Via Conceivably Tech, we learn that Microsoft was granted a patent for the shutdown procedure in Windows. If I understand it right, Microsoft is now the sole owner of the procedure asking whether you really want to close an application with unsaved data.

Note that the patent does not seem to cover the most annoying aspect of a Windows shutdown, the never ending Windows updates. I have not used Windows on my dual-boot laptop for months for precisely that reason... I am waiting anxiously to see that patented as well.

Over at ZDNet, Ed Burnette discusses a blog post by James Gosling, who created Java while at Sun. He relates how Sun lost big on a court decision regarding a trivial IBM patent. Sun employees were soon after encouraged to flood the patent office with applications, and there seems to have been a competition on who gets the silliest patent.

Burnette conjectures that one of those goofy patents is in fact among those that Oracle, who recently acquired Sun, is suing Google over. Does this qualify as irony?

The International Intellectual Property Alliance, the copyright lobby group that includes the MPAA and RIAA among others, is petitioning the US Trade Representative to put Indonesia, Brazil and India on the "301 Special" list. This list defines the countries that are havens for piracy and that should be subject to retaliation for failing to defend copyrights.

The reason they should be put on the list? Their governments encourage (but do not mandate) their administrations to use open source software. Obviously, this reduces the revenue of cost software vendors and publishers, but it is a real stretch to call this piracy. The governments are simply making business decisions, weighing costs and benefits. And given the quality of open source software and operating systems, that decision is rather easy.

Instead of finding new definition for piracy, the IIPA should make sure its members are offering good products at competitive prices, the basic requirement for a firm to survive in a free market. Or is the IIPA also against capitalism?

Hat tip: TechnoLlama via The Guardian.

I forgot a few days ago to put up here a link to my latest post on the RePEc blog, so here is a belated mention.

Academic authors are too often so glad that their paper has been accepted for publication in a journal that they readily give up all their rights to the publisher. This need not be, and authors can retain their rights with a few easy steps. Unfortunately, most authors do not realize they have such rights. So, spread the word and empower authors!

Jammie Thomas downloaded 24 songs from Kazaa and was sentenced to a fine of US$2,000,000. Joel Tenenbaum downloaded 30 songs and was fined $675,000. These amounts sound improbable, but could have a justification à la Becker: If the fine is high enough, then it should deter everyone from this activity. In fact, if the fine is infinity, then their would be no crime at all. That only works if there is no risk of error in the determination of guilt, in which case, the fine need to be reduced to account for type I errors. The level of a fine then reflects the gravity of an action and the likelihood of errors.

How do the above fines compare to other crimes? Gapers Block uses the Illinois Criminal code to find that file-sharing is worse than arson, child abduction and second-degree murder, among others. This just shows how ill-conceived laws are sometimes, and copyright and patent law unfortunately provides too many examples.

Open Access publishers charge author fees in order to make their work freely available to the public. While I think most of these author fees are much too high given the low cost of publishing online, Sciyo appears to go even further and distribute royalties for article downloads to authors. The economic motivation seems to be a bit odd at first glance: why pay authors who generate higher bandwidth costs? I think the true motivation is to attract better papers that will generate more downloads and thus a better reputation for the involved journals. Also remarkable: this publisher already has among the lowest author fees in the industry (well, except for those who do not have author fees).

HT: Open Access News

Does filesharing reduce profits of the music industry? This paper claims so, and that should not be that much of a surprise. However, it also argues that filesharing is welfare improving because it leads to more competition and thus lower prices. Remember, ultimately it is the consumer that counts when computing a surplus, not just music industry profits.

HT: Economic Logic

The estate of jazz legend Chet Baker is suing Warner Music Canada, Sony BMG Music Canada, EMI Music Canada, and Universal Music Canada for piracy. These labels have massively used Chet Baker's works in compilations without any compensation, and they have already admitted doing so. The sought compensation is C$20,000 per infringement, which adds up to about C$60 billion.

HT: Toronto Star via BoingBoing

I just came across this older youtube video discussing a six-second drum loop from 1969 that became to basis of hip-hip and the subsequent genres based on sampling, the "Amen Break." The video shows how the lack of enforcement of copyrights allowed new genres to emerge and musical creativity to flourish. Of course, there is a company laying claim to a copyright at some point, of course unrelated to any involved artist.

Microsoft obtained yesterday patent 7,617,530, a "rights elevator":

Systems and/or methods are described that enable a user to elevate his or her rights. In one embodiment, these systems and/or methods present a user interface identifying an account having a right to permit a task in response to the task being prohibited based on a user's current account not having that right.

People familiar with UNIX or Linux recognize immediately the file rights management that is inherent in the security that these operating systems offer. In particular, the command line instruction sudo does exactly what this patent claims: it allows a user to see a file or run a command for which it has no privileges. The sudo command dates back to around 1980. The file rights management predates this by many years.

Is somebody asleep at the wheel at the US Patent Office?