The Daily Caller has an excellent article on the portrayal of intellectual property rights in the movie "The Social Network." Here's a quote:

"The Social Network" should also be celebrated for casting an intellectual property dispute as its central conflict and in doing so, chipping away at the legitimacy of modern intellectual property protections.

You may enjoy

the illustrated history of piracy.

Highly recommended reading here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/oct/05/free-online-content-cory-doctorow

A great line from the new film The Social Network.

Lawrence Lessig gives a very insightful review of the film and explains how, in spite of it still being a solid film, writer Aaron Sorkin managed to miss the mark in crafting an even better (and ultimately, more honest) one.

It helps if you've already seen the film to fully appreciate the review which can be read here:

http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/78081/sorkin-zuckerberg-the-social-network?page=0,0

I've argued in the past that we should both get rid of patents and the FDA. Without the FDA, the problem of having to reveal the secret of a new product in order to get approval is gone. And the FDA does more harm than good anyway. This would seem to confirm that. It's hard to imagine that any benefit from their having kept unsafe drugs off the market will justify their preventing the development of new antibiotics in the face of increasing bacterial resistance. In this case the road to hell may literally be paved with good intentions.

From: Mullins, Daniel On Behalf Of Merrill, Steve Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2010 4:38 PM To: Mullins, Daniel Subject: First Public Meeting of the Committee on the Impact of Copyright Policy on Innovation in the Digital Era

Dear Colleague:

We have scheduled the first meeting of the NAS-STEP committee to develop a research agenda on the impact of copyright law and policy for Thursday & Friday October 14-15, 2010, at the Academies' Keck Center, 500 Fifth St., NW. We invite interested parties to present their views on the committee's task in an open session Friday from 8:30-Noon in room KC 100. We encourage presentations that identify priority issues in copyright policy that the committee should consider addressing. Some but by no means all of the possibilities are enumerated in the project prospectus attached, including * limitations and exceptions to copyright including fair use * secondary liability for infringement * technology mandates * statutory damages and * access to publicly supported scientific research

To discuss this invitation and/or schedule a time on the agenda, please contact me at an early opportunity. Project sponsors will be given their preference of time to the extent possible.

Sincerely,

Stephen A. Merrill, Ph.D. Executive Director Science, Technology, and Economic Policy The National Academies 500 Fifth Street, N.W. KC574 Washington, DC 20001 Tel. 202-334-1581 Fax 202-334-1505 Mob 202-731-1782 Email smerrill@nas.edu Web www.nas.edu/step

This is why I think government mandated DRM isn't merely bad policy, but crazy policy. On the other hand, if companies are foolish enough to want to lose all their customers by putting DRM in their products, well there thankfully isn't yet a law that mandates companies sell only things people want to buy. I don't give advice on buying stocks, but Microsoft surely doesn't have much of a future.

BoingBoing.net has all the links and goodness here:

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/09/26/comic-explains-the-f.html

A useful link to all of the SF Chronicle's recent coverage on the topic can also be found here:

http://topics.sfgate.com/topics/Copyright

Ashlee Vance writes in today's New York Times Sunday Business section about the problems open source software has with enforcing the agreement of users to publish the source code with the the actual software, so that it can be further developed link here. I don't think the article explained the issue very well; it says only that the agreement with the open source community has been violated.

The point of the open general license is that software which finds new uses or builds on the underlying code and alters it then becomes available to the rest of the open source community. Hopefully, the accumulation of applications will in time be a highly competitive rival to the big profit making software suppliers like Microsoft and Apple. It is also a way to reduce the high cost of profit-seeking software makers that retain their software monopolies for long periods.

The article makes a point that financial penalties for failing to abide by the standard open software agreement have been modest if not nil. This no doubt softens the reluctance of users, as evidence by the rapid spread of such applications to new gadgets that are now pouring into the market.

Finally, the article sends readers to the Linux Foundation for more information; to Hewlett-Packard, which has helped develop a standardized inventory list for software so that companies can keep track of their code and licenses," and to a website, "Gpl-violations.org, an organization named after a popular open-source license, [which] receives an e-mail complaint from someone who suspects that a product may use open-source software without adhering to the rules" and checks it out.