The Washington Post recently editorialized on the high cost to students of the textbooks they are often required to buy link here. That prompted me to write the editor a letter pointing out the virtues of free online availability to lower student costs link here. It also avoids the moral dilemma faced by faculty members in pursuing their share of the monopoly profits, as well as the high cost of revising printed publications when the subject matter changes rapidly.

We get too few opportunities like this to spread the word.

The anonymous Patent Troll Tracker posts his latest compilation of Litigation Statistics for January 2008 link here. "At long last, here are my January 2008 patent litigation statistics. In total, PACER/ECF showed 230 patent cases filed in January 2008, compared to 210 in January 2007. This is a 10% year-to-year increase." See the rest of the post for lots of details on who, what, and where.

So the broken system is still with us and still shows no signs of improvement.

Writing in today's New York Times, Joe Nocera picks up an old story about Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling suing RDR Books for copyright infringement because it was about to publish Steven Vander Ark's Harry Potter Lexicon link here. The publisher is getting an assist from Anthony Falzone of the Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project, which was founded by Larry Lessig, allowing Nocera to do a riff on the growth of criticism of copyright litigation.

It is a cheering thought that some of the criticism of intellectual property abuse is finally making it to the main stream media. We will need a lot more of that if we are to get the laws amended in a reasonable way, promoting innovation rather than stifling it.

A federal appeals court upheld a lower court's 2006 ruling that a corporate consultant, who thought up American Express's "My Life, My Card" slogan, has no trademark rights in it. His claim is akin to an ad agency's marketing concept. Ad agencies get paid for their marketing and advertising work. So can this guy.

Here is the story.

Cho Jin-seo, Staff Reporter for the Korea Times, has written a puff piece for the Business Software Alliance, featuring Jeffrey Hardee, vice president and regional director of BSA link here. Hardee is flogging a study made by a research firm, IDC, purporting to show that piracy is rampant in Korea and costs the country billions. The study found that "about 45 percent of computer programs in use in offices were illegal copies in Korea in 2006." He goes on, 'The study demonstrated a 10-point drop in piracy over a four-year period can add an additional $1.4 billion to the economy. That is certainly an achievable target ... `For every $1 of software sold, it has a multiplier effect of $1 to $3 in the local industry, among channel and service providers. So the local contribution is nearly $1 billion out of $1.4 billion. $1 billion will stay in the country.'' An account of the benefits of piracy to the Korean economy is absent from this calculation.

I served as Economic Counselor in Korea in the 70's. We were continually harassing the Korean government to close the small shops that sold pirated software, but on the whole, the police were reluctant to prosecute poor Koreans, much less put them out of business. The Koreans I knew had little sympathy for poor Microsoft and that seems not to have changed.

We opponents of patented software have a problem, however, in pointing out how crazy the current American law on intellectual property is. Few in the American public, much less in the Korean, are aware how screwed up the system has become. In Korea and elsewhere, they also need to learn how IP as promised in our constitution to foster innovation has lost its way.

Picking up on Bill Stepp's previous post, the alternative way of publishing, posting a book on line and allowing downloading without charge is slowly expanding. Bell's book "Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good," is available that way here . This follows David's model.

A more trivial but perhaps economically more important variation is represented by a comic book now free to download here. This mode of distribution seems to have been a success; "The comic book publisher Boom Studios announced about 2 weeks back that they were going to release the full first issue of a new comic called North Wind online free the exact same day as it was released in shops. The hard copy sold out almost immediately and a second printing had to be ordered link here."

A variation on this for those who want to read a hard copy is to print it on a laser printer. I am also intrigued by the idea of having it printed by lulu press, which will print single copies at a competitive price link here. Public Domain Books Reprints Service has announced it will make available some 1.7 million books in the public domain, using lulu link here. Admittedly an experiment to test the demand for the service, it has the possibility of being expanded to new books.

Who knows what kind of copyright provisions would be necessary for this? Public Domain Books publishes with this disclaimer: "NOTE: There is no warranty of any kind with this service. Use it at your own risk. Please also note that we are not affiliated with any of the archives that the digital images are being obtained from. We are simply using these sites in accordance with their terms."

I posted about the Swedish Pirate Party last weekend, but failed to follow all the links. It turns out there is a Pirate Party here in the US and that it has a website here. More interesting, Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the Swedish party has been in the US giving speeches. They are pretty strong statements of how broken the patent and copyright system is. You can see and hear Falkvinge in an hour-long statement of his and his party's views here. There is also a long Wikipedia entry on the party here.

The Economist has a provocative piece on the recorded music industry and its death spiral in the sale of CDs and downloaded music. The subhead reads, "Last year was terrible for the recorded-music majors link here. The next few years are likely to be even worse." It cites three reasons: facing declining sales, big retailers are cutting display space; major distributors are cutting promotion to reduce costs; and they are refusing to invest in the growing parts of the industry, like touring. Downloads, for sale or free with advertising, do not get the same revenue return.

The article doesn't make this point explicitly, but the means for distributing music has changed, costs have been cut, and the majors are really out of a job. Copyright violations are a small part of the story, but they underscore the direction of industry trends. The spreading antipathy for enforcing copyright involving free exchanges will continue to cost the industry public support.

There have been several references in blogs to the current debate in Sweden over stricter enforcement of copyright vs. making not-for-profit file exchanges completely legal link here. Perhaps the most significant elements left out of these posts was the role of Pirate Bay, the BitTorrent site of some fame, and the creation in Sweden of a Pirate Party, addressing this issue. Thirteen Swedish MPs in the Moderate Party have now come out in support of free exchange. The issue started with a government study of stopping currently "illegal" exchanges, leading to a set of extreme measures like taking away internet access to anyone caught exchanging copyrighted material and spying on private internet traffic. These appear to have violated the Swedish sense of individual rights. The copyright owners are now under attack as self-interested big businesses, not as protecting the rights of artists and authors.

This story isn't over. We don't know how it will finally play out. Though the opposition to more restrictions and more stringent enforcement is strong, it doesn't mean that legalizing all free exchanges will happen. Rather, the present lax regime of not, for the most part, enforcing copyright may simply continue.

My most optimistic take is that free exchange will undermine restrictions on free exchange of copyrighted material around the world and force the recording and video business to find other business models. That will happen as long as Swedish sources of free downloads can be accessed, as currently with Pirate Bay. They do need better advertising in the rest of the world.

We should however, expect the RIAA, MPAA, and owners of copyrighted material to go to extremes to put pressure on their governments and through them, on the Swedish government. We all have an interest in seeing that they don't succeed.

The anonymous Troll Tracker sums up 2007 on the patent front this way: "We reached the end of 2007 link here. All the other blogs are reporting an overall decrease in IP litigation, a cutback from 2006, or are reporting the slightest of increases in patent filings from 2006 to 2007. That's simply not true. By the real count -- the number of defendants sued for patent infringement -- 2007 was a record year. In fact, here's my headline: '2007 shows a 30% increase in patent litigation over 2006, fueled by a 40% increase in the Eastern District of Texas.'"

So all is not well on the patent front, contrary to what the patent monopolists want you to believe.

The post is full of more such good stuff, so have a look.