In a case similar to that of Limewire reported below, Streamcast, a distributor of software to share files, was found by a court to be guilty of “encouraging computer users to share music, movies and other copyright works without permission (link here).

The case, brought by members of the Hollywood movie studios, record companies and music publishers, had been to the Supreme Court and was sent back to the lower court for further review. The judge's “summary judgement” seems pretty conclusive, unless Streamcast follows the model suggested by Limewire to try to work out a deal by which it can permit file sharing only if the file does not involve copyrighted material.

From the New York Times via Slashdot: IBM has decided to adopt a more open procedure of patenting.

The move by I.B.M. does carry business risks. Patents typically take three or four years after filing to be approved by the patent office. Companies often try to keep patent applications private for as long as possible, to try to hide their technical intentions from rivals.

"Competitors will know years ahead in some cases what fields we're working on," said John Kelly, senior vice president for technology and intellectual property at I.B.M. "We've decided we'll take that risk and seek our competitive advantage elsewhere."

You mean they plan to make money by competing? How unusual. Perhaps the company is run by engineers and not lawyers?

Yahoo reports (link here) that the World Association of Newspapers is spearheading an initiative to create the “Automated Content Access Protocol” and enforce the terms under which search engines access on line and printed content. Newspapers and magazines are said to be particularly concerned about the loss of income to the internet, either from subscriptions or advertising.

"What is required is a standardized way of describing the permissions which apply to a Web site or Web page so that it can be decoded by a dumb machine without the help of an expensive lawyer."

"In one example of how ACAP would work, a newspaper publisher could grant search engines permission to index its site, but specify that only select ones display articles for a limited time after paying a royalty."

The dilemma for ACAP's members is that they benefit from search engines which create traffic to their sites. The solution for some has been to deny access to whole articles unless a fee is paid or the reader is also a subscriber.

A work in progress.

The Washington Post reports that Oprah Winfrey's lawyers are threatening to sue retired school teacher Patrick Crowe for copyright and trademark infringements because he uses her picture in his website running her for president (link here).

At one level, this is silly. But it does raise a serious question. Does she own the copyright on her image? I don't believe I own mine or you, yours. She is a public figure. Paparazzi take and sell photos of celebrities all the time. The lawyers may rather believe they can scare Crowe into taking down the picture, using the threat of big legal costs.

In a curious claim of violation of intellectual property rights, students at a McLean Virginia high school say that their essays are submitted to a company, Turnitin, to compare against a 22 million document database for plagiarism. The essays are then added to the company's database to compare to new essays, giving rise to the claim of violation (Washington post - link here).

It looks as if the students will lose, as the school with the protesting students is requiring them to surrender their claim in order to receive a grade.

Some legal minds are quoted as supporting this student view. That suggests how far claims of property can be stretched.

Copiepresse, an organisation which manages copyright for the Belgian French- and German-language press has won its suit against Google in a Belgian court which has ordered it to stop reproducing article snippets from French-language newspapers in an unprecedented copyright crackdown over what is a common online practice (link here).

Google, which is planning to appeal the ruling, said that it had removed links to the newspapers from news.google.be and was in the process of taking them down from its news sites in other countries.

Agence-France Presse has brought a similar suit and is seeking monetary damages.

If this becomes widespread, it will really damage Google's usefulness and popularity .

Joe Nocera wrote a fascinating story about a nasty patent suit between a patent-trolling company, whose board is chaired by none other than Paul Allen, and audible.com. The story begins:

Nocera, Joe. 2006. "Tired of Trolls, a Feisty Chief Fights Back." New York Times (16 September). "Patent disputes have become part of the dark underbelly of American business. So-called patent trolls acquire patents, often from bankrupt companies -- and often overly broad patents that should never have been issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office in the first place. Instead of using them to build a commercial product, they extract licensing fees from companies that are making and selling real products. As The New Jersey Law Journal put it not long ago, "They exist solely to exact a tax"." "The deck is stacked against target companies, even when their product is not infringing. Patent litigation is expensive, and the judicial system tends to be sympathetic to the patent holder. So companies usually come to the obvious conclusion: it makes more sense to pay than to fight. For its part, the patent troll often prices the licensing fee below the cost of litigation, to encourage such behavior." Abuible refuses to settle, spends a million dollars rather than pay the demanded $300,000, only to find out the troll company does not even have legitimate ownership of the patent. "After a year of legal wrangling, Digeo dropped its price. A clearly frustrated Mr. Blaisdell wrote an astonishing e-mail message in May 2006 to Audible's internal lawyers, saying he was "perplexed as to why Audible has not taken Digeo up on its offer to settle for $300K." After all, he pointed out, that was far less than the "high legal fees" Audible was paying. He added, "Surely you understand that the prospect of convincing a Jury that Audible doesn't infringe or that the Patent is invalid is an expensive one." Digeo may or may not be a patent troll, but rarely has the economics of patent trolling been so baldly stated." "As it turns out, Digeo did not have the complete ownership of the patent that it thought it had. Documents that had been turned over to Digeo when it bought the patent showed that Edward Chang, one of the four co-inventors, had died, and that another -- his brother -- had assigned the rights to the patent to the company that later sold the `823 to Digeo." "Edward Chang, however, was very much alive, and his brother had never assigned the rights to anyone. The documents had been forged -- though it's not yet known by whom. The forgery was discovered by Mr. Kelber, the Audible lawyer. Audible then went to Mr. Chang and got him to sell it a license for $70,000. Last month, when this new evidence was presented, a judge ruled that Digeo was entitled to no monetary damages from Audible."

There is a thoughtful article by Todd Bishop in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on the Microsoft application to patent a computer method of conjugating verbs. It is thoughtful not only because Todd quotes my earlier post, and talked to Preston McAfee and Mike Masnick, but because he also talked to the people at Microsoft. So it makes sense to discuss: is this kind of patent a good idea or not? Microsoft argues that there is innovation that seems to largely revolve around switching from one language to another. No doubt compared to other computer programs this is an innovation. However, as Preston correctly remarks - it is a feature of every language textbook ever written. So does it make sense to allow every existing idea to be patented the first time it is ever done on the computer? Obviously the only "innovation" is in the specific computer code that achieve the purpose - but that isn't what is patented - anyone else implementing the idea would likely write somewhat different code, and probably wouldn't benefit that much from the "innovator"'s code. Moreover, the purpose of the patent system is to encourage innovation. On the one hand the cost of Microsoft's "innovation" is trivial - you and I could whip up some code in a few hours. On the other hand, the negative impact of the patent on innovation may be substantial - anyone who wants to write a computer translation program or textbook program now has to contend with the Microsoft patent - and how much worse if I take nouns? So regardless of whether Microsoft deserves to be a laughing stock for patenting such an obvious idea, issuing and enforcing patents like this cannot possibly be a good idea.

This is an older news item - from August 2 - but hasn't been widely reported. The Federal Trade Commission has finally issued a ruling in the Rambus case. Rambus you may recall is a notorious patent troll - famous for never actually building a memory chip, but for collecting royalties. In the ultimate submarine patent manuever, they not only patented an obvious idea and kept it secret, but then joined a standard making body, and without revealing they held a patent on the idea encouraged the body to agree on a standard that infringed their patent. This was a little too much apparently

In June 2002, the FTC charged Rambus with violating federal antitrust laws by deliberately engaging in a pattern of anticompetitive acts to deceive an industry-wide standard-setting organization, which caused or threatened to cause substantial harm to competition and consumers. The Commission complaint alleged that Rambus participated in the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC), a standard-setting organization that "maintained a commitment to avoid, where possible, the incorporation of patented technologies into its published standards, or at a minimum to ensure that such technologies, if incorporated, will be available to be licensed on royalty-free or otherwise reasonable and non-discriminatory terms." According to the FTC complaint, Rambus nonetheless participated in JEDEC's DRAM standard-setting activities for more than four years without disclosing to JEDEC or its members that it was actively working to develop, and possessed, a patent and several pending patent applications that involved specific technologies ultimately adopted in the standards.

The FTC has now ruled unanimously on the matter

In an opinion by Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour, the Commission found that, through a course of deceptive conduct, Rambus was able to distort a critical standard-setting process and engage in an anticompetitive "hold up" of the computer memory industry. The Commission held that Rambus's acts of deception constituted exclusionary conduct under Section 2 of the Sherman Act and contributed significantly to Rambus's acquisition of monopoly power in the four relevant markets. The Commission has ordered additional briefings to determine the appropriate remedy for "the substantial competitive harm that Rambus's course of deceptive conduct has inflicted."

Chalk one up for the good guys.

(via Preston McAfee) Microsoft has now patented conjugating verbs

A verb conjugating system allows a user to input a form of a verb and display the verb forms. The verb conjugating system allows the user to input the infinitive form or non-infinitive forms of a verb. When a user inputs a non-infinitive form of a verb, the verb conjugating system identifies a corresponding base form of the verb. The verb conjugating system then uses the base form to retrieve and display the verb forms for the verb. The verb conjugating system may highlight the non-infinitive form of the verb within the displayed verb forms to assist the user in locating the verb form of interest.

I think I should grab nouns, and then negotiate with them for the movie rights.