As reported by copyright lawyer William Patry in a comment on his blog:

"... I would like to ... point[] to an amazing new UK historical resource. ... the project in the UK House of Commons to digitize (or as they say digitise) Hansard, the official record of the House of Commons, for the period 1803 to 2005. I have already used it and found great discussions of copyright issues, including the term of protection, as early as 1803.

In Against the artificial scarcity of IP law, Michel Bauwens has a nice summary of some of my own arguments against IP.

William Patry has ended The Patry Copyright Blog, and detailed his reasons for doing so.

His blog will be missed by all his readers, both copyright professionals and us amateurs. His copyright legal acumen, learning, and scholarship were second to none, and on full display in his seven-volume treatise Patry on Copyright, as well as in his blog.

In the last statement at his blog, he notes the depressing nature of the current state of copyright law. Of course it is depressing, but not just because of the reasons he sets forth.

Copyright law, in common with all "intellectual property[,] is a cancer," as Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine put it in Against Intellectual Monopoly, p. 264. Like all cancers, it has a tendency to metastasize and grow. It ultimately threatens the life of its host. Even short of killing, it can make life unpleasant, as it did for a young Chinese computer scientist, who was jailed for "infringing" a copyright last year. I don't recall William Patry speaking out against the violation of his liberty, but this blog did. Boldrin and Levine also discuss this issue at length. I can't recall one defender of the monopoly formerly known as intellectual property (or copyright) ever even taking note of the contradiction between liberty and "IP."

He notes that:

Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.

Although his point about copyright's preservation of failed business models and technologies is correct, I must respectfully dissent from his view that its reason for being is "to encourage learning and the creation of new works." Copyright, like its older sibling patent, was born in an unholy alliance of kings and rent seekers, and is all about statism and rent-seeking, not creation and innovation. (N.B. William Patry disagrees with this and wrote about it at his blog.) Unfortunately, he has removed his archives, so it's impossible to read his blog on this subject.

Finally, his statement that

In order to encourage open discussion I permitted not only comments but anonymous and pseudonymous comments. I did that because I wanted to encourage the largest number of people to participate, and after four years I believe that was the right decision

is a bit disingenuous, as Crosbie Fitch and I would both attest to, having both had (non-crazy) comments he disagreed with removed.

The legal arcana was a bit heavy going, and of more interest to copyright lawyers. I will miss his blog more for its historical scholarship and erudition, as well as its occasional bursts of humor. I might not have discovered authors such as Ronan Deazley otherwise, to name one.

My 2001 article is now out in book form: Against Intellectual Property (Mises Institute, 2008). Of course, the Mises Institute offers a free PDF version online as well. And there is also a Scribd version.

Those interested in this might also find my article "There's No Such Thing as a Free Patent" of interest, plus my Austrian Scholars Conference 2008 Rothbard Memorial Lecture, "The Intellectual Property Quagmire, or, The Perils of Libertarian Creationism" (originally titled "Rethinking IP Completely"), which is online. Here's the audio, the video, and the accompanying Powerpoint presentation (PPT, 32 MB; PDF version, 51 MB). The Google Video version is now available; embedded version below.

These and other material are available on my website.

The August 1 edition of the Wall Street Journal reports that organizers of competitions involving animals, robots, and even body parts have been changing their names to avoid "infringing" the trademarked name "Olympics."

The Ferret Olympics is now the Ferret Agility Trials; the Raw Olympics and Rawlympics are now the Raw Games.

America's only native criminal class (i.e., Congress) passed a statute in 1978 giving the U.S. Olympic Committee a monopoly on the word "Olympic" and a few other words. This was buttressed by a 1987 SCOTUS ruling.

The USOC is trying to prevent "ambush marketing." Its lawyers think that people organizing races by ferrets and such will undermine its profitability. If ever there were an example of what Ludwig von Mises called the Montaigne fallacy (seeing the market as a zero-sum game with someone's profits causing someone else's losses), this is it.

From time to time word has leaked out about the negotiations on ACTA, the European, US, and Japanese joint proposal on an international copyright and patent agreement. If you think agreement is a great idea, that makes sense. The problem is that its terms will apparently extend the reach of restrictions in ways that reflect special interests and totally ignore the development of technology's effect on business models in ways which foster innovation--the whole point of patents and copyright.

Till now, our government has been cosy about the terms of its draft agreement. But somebody squealed and the terms are spelled out at Wikileaks link here. Go read. Fortunately, nothing is likely to happen till after the new administration has taken over.

Techdirt notes in CAFC Judge Regrets Decisions That Resulted In Software Patents that one of the federal judges on the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit admits that he was "troubled by the unintended consequences" of the earlier decisions that resulted in the proliferation of software and business model patents. Well at least he regrets it!

Now libertarian proponents of state legal systems are for some reason optimistic about the ability of state legislature and courts to promulgate just laws. Objectivist attorney Murray Franck , for example, wrote:

Just as the common law evolved to recognize "trespass by barbecue smoke," it would have evolved to recognize property in the airwaves and in intellectual creations. But even if it could be established somehow that the common law would never have recognized intellectual property rights, this would not be an argument against such rights. The common law often requires legislation to correct it (for example, in recognizing the rights of women). Indeed it is a myth that the common law evolves to reflect, and that legislation always is in conflict with, the requirements of human nature. The same minds that employ induction and deduction to decide a particular case, making common law, can employ those methods to legislate universal laws.

Hayek also believed that case-law might need occasional "correction" by the legislature (see my Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society, p. 171). Both Franck and Hayek here express confidence that it is possible for the state--via its courts and legislatures--to issue "just" law. Well, I don't know about that. Here we have a "bad" judicial interpretation of a "bad" legislated statute. Oh, well, I guess they can at least "regret" it.

(Cross-posted at Mises blog.)

There is an interesting op-ed in today's New York Times by Tim Wu warning of the dangers of allowing one or two large telecoms to control the bandwidth of the internet. He then goes on to argue that reforming the rules for allocating spectrum could enhance the competition the wire-based telecoms face by allowing competitive innovation in the provision of wi-fi service.

While the point about the need for regulatory reform in the way the spectrum is allocated is well-taken, what the piece fails to address is the whole debate over net neutrality and whether the large telecoms should be declared common carriers subject to the fair access rules that govern how truck lines and freight trains operate in the market.

Wu's analogy of the telecom monopoly/duopoly to OPEC is reasonable, but OPEC is an international cartel that is beyond the reach of any particular nation's antitrust laws. AT&T, Verizon and Comcast aren't, and I would hope that with the passing of the Bush administration, our government would get serious about the need to regulate these monopolies. Enhanced competition is obviously a good thing, but given that the telecoms have been successful in preventing cities (Philadelphia comes to mind) from putting up their own public wi-fi services, the playing field would hardly be level even if the FCC managed to come up with a good set of policies for allocating the spectrum. And, given the lobbying clout of the telecoms, my guess is that good publicly-oriented policies won't have much of a chance unless the Justice Department is standing behind the FCC waving the big antitrust stick.

Senior EPO official warns of tougher patentability standards and higher fees

The latest issue of IAM has now gone to press and will be published at the end of this week. There are a number of highlights, but for the cover story this time around I have gone for a piece written by Ciáran McGinley - the Controller of the EPO and so one of the office's most senior staff members - on the subject of "global patent warming". In the article, Ciáran goes into some detail about what the phrase means and what is causing it. "Incoming volumes are increasing per patent office due to globalisation driven by patent propensity and trade," he writes. "Pendency volumes are also increasing, pretty much independently of what has been happening to pendency times in the different offices. Finally, woolly boundaries are widespread, not just between granted patents but especially among pending applications. It is becoming too much, the system is gradually becoming much warmer. It may not be warm everywhere (yet). It may not be warm in all industrial sectors (yet). But it is definitely temperate."

I guess anyone daft enough to believe in "global warming" nonsense might also be alarmed at the patent system having problems.

An interesting story in the LA Times about the movie "Dark Knight." They went to great lengths to make sure that bootleg DVDs wouldn't hit the streets for the first two days after the movie was released:

Warner created a "chain of custody" to track who had access to the film at any moment. It varied the shipping and delivery methods, staggering the delivery of film reels, so the entire movie wouldn't arrive at multiplexes in one shipment, in order to reduce risk of an entire copy being lost or stolen. It conducted spot checks of hundreds of theaters domestically and abroad, to ensure that illegal camcording wasn't taking place. It even handed out night-vision goggles to exhibitors in Australia, where the film opened two days before its U.S. launch, to scan the audience for the telltale infrared signal of a camcorder.

Warner Bros. executives said the extra vigilance paid off, helping to prevent camcorded copies of the reported $180-million film from reaching Internet file-sharing sites for about 38 hours. Although that doesn't sound like much progress, it was enough time to keep bootleg DVDs off the streets as the film racked up a record-breaking $158.4 million on opening weekend. The movie has now taken in more than $300 million.

The success of an anti-piracy campaign is measured in the number of hours it buys before the digital dam breaks.

Notice: intellectual property didn't play any role in this, and they focused on the doable - keeping the monopoly for a short period of time. I am completely in favor of this: I think a truly short-term monopoly does little social harm, and provides important incentives for creation. But as this makes clear: the police power of the state isn't needed here. And it's absence makes sure that the monopoly is truely short lived. I've long thought that this is the proper use of DRM: don't try to lock down stuff that is years old for decades - clearly a losing proposition - but use it to keep the secret on initial release. If that is accompanied by the DRM-free version to be released after a short pre-announced period of time, the incentives for crackers drops, and it becomes posible to actually keep the secret.