My Austrian Scholars Conference 2008 Rothbard Memorial Lecture, "The Intellectual Property Quagmire, or, The Perils of Libertarian Creationism" (originally titled "Rethinking IP Completely"), is now online. Here's the audio, the video, and the accompanying Powerpoint presentation (PPT, 32 MB; PDF version, 51 MB). Update: the Google Video version is now available; embedded version below.

In reading Robert Pear's excellent article in today's New York Times Business Section documenting the sheer waste associated with patent-oriented rent-seeking by Big Pharma in its lobbying over Congress's current round of attempted patent reform, I was struct by this sequence of quotes and comments on the disagreement between companies that rely on patents and those that don't regarding the proposed reforms of the inequitable conduct doctrine, which allows the courts to invalidate a patent if it is demonstrated that the patentee deliberately withheld or distorted information in the patent application process:

Mr. Armitage, the Lilly executive, said: "The doctrine of inequitable conduct is used so aggressively in litigation that it has unintended consequences. Applicants give the Patent and Trademark Office too much information, to avoid allegations that they concealed anything, and they refuse to explain the information, to avoid later allegations that they engaged in some form of misrepresentation."

James C. Greenwood, president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, said, "The poor patent examiner gets a dump truck full of information that he has to pore over without any assistance from the applicant."

The number of patent applications 467,243 in 2007 has nearly doubled in the last 10 years and has more than tripled since 1987.

Jon W. Dudas, the under secretary of commerce for intellectual property, said: "We are getting more and more unpatentable ideas, worse and worse quality applications. Historically, in the last 40 years, the allowance rate the percentage of applications ultimately approved hovered around 62 percent to 72 percent. It went up to 72 percent in 2000, but dropped to 43 percent in the first quarter of this year."

On reading this, I started to wonder if anyone had thought about possible open source methods for reviewing patent applications, and, lo and behold, this is something the USPTO is apparently considering. Link here.

Even if it doesn't, this article offers further proof of just how thoroughly corrupt our current patent system is.

A conference in Amsterdam two weeks ago discussed the "strategies for sustainable access and creative reuse of images and sounds online." There is a lot too read, but for an executive summary, see this blog. From what I gather, open access models are thriving in Europe, as archive maintainers have been able to convince authorities that it was money well spent, if government money is needed at all. There seems to be a general agreement that copyright is counterproductive. And this argument is not coming from theoreticians, but practitioners.

PS: A few minutes after posting this, I stumble on another account of this conference that more specifically looks at examples of some business models. Offering free downloads appears to be perfectly viable...

Pennsylvania has a consumer law that guarantees high prices! According to Pennlive.com:

The 1941 law is intended to prevent businesses from driving others out of business by selling goods at prices below cost. The goal is to protect consumers, because a company that wiped out competitors could then charge any price it wanted.

In this particular case, it prevents Wal-Mart to sell generic prescription drugs for $4, which have to be charged at least $9. Not surprisingly, independent pharmacists are fighting against a change in this law, given that they sell these drugs for $25...

So, we have a law that is supposed to prevent a future monopoly by instituting a cartel.

In Nobel Prize Winning Economist Explains How IP Rights Are Part Of The Globalization Problem, techdirt's Mike Masnick (who is heroically great on IP) notes the "fascinating speech by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz on Making Globalization Work. We've written about Stiglitz in the past, for his explanation of how patents often do more harm than good economically."

But not so fast. Is Stiglitz really that good on IP? As I noted in Patents and Utilitarian Thinking Redux: Stiglitz on using Prizes to Stimulate Innovation, Stiglitz has advocated replacing the patent system with a system for "awarding prizes"--presumably taxpayer funded--for innovations and inventions. In Scrooge and intellectual property rights, Stiglitz endorses a "medical prize fund" that "would give large rewards for cures or vaccines for diseases," which "prizes could be funded by governments in advanced industrial countries." Two cheers for capitalism! Or is that the other one?

The March 31 issue of Business Week had an interesting article on recent efforts by some fashion designers to sue their copiers, "Put a Patent on That Pleat." Stuart Weitzman and Diane von Furstenberg sued a couple competitors, including Target, which copied von Furstenberg's "spotted frog" print. Target spinelessly caved in and stopped selling its frog knockoffs, saying it respected others' "intellectual property." This is the kind of stuff Ayn Rand meant when she talked about "the sanction of the victim." (N.B. I am neither a Randian, nor an Objectivist; and I oppose her defense of patents and copyrights.)

But lo and behold, movie mogul and impresario Harvey Weinstein, who owns the Halston label, is moving to make its catwalk fashions available right off the runway at Net-a-Porter.com, with the idea of using a first-to-market model to beat the pirates at their own game and garner the rents earned from satisfying the market demands of demanding fashionistas first. Even Mr. Weitzman and others are innovating by designing original creations with new materials and patterns that make it harder for pirates to copy them. Some of the new materials are too expensive for knockoff purveyors to copy.

In September 2007, James Surowiecki revisited "The Piracy Paradox", the tendency noted by law school professors Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman of fashion innovation to flourish in the absence of strong intellectual "property" protection.

via Mauro Mello Jr., probably best just to quote him

Here is yet another article on how people who want to believe can get really screwed up.

Courtesy of the music industry and its allies, this is yet another not-so-subtle stab in the back of people who purchased DRM-protected music (a.k.a. bona fide customers, the raison d'etre of the music industry, by the way). It is almost surreal, along the lines of "if you don't ever upgrade this one specific computer of yours, or if it doesn't seize for any particular reason, your (our) music is yours to keep forever (sort of)".

The article is here

19-0. There, I said it. The NFL Patriots are apparently pursuing steps to trademark "19-0" and thus hinder any team that would actually have a perfect season from using its actual win-loss result.

The trademark application would not prevent newspapers from using 19-0 in their columns, as the application is visibly only for silly knick knacks with a 19-0 mark. But the principle is vexing, like trademarking three-peat.

A story out of Korea today reports that the "Coalition of Anti-Privacy in the Korean Movie Industry" is pushing to close down eight P2P websites for pirating their movies link here. `Internet users illegally downloading movies and recklessly reproducing them is rampant here,'' said Kim Ji-hoo, spokeswoman for the filmmakers' rights group, as quoted by The Korea Times. The article produces some no-doubt-spurious statistics on the prevalence of such piracy and the cost to the industry to make its PR point. It also is reported to have started an education campaign to inform the public about the high cost and how wrong it is. Right out of the MPAA playbook.

This story makes the same point I just made in the comment on enforcing IP rights in China. These countries will enforce IP when they have domestic constituencies that will benefit. I wonder how the defense, that a site "making available" does not constitute piracy, will play in Korea?