The Economist takes a bleak look at the internet's prospects, seeing it fracturing because of national and language differences, and anti-competitive forces among service providers link here. It seems that there is little individual users can do about the first two, as the likes of China puts up barriers in the national defense interest or to reflect national differences in cultural norms on pornography, for example.

But we can do something about the drive to carve up the internet by patented technology or by rules that cement the powerful ISPs in place against possible competition by not mandating net neutrality or not mandating that big ISPs offer small ones open access to their networks at wholesale rates to restore competition. Indeed, based on the experience of other countries with the latter rule, it would be the best alternative.

In the end, the bleak look is softened by The Economist's usual on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other outlook such as, 'Yet predictions are hazardous, particularly in IT." I wouldn't hold my breath unless the consumer is heard and is listened to.

Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated is a mass collaborative artistic re-envisioning of George A. Romero's 1968 cult classic, Night of the Living Dead.

International artists and animators were invited to select scenes from the film and reinvent them through their artwork.

The full and complete re-imagined work is currently available:

http://www.notldr.com/next/main.html

http://www.amazon.com/Night-Living-Dead-Duane-Jones/dp/B003GUGB8G

A similar artistic endeavor was performed with Star Wars, but the Star Wars Uncut website lists a message which states: "We have a fully edited version of the movie produced, but we are working through the legal issues in order to bring that to everyone as soon as possible."

Why is this? Simple - One film is in the public domain, and the other isn't.

Conor Friedersdorf over at Andrew Sullivan's much-trafficked blog points to "an interesting post about craft cocktails and the impulse to protect certain recipes as intellectual property" as well as the reaction to the concept from a third blogger.

Read all about it and get the discussing links here:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/09/keeping-government-out-of-cocktails.html

The NY Times has a review of the latest book arguing for less restrictive copyright regimes.

Read it (the review) here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/books/review/Darnton-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&ref=science

Interesting discussion on the struggle to maintain monopolies over classified information in the digital age here:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/08/chasing-wikileaks.html

The New York Times has a good short article on the growth of patent trolls (which it terms as non practicing entities or NPEs) link here. The story hangs on the suit against EBay for $3.8 billion by XPRT Ventures which goes unmentioned thereafter.

It then describes the basic patent troll model: "The basic idea is that an investment firm buys a pre-existing patent for, say, $2 million. It then sues perhaps a dozen companies that use technology potentially overlapping the patent. Each firm that fights may end up paying $500,000 or more to defend itself and could also face penalties. The alternative is to settle for, say, $1 million or so. If just three firms pay up to avoid a battle, the patent owner makes big money."

The EBay example is not particularly apt here since it is for so much money that EBay is likely to fight it. But the story provides the excuse for the article which goes on to cite the rise in the number of such suits, 500 last year or six times the number in 2001.

The article then switches to a "new" business response to the patent troll threat, the counter-troll that acquires patents to sue or cross license other firms by which its member companies might be sued for infringement. Thus for a generous annual fee, it seems to offer some insurance against loss.

Its exemplar, roughly two year old RPX, has an extensive website link here, a puff piece, and Google adds little more. However, the Times piece reminded me of ten-year-old Intellectual Ventures about which we wrote link here and which now has a Wiki write-up link here . I checked quickly for officer names of the two but found no overlap. I do note, however, that IV has some big corporate subscribers including Microsoft, Verizon (also "insured" by IV), and Intel.

Thus the "counter-troll" model seems to have proved so attractive that it has spawned a rival. Here is another reminder of how patents enrich the big oligopoly companies and exploit the consumer while providing no benefit to the inventor in whose name patents are issued.

CMR International, a firm that tracks that performance of the pharmaceuticals sector, released a rather depressing report on research and development productivity last week. The report will set you back $10,000, but highlights have been made public:

- A total of 26 new molecular entities (NMEs) were launched onto the global market in 2009, an increase on 2008's 20-year low of 21. But the number of launches last year was still only a little more than half the peak level in 1997.

- The number of experimental drug projects terminated at the final Phase III stage of development had doubled in the period 2007-2009 compared with 2004-2006.

- Total global R&D expenditure dropped by 0.3 percent in 2009, after a 6.6 percent rise in 2008 and rapid growth seen in earlier years.

- Pharma is having a tough time selling its new drugs: New drugs launched within the last five years accounted for less than 7 percent of industry sales in 2009, down from 8 percent in 2008, highlighting the big problems that companies are having in trying to reinvigorate their portfolios.

The Economist has two articles this week of interest to IP critics. The first addresses detecting what the article calls piracy link here. It cites a new way to do the deed using a scan of all the frames in a video to tell whether the "copy" is really a copy. It hyperventilates," The technology is said to have an average detection rate of 96% and a low rate of false alarms: a mere five per million, according to tests by the ISO. It can detect if a video is pirated from clips as short as two seconds. And an ordinary PC can be used with the system to scour through 1,000 hours of video in a second."

The problem with that is whether the portion "detected" as a copy is really piracy. The article totally ignores whether fair use would allow the "copy."

More important would be the temptation to redefine piracy as any "copy" which included more than some arbitrary percentage of the original. Under that doctrine, one may foresee the final end of fair use by defining it so narrowly that none would be legal. That could end up, for example, outlawing all satirical take-offs and other indisputably legitimate uses of original material.

The second Economist article discusses open access to the internet and net neutrality link here. It has an interesting account of the long history of the legal doctrine of common carrier status.

It concludes, "America's regulatory approach has left much of the country with a cable monopoly for truly fast broadband access. The single largest reason given for failing to purchase broadband access in America is price, and many non-adopters are stymied by hardware fees, a lack of billing transparency and the extra cost of bundled services that providers often add to internet access. The FCC's current plan to ask last-mile providers to subsidise rural service, and to ensure equal treatment of packets of information is a mild intervention by global standards. America's modern-day common carriers should count themselves lucky."

Both articles are definitely worth a read.

We don't often think of the courts as playing an active role in the evolution of intellectual property law, perhaps because we tend to accept the assertion by judges that they follow precedent. Writing in the Washington Post, Steven Pearlstein cites four cases where the D. C. Circuit Court has gone out of its way to assert that the regulators have exceeded their Congressionally granted authority. link here

The key graph: "Many of the D.C. Circuit judges have long since stopped pretending to defer to the factual determinations and policy judgments of duly appointed regulators, as the law requires. Deference has now given way to skepticism, hostility and contempt that can easily be read between the lines of overly legalistic opinions that routinely ignore the plain language of statute and the clear intent of Congress. It's gotten so bad that top regulators told me privately this week that they routinely put aside consideration of needed new initiatives because they assume they will be foiled by the hostile appeals court."

In the first case, the DC court went after the Federal Communications Commission for exceeding its authority in trying to regulate Comcast violations of net neutrality. In the second case, Pearlstein charges the Court with interfering in the development of generic drugs, thus extending the drug patents of the large pharmacy companies. Thirdly, he knocks the Federal Trade Commission for going beyond the pale in trying to reign in " a tech company for enhancing its monopoly in a certain chip-making process by deceiving an industry standard-setting body. According to [Judge] Williams, the fact that its deceit 'merely' enabled a monopolist to charge higher prices doesn't constitute illegal anti-competitive behavior." Huh? Finally, the court stopped the Securities and Exchange Commission when it tried to require that 75 percent of the directors of a mutual fund be independent of the company chosen to manage the fund's investments, in order to protect small investors.

I can't find the quote, but Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. argued that justices first decide how they want a case to come out and then pick the arguments to reach that end. With that in mind, it is much easier for us commoners to understand how judges reach their judgments and that being human, they are not averse to expanding their own powers.

Studio publicity execs were unimpressed by the move. "It's a terribly analog way of thinking in a digital world," said one studio PR chief. "It's just a totally unrealistic response, since if we've learned anything about the flow of information these days, it's that it gets out in all sorts of uncontrollable ways. The minute we have a meeting or make a decision, it's up on someone's blog. We're not the announcer anymore. We're the responder to what someone's already written. All we can do most of the time is damage control."

Read about what he is referring to here:

http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2010/03/variety_threatens_studios.php