Patent troll NTP is back at it again with a new suit against AT&T, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless over the same patents that brought a $612.5 million settlement from BlackBerry maker Research In Motion link here and here. The USPTO has already ruled preliminarily that the patents are invalid but NTP has appealed, so the case goes on and NTP can even expand its suits if it can afford more lawyers. If, as in the case of RIM, this threatens a company's continued existence, it will pay up, even if it is quite sure that it will ultimately win its case. It is another example of justice delayed being justice denied and an indictment of a legal system which grants questionable patents and then allows their use to extort.

OFFTOPIC: What do we mean by abolishing copyright?

Can copyright not arise in a free market - either through the "partial sale" of property or private contracts otherwise?

Is the crime that copyright is "automatic," requiring action to nullify restrictions rather than action to create them?

Is the crime that a non-party can be bound to the contract?

Or is the trouble, really, that "the people" are willing to pay far too much for so limited access to copyrightable works? When we talk of "copyright reform" do we mean "public opinion reform"?

Free markets might generate a pseudo-copyright in the form of a contract not to distribute copies, but it wouldn't be transitive -- if a copy fell into the hands of someone not bound by the contract (e.g. because someone else breached theirs, or simply via a leak) the content would promptly become free.

Indeed, someone bound by the contract has only to sell or loan his copy and it might get freed. The contract might attempt to restrict doing so, or require binding the recipient to the same contract, or at least require not loaning a copy to someone if you know they'll make copies. Even so, this just means someone has to breach the contract for the content to be freed; once a copy falls into the hands of someone who hasn't been bound by the contract, they can distribute copies and derivative works to their heart's content, legally.

If a leak got detected quickly enough it might be contained by the "copyright" holder offering the copy-receiver a large sum to bind themselves to that contract, but if he's passed copies on by this time it's probably just throwing away money.

It would be a fundamentally freer system, but such contracts would still allow companies a brief period of monopoly by throwing up a speed bump in front of the eventual competition. Which really ought to be enough to meet the needs stated in the progress clause anyway.

It would be interesting to see in which sectors such contracts were stable and in which they proved to be a waste of time. Likely the latter will include any situation where reverse engineering is easy.