech economics professor R. Preston McAfee finds it annoying that students and faculty haven't looked harder for alternatives to the exorbitant prices. McAfee wrote a well-regarded open-source economics textbook and gave it away -- online. But although the text, released in 2007, has been adopted at several prestigious colleges, including Harvard and Claremont-McKenna, it has yet to make a dent in the wider textbook market.

"I was disappointed in the uptake," McAfee said recently at an outdoor campus cafe. "But I couldn't continue assigning idiotic books that are starting to break $200."

McAfee is one of a band of would-be reformers who are trying to beat the high cost -- and, they say, the dumbing down -- of college textbooks by writing or promoting open-source, no-cost digital texts. ... "What makes us rich as a society is what we know and what we can do," he said. "Anything that stands in the way of the dissemination of knowledge is a real problem."

McAfee said he wrote his open-source book because the traditional textbook market is broken. Textbook and college supply prices nearly tripled between 1986 and 2004, an audit by the federal Government Accountability Office found in 2005.

Read the whole thing here.

Then, if you want to learn something about economics, download Professor McAfee's textbook here.

Also check out the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching [MERLOT] here.

Patterico seems to think so with regards to their reprinting of a blog post authored by your humble servant (without my permission).

And Patterico is right - I don't care. It certainly isn't going to cause me to lose my incentive to continue writing about topics that interest me.