Mrs. Rowling is having her own readers/admirers sent to jail for liking her books too much and wanting to share her "beautiful" (so to speak) prose with other teenagers who cannot read English, but can read French.

The story is simply told. At light speed, and apparently with extreme accuracy, a 16 year old French high school student translated Rowling's last volume in French and posted his high quality translation on the web, for free.

They had him arrested "to protect copyrights and to avoid innocent fans being duped." Yup, that's exactly what Rowling's agent said. The kid was then released and it is unclear if they are pressing charges against him or not. The translation is gone, obviously.

Gallimard will come out with its translation in a few months ... a 16 year old Lycée student is apparently more efficient than them. That's what you get with a high quality Lycée system!

One trick used by pharmaceutical companies to arbitrarily extend the life of their patents is to come up every ten years or so with small, sometime barely significant, improvements and variations that are recognized by the USPO as new inventions and patented accordingly.

After India, giving in to pharma-lobbying and international pressure from the US and the EU, adopted a new patent legislation that allows for patenting of drugs, big pharma decided to test it to see if the same trick could be played there.

The test was carried out first by Novartis, using the case of a relatively minor (in terms of Indian market size) leukemia drug, called Glivec. Was a small improvements on Glivec patentable in India as a new drug? More importantly, shouldn't the Indian courts order local producers of generic drugs to stop producing the generic version of Glivec and export it worldwide, now that its new version was covered by an Indian patent?

The answer, coming from Madras, is NO: the small improvement does not contain enough innovative content to support the claim for a new patent. Because the original version of the drug goes back to before 1995, it is not covered by an Indian patent and the local producers can continue competing with Novartis worldwide by selling their version of the drug at roughly 1/10 of Novartis' price.

To learn why this is good news not just for people suffering of the particular form of leukemia that Glivec is effective against, but also for a lot of other sick people, read the extended discussion in the excellent NYTimes piece.

The New York Times gets it just right in their editorial today (link here) on the Federal Communications Commission's "compromise" on open wireless rules for the public spectrum auctions coming up early next year, and the follow-on auctions of the analog television spectrum in 2009. Under the compromise, some portion of the spectrum being auctioned next year will have requirements that cell service providers operate open networks, without restrictions on which phones customers use and which software applications they run on their phones and over the open networks.

As the editorial notes, AT&T and Verizon fought this ruling tooth and claw.

The Tinseltown Identity: sixty per cent of movies (even with multiple platform distribution) and ninety per cent of TV series lose money.

So what's a studio to do?

Convert it to the Tinseltown Ultimatum:

Ditch the residual payment system .

Movie script writers are entitled only to their initial fee under copyright rules, which of course no one in Hollywood is proposing to touch.

Everything you need to know right here .

Fopp and Tower Records have closed within the last year.

The four major record labels are undertaking cost cutting measures to save their businesses. Are they just shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic?

This six-volume encyclopedia on pharma technology and regulation looks like it might be the last word on the subject, at least if having everything in one convenient place is the criterion. I haven't seen it and don't know if it covers the patent issue, but it looks worthwhile as a general reference. And at only $3,000 a set, you'll probably want two.

Click here

There are at least a dozen new unauthorized Harry Potter books in China. They are spurring interest in reading among kids, and providing lots of jobs in the printing industry, not to mention booksellers, according to the New York Times .

But not to worry, J.K. Rowling's lawyers are on the case. After all, she's only a billionaire and might have a problem upgrading her lifestyle if this problem continues.

If they can't do it, she might call out Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish, and Short. I hear they are really mean.

Fortunately, the Chinese government is more libertarian in regard to the monopoly formerly known as intellectual property than are the governments of the U.K. and the U.S.

It seems that authorities with the U.S. border and custom enforcement have no problem issuing border passes to drug smugglers coming to the U.S.

But when it comes to cracking down on people playing unauthorized copies of video games, they are all over that serious transgression big time commando-style.

Certainly shows where the priorities of law enforcement are these days. Curiouser and curiouser...

In todays patent troll news Sony is being sued over the cell processor. The patent Sony is alleged to have infringed is here. Why is Parallel Processing a patent troll? Simple: Parallel Processing, or more precisely Rob Chang to whom the patent was issued, has contributed little or nothing of social value. Read the patent: does it help you build a parallel processor? No. The basic ideas underlying parallel processing have been known for decades; the devil is in the details - which types of decentralization of processing and memory work well under practical conditions and with particular hardware. The Sony Cell is the product of a few cheap ideas and a lot of expensive tinkering. There is no evidence Rob Chang or Parallel Processing contributed to this process. So they have no moral or economic claim on Sony. And since they lack moral claim and are trying to file a financial claim that makes them trolls.

The sad thing is - it wouldn't be that hard to improve the patent system to get rid of this type of claim. Just force patent holders to provide evidence of having contributed in a substantial way to product they are claiming belongs to them.