The Patent Troll Tracker site take-down is explained, with interesting references to other sites link here . Its patent lawyer author and his employer, Cisco, are being sued by two patent lawyers for defamation. Techdirt, my source, thinks the case is without merit, but that may be of little weight for Cisco. Comments at the site pursue that question at length. There remains, however, some faint hope that the Tracker may return to the web. For now, we can all mourn his absence.

Brad Stone writes on business method patents in Bits, the New York Times blog, reporting that those who dislike them see a chance of discrediting the whole category in a case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit link here. The usual grounds, that these patents are vague or obvious and lead to endless litigation and tie up the patent office, are cited. In a contrary view argued by Gregory Aharonian, the problem for the optimists is how to define a business method patent to distinguish it from "real" patents, here.

It seems to me he has a strong point and the only way to rid us of these cases is to get rid of all patents. What are the prospects of that?

I haven't seen any mention of it, but the Patent Troll Tracker seems to have taken down his site. His last post in which he said he had been outed, was up for about two weeks but nothing new appeared and today that was gone as well--the old link was here.

In that last post, he seemed interested in continuing but as a patent lawyer and director in the Cisco System intellectual property group, I can imagine that doing so could become difficult. One blog wrote that he would take a few weeks off to consider whether to go on link here. It would seem now that he has made a decision.

A sad day.

The Patent Troll Tracker is no long anonymous link here. The question now is whether he will continue. "Now that I have been unmasked, I'm not sure where the blog is going from here. I'd like to keep it going." That is good news, because in the past, he suggested he might bow out, once found out.

He also reports a bit about himself, including his career as a lawyer. And he describes his motivation for starting the blog: "When I started the blog, I did so mainly out of frustration. I was shocked to learn that a huge portion of the tech industry's patent disputes were with companies that were shells, with little cash and assets other than patents and a desire to litigate, and did not make and had never made any products. Yet when I would search the Internet for information about these putative licensors, I could find nothing. I was frustrated by the lack of information, and also by the vast array of anti-patent-reform bloggers out there, without a voice supporting what I did believe and still believe is meaningful reform."

May he continue until we get meaningful reform.

The latest issue of Technological Innovation and Intellectual Property is hot off the blogs - and very depressing reading it is too. Bad patents drive out the good, costing the economy billions; patents in software make it hard for new firms to enter the market and to get financing. One good bit of news: James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer's new book Patent Failure: How Judges, Lawyers and Bureaucrats Put Innovators at Risk appears in the bookstores this month.

Technological change (i.e. innovation) continues and will transform IP law/practice. Here is a new one, a book scanner ("ripper") for the individual, the next step up from Amazon's Kindle, a hand-held reader of already digitized books link here.

The first review of the Atiz BookSnap aptly describes it as clunky -- "an ominous three-foot-high construction draped with a thick black darkroom-style shade -- looks like a Goth puppet theater and weighs 44 pounds. Under the shade is an angled cradle for a book and a glass platen to hold the pages down during scanning. You turn the pages yourself. It costs $1,600, not including the two Canon digital cameras (around $500 each) necessary to capture the page images and send them to your computer, where software transforms the pictures into files that can be read on a screen or an e-book reader. It takes considerable fiddling to get images set up properly."

But someone is bound to improve it. And so what Google has been doing, digitizing the world's libraries, will become mainstream, creating competitive pressures on book publishers that will both greatly lower the price of books and put the industry on the defensive.

Harvard's faculty has voted overwhelmingly to put it research on line link here. "Robert Darnton, the director of the University Library, wrote in an e-mail message, 'I hope this marks a turning point in the way communications operate in the world of scholarship.'" The library's site is expected to be up and running on April 1. It joins a free online legal research site (www.plol.org).

Free public access shows real progress.

Congress doesn't usually intervene in individual patent cases, but here it has taken the first steps to do so link here. Thereby, big banks would get immunity against a patent lawsuit potentially worth billions in costs to them. The object of their attentions is a Texas patent troll, Data Treasury, which is demanding damages "for infringing on its method of digitally scanning, sending, and archiving checks."

There are several issues here. One is whether the patent is valid as the Patent Office has found--it isn't, if the invention is obvious, as seems likely to this reader. Another is, assuming that the patent is valid and that patents have any real value in promoting innovation, whether the inventor hasn't been cheated. But now, in addition to lawyering up, the troll has had to lobby up. Guess who pays.

Picking up on the trend to online publication, publisher Harper Collins is using this device to promote books by putting six (including the Paulo Coelho novel David wrote about link here) each month at its website link here. Fantasy novelist Neil Gaiman has riffed on the idea by selecting his online novel for posting online, based on the votes of readers of his blog from a list of eight at his website . The books will not be downloadable or printable.

Want cheap advertising? make it a contest.

The Harvard faculty will vote today on whether to publish scholarly and scientific research on the web rather than in expensive journals link here.

"In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn," said Robert Darnton, director of the university library. "It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository."

There is more to the proposal, so read the article and arguments against as well as for. But hopefully, the proposal will be adopted by other faculties as well.