Matt Yglesias link here picks up a story on patents from Steve Landsburg link here.

The patent covers a "portable electronic device with graphical user interface supporting application switching". The effect of the patent seems to preclude any other smartphone maker from doing the same thing.

Landsburg avoids coming to a judgment about this patent, and asks the readers to argue the question. Yglesias has a more reasoned judgment:

"Sometimes critics of over-patenting lean too heavily, I think, on the idea that these abusive patents are somehow overly broad or trivial but I don't think that's the real issue here. The issue is that there's just no sound public interest case for granting monopolies over certain features to the first-to-market firms in this industry. Apple has already gained a very large competitive advantage from the fact that they were the first people to deploy a working touchscreen smartphone and even without patents clearly has a strong financial need to continue investing in improving its product lest lower-margin Android-powered phones eat away at its profits."

But I don't think that goes far enough in this case. We now have an industry dominated by two or at most three huge firms (counting Google). The many small firms are sources of innovation but are simply bought up by the biggies when they are very innovative and successful. The lawyers are running rampant.

The big three should be broken up as dangerous with their dominant market power.

These were collected in the course of other research by Azeen Ghorayshi and put online as a slide show by Mother Jones magazine link here.

My favorite is #6 in the slides called "method of concealing partial baldness" patented on May 10, 1977. Here is the illustration for the patent which should have been denied on the grounds that it was already in wide use among the balding. .

Really makes me feel confident of the wisdom and judgment of the patent office and it has been that way for years and years. What happened to good sense.

Matt Yglesias takes up the patent issued Google on its driverless car link here.

But that characterization isn't quite right. In fact the software patent is on the method allowing the control to pass back and forth from machine control to human control. More precisely, "the use of a predefined landing strip" or "programming a predefined route into a vehicle, or having a computer control an autonomous vehicle that follows a route based on information stored in the computer".

Matt notes that the world gains from this in terms of safety and efficiency. However he questions the patent grant on the grounds that another monopoly has been established by stealth. Fortunately, the patent will be worthless once the world switches to full time computer control of the car. But in the meantime, we will all pay in higher prices.

Via ZDNet yet another example of why we need to get rid of patents on software.

Matt Yglesias had two good blog posts on copyright yesterday, making a quite telling argument I had not seen before. The first post looks at the nature of "theft" implied by the use of the term piracy link here. He basically argues that it is not the usual form in which I deprive you of your property when I take an object and that therefore we can be much more relaxed about it.

The second looks at who benefits from copyright protection for things on the internet and whether it makes much difference in the incentive to create link here. Most violations occur on the internet where the returns to the creator for the high earning books and movies have become enormous; that constitutes, if anything, an incentive to produce less.

In short, why should public moneys be spent to guarantee ever higher, not to say exorbitant, returns to copyright owners? This is not the sort of argument lawyers will find attractive, but why trust their judgement since they are big gainers from enforcing prosecution. Better not to have the public pay for enforcement and make the lawyers earn their generous take.

Our former fellow blogger, Larry Lessig, has a new book out and it has been reviewed today in the New York Times link here .

The review is favorable, arguing that the book is on the side of the public interest, but at the same time, critical because it concludes the proposed cure for bad law flowing from special interest money in policy making is unlikely to succeed--the interests on the other side just have too much at stake.

In the end, the book implies that the cure for what ails the body politic will be found in voter education and that will involve a long wait.

Alex Tabarrok who blogs at Marginal Revolution has suddenly turned his attention to patents and their pernicious extension (or perhaps I have only just become aware of his interest) link here. He has written an e-book and cites a number of favorable reviews. He argues that patents have not only failed to encourage innovation but have instead slowed it down based on data over a period of years and citing the legal costs of patent suits decreasing the returns from innovation.

He returns to patents in a later blog where he comes down hard on one example: the extension of protection for the development of a new medical procedure link here. His example of choice has been much in the IP news recently as the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the granting of a patent on a method of determining how much of a medicine long since out of the reach of its original patent should be adjusted, depending on the patient's tests. He then does a riff on the general expansion of patent protection to such new fields as software.

Worth reading and thinking about.

The conclusion seems to be that we can't have tablets or smart phones because every device violates someone's patent. See how the patent system encourage innovation?

The New York Times ran a surprisingly long and tough piece from Reuters titled Making Sense of Patent Law link here. It opens, saying "The United States Supreme Court has a chance to reverse the mission creep in patent law. The system is supposed to reward inventors but not stifle innovation. Fuzzy and overly broad concepts like thought processes generally are not protected. Yet one company, Prometheus Laboratories, reckons it owns a method for interpreting how patients react to a drug."

It then traces the history of patent law covering ideas which consistently forbade such patents but by 1994, was patenting "any software with a practical purpose."

The instant case began "in 2004, [when] Prometheus claimed the Mayo Clinic had infringed a patent on a seemingly simple process for diagnosing patients. The procedure was the kind of analysis based on observation that doctors do every day, the clinic maintained. But the Federal Circuit upheld the patent. The Supreme Court is to hear oral arguments in the case on Dec. 7."

"The seven years of litigation are one cost of a broken system. The number of federal patent infringement lawsuits has soared, to more than 3,300 last year from about 800 in 1980. Legal experts say the suits have cost companies hundreds of billions of dollars a year."

"But the greater expense may be lost innovation. The risk of getting sued discourages research investment and delays medical breakthroughs the opposite of what those who devised the patent system intended. Reversing years of damaging precedents is hard, but a Supreme Court ruling against Prometheus would be a start."

Hope rises. We will be watching.

Nick Bilton poses an interesting question in the New York Times on whether you can copy physical objects without violating copyright link here. His answer is yes and he found intellectual property lawyers who supported that view. He gives several examples, based on 3-D printers actually producing copies of a cup and other useful physical objects, either from the object or from photographs of the object. He asserts that copyright does not cover things that are useful.

This conclusion raises several questions in my mind. What if the object is patented rather than copyrighted? What if its usefulness depends on a patented process that is essential to the usefulness of the object or its copy?

Finally, how long before the proponents of intellectual property manage to get the law changed, either through legislation or judicial interpretation? Even now, you can imagine the outbursts of outrage once something significant is "stolen".

Maybe we'll be lucky but don't count on it.