Copyright provides a (somewhat temporary) monopoly that allows the holder to extract rents by limiting access to the copyrighted work. This paper by Giovanni Ramello writes about some literature that has been interesting in how some industries have been trying to expand their market shares by exploiting these monopolies to the point of excluding new entrants. He documents this with the example of the publishing industry whether the major players keep increasing the stranglehold on the industry.

We have certainly seen this happening in the scientific publishing industry, where the number of players keeps decreasing through mergers and acquisitions. But this is a good opportunity to remind ourselves that there is a movement trying to counter this: Open Access. And it so happens that this week is Open Access Week. So spread the good word about the free dissemination of research!

Hat tip: Economic Logic

There is an interesting article in today's Business Section of the New York Times that asks the question of whether Apple's business culture with respect to the iPhone is taking it down the same path it went down with respect to the Macintosh which saw it eventually lose out to Microsoft in the market for home computing. This question refers, of course, to Apple's culture of control over the market for apps on the iPhone, which is reminiscent of its demands in the 1980's and '90's that application developers wishing to write code for the Macintosh had to apply for and pay for licenses from Apple before Apple would release the necessary application program interface code to the developer.

It would seem natural to conjecture that the openness of the Android operating system could eventually lead to the same kind of market tipping phenomenon that saw the Mac lose out to the PC for business adoption. That said, it isn't clear where the needed network externalities are coming from in this case, since wireless communication technology is pretty standard.

Our Stephan Kinsella has put together a center for the study of - well more or less against monopoly. Go take a look: Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom

John Bennett post links to an interesting article on copyright as a way of infringing upon free speech. While I agree on the substantive conclusion (the power attributed to copyright holders does infringe on free speech nowadays) I am not sure that the issue can be addressed in a satisfactory way by simply advocating a Common Law (CL) approach instead of a Statutory one (SL). At the end, this seems the eternal debate between CL and SL and both evidence and logic leave the issue quite open. Until a judge does not exceed the established boundaries the CL approach tends to leave more to to fair use and less to its opposite. But once a judge rules otherwise ... well, we are up the old creek that John Belushi made so famous (did he have a copyright on the joke?)

The question is: how do you prove that something is not "fair" use? A statute, per-se, does not immediately make this an easier task (i.e. restricts fair use), or vice-versa. A statute establishes some criteria, and those criteria may be restrictive or not in the very same way that, under CL, a judicial interpretation may, or may not, establish new boundaries and new interpretations. The issue, at the end, boils down to: who has got the power to decide and rule?

I am afraid the answer always depends on the balance of the powers on the battlefield, and that balance tilted in the 1980s in a very clear direction. It did not tilt in the bad direction because SL took over CL, but because the political momentum (and the Reagan administration) pushed in that direction. The direction of change, until now at least, has kept steady and we are now in the situation we are. Until technological and economic changes will not tilt the opposite way (the same argument applies to patents) the current trend will persist because it is supported not by the majority of people but by the most organized and powerful lobbies.

That is the political problem. I am well aware I do not have an answer as to HOW we can tilt the political momentum in favor of free speech and against intellectual monopolies, but THAT is the problem we need to face. Free speech is a collateral damage(d) freedom in this battle, which is one of economic and social interests. Hence, it seems to me, the question we should ask is: how do you build and who can build a coalition of social and economic forces that will find intellectual and inventive freedom to be preferable to intellectual monopolies. At that point, either CL or SL may be useful to push back intellectual monopoly. I do not see, a-priori, why one system would yield better results than the other.

Mike Masnick picks up on the conflict between copyright and free speech link here. Many of you have probably read it but if you haven't, you ought to. You will ask yourself what you have been thinking. And to wonder what the courts have been thinking.

I hope this is not a repeat on this blog. Der Spiegel published two months ago a discussion of the work of Historian Eckhard Höffner. He argues that the fragmentation of Germany in the 19th century made it impossible to enforce copyright laws, if there were any. This lead to the massive availability of books, and to the publication of ten times as many titles as in the UK, where copyright was strictly enforced. This transformed Germany into a country of readers.

Michele Boldrin and David Levine have made the same argument in their book when comparing the copyright enforcement in the UK and the lack thereof in the United States, which lead to a boom of readership and then literacy in the US. Höffner makes the same point for Germany. He goes as far as claiming that this boost in readership and thus knowledge is the origin of the great expansion of German industry, much stronger than in the neighboring countries or Britain. Indeed, plenty of manuals and handbooks were published that made knowledge much more widely available, In Britain, this was limited to the elite, and the common people had to learn from hearsay.

The most glaring negative aspect of patents nowadays are patent trolls, and nowhere is this more obvious than with software patents. here is another one for your enjoyment, or not.

Ars Technica reports about a firm threatening to sue large corporations for the use of roll-over images on their website. What makes this one different is that instead of intimidating small players, it is going after big fish who have legal teams, and those are willing to fight back. Even stranger, the patent expired a few days ago. But I wonder how many still fell for it.

Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library, confronts them and argues that we should summon the willpower to overcome them.

He submits that: "'Despotism and priestcraft' have an antiquated ring to them, but the danger of restricting access to knowledge is as great today as it was two hundred years ago."

Read the rest here:

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/oct/04/library-without-walls/

From a representative of a large multinational to the inventor of graphene: "We are looking at graphene, and it might have a future in the long term. If after ten years we find it's really as good as it promises, we will put a hundred patent lawyers on it to write a hundred patents a day, and you will spend the rest of your life, and the gross domestic product of your little island, suing us."