President Obama reportedly gave an iPod, loaded with 40 show tunes, to England's Queen Elizabeth II as a gift. Did he violate copyright laws when he did so?

Read here for a great analysis.

Steve Silberstein writes in with some reading suggestions

James Bessen and Michael Meurer "Patent failure : how judges, bureaucrats and lawyers put innovaters at risk" - I've read this, and contains a lot of useful information and careful analysis. I saw the authors at a conference yesterday...I have given them a hard time about their conclusion. Roughly they document how thoroughly broken and useless the patent system is and then conclude that we should tweak it a little bit...

Three more books I haven't read: "Copyrights and Copywrongs" by Siva Raidyanathan "Not so patently obvious" by Eric Stasik "Copyrights Paradox" by Neil Weinstock Netanel

Opinions welcome; if you've read one why not post a comment?

from Danny Piccirillo

I created the Facebook group "I don't believe in imaginary property ". The group is hosting an upcoming "Pirate Pride Day" on the anniversay of Microsoft's global Anti-Piracy Day.

Enjoy!!

Another interesting link from Jeffrey Racine...first an email response he received

From: Mihkel S. - Skype support To: racinej@mcmaster.ca Subject: Re: MA002: Skype on ipod touch in Canada??? <<#2340203-3458322#>> Date: Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:14:29 GMT (12:14 EDT)

Hello Jeff,

Thank you for contacting Skype Support.

We apologize for the inconvenience you've experienced while trying to download Skype for iPhone. Unfortunately, the Skype for iPhone application is not available for use in Canada at this time. There is an ambiguous restriction in one of the standards-based technology licenses, and we are looking into it. The issue is not related to Apple, nor is it specific to Skype.

Once again, we apologize for this inconvenience and would like to assure you that we are working with the regulators to resolve this issue as soon as possible.

Thank you for your understanding and we hope you enjoy using Skype on your iPhone in the nearest future.

Best regards,

Mihkel S. Skype support

More details here

The March 30, 2009 episode of Free Talk Live discusses this topic (around 00:11:00).

Hat tip to Manuel Lora.

Shocked, shocked to hear that Of Mice and Academics: Examining the Effect of Openness on Innovation by Fiona Murray, Philippe Aghion, Mathias Dewatripont, Julian Kolev, Scott Stern #14819 (EFG).

(hattip Jeff Racine) MIT is aggressively taking on the commercial academic publishers with a new open access policy for publication by MIT faculty. This seems to be pretty formidable

each Faculty member grants to MIT a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Provost or Provost's designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written notification by the author, who informs MIT of the reason.

And since when is any vote of any faculty unanimous?

You can also find an article about this on Ars Technica

Now the rest of us need to get to work imitating the innovator.

Just a quick link...an article on SHRM on our book with some additional comments by Michele and me. As you can plainly see we are now business leaders.

David Post over at Volokh.com has some important insights regarding copyright law and the free software movement, and how copyright law can actually be used to undermine itself.

Well worth a read!

My friend and colleague Sandro Brusco posted the following on noiseFromAmerika.

I am reporting it here because, personally, I believe the repeated, desperate and everyday more damaging efforts by this administration, the previous, and the Federal Reserve to "save" the American banks in their current form and keep their executives and managers where they are, i.e. to preserve the status quo, is the worst case of monopolistic power being exercised on the American people in very many decades. We will pay this dearly, and for a long time, where "we", here, refers to the average guy consumer/taxpayer.

It is an insanely bad exercise in political monopoly power and economic monopoly power. Its aim is to keep a few thousands incompetent super-rich monopolists where they are, which where they should not be.

SANDRO BRUSCO'S TEXT:

The new plan to rescue banks, as described by the New York Times, looks a lot like all the older plans. The basic idea seems to be always the same: overpay the toxic assets using taxpayers' money. I don't really have much to add to what Paul Krugman has already said on the subject in a couple of posts in his blog. The approach is, quite simply, nonsensical. The relevant quote from the NYT article is the following:

Risk-taking institutional investors, like hedge funds and private equity funds, have refused to pay more than about 30 cents on the dollar for many bundles of mortgages, even if most of the borrowers are still current. But banks holding those mortgages, not wanting to book huge losses on their holdings, have often refused to sell for less than 60 cents on the dollar.

The approach of this administration, and of the previous one as well, seems to be that the investors are unreasonably risk averse, or irrational, or whatever, and they should buy the toxic assets at a price closer to what the banks want. Otherwise, you see, the banks would have to ''book huge losses''. Why the market is not working is left unexplained. The solution is simply to fill the gap between the 30 and the 60 cents with a huge public subsidy.

We can only hope that this approach will fail, the same way that it failed when it was first proposed in the fall of 2008. Yes, of course, we do need some sort of intervention. The point has been made by many, and I find this exposition by fellow game theorist Sandeep Baliga very clear. But there are many different ways to intervene. In a previous post I have tried to explain how to set up a better mechanism for price discovery of the toxic assets. Other ideas have been floated. Bulow and Klemperer, for example, have suggested a clever variation on the good bank / bad bank approach. As a minimum, if the administration is really unwilling to consider new ideas (but why?), it should at least consider some variant of the Swedish approach: let the banks fail, take them over, recapitalize and then resell them.

The plan instead is to use public money to help the creditors (other than depositors, already covered by FDIC insurance) and the shareholders of the banks. No explanation is given of why private investors are so reluctant to buy the toxic assets. What if the investors are correct in their assessment and these assets are really worth no more than 30 cents on the dollar? Why should the taxpayers bear all the risk? And what if the money is not enough and we keep having zombie banks? The whole thing is almost too depressing to contemplate.