The Mind Trap

US Man Seeks Movie Plotline Patent

The Register: A US man is attempting to patent a storyline...which is normally covered by copyright. Copyright covers the expression of an idea, but an idea can be expressed in many different ways. Patents, on the other hand, give exclusive rights to an underlying idea.
Will the patent be granted? "He points to a November, 2004 article in the Journal of the Patent and Trademark Office Society, A Potentially New IP: Storyline Patents to support his case. He says that the article argued that binding case law strongly suggests that methods of performing and displaying fictional plots, whether found in motion pictures, novels, television shows, or commercials, are statutory subject matter, like computer software and business methods".
This idea goes against the grain for a number of reasons... first, todays culture is built on the remnants of past culture. This sort of patent would prevent tomorrows culture building on todays, and there's no telling what this would prevent. After all, Mickey Mouse was a derivation of a derivation made within a few years of the original.
The second problem is that the storyline is not really "art". Just about anyone can come up with a story, but it's the way the story is expressed that makes it interesting. Also, the storyline that is the subject of the patent application (read the Reg piece for the outline) doesn't actually have a conclusion, so it can't really be considered a storyline.

How Patents Impede Research

ZPEnergy: A survey has found out just how much of a chilling effect patents have on science research... "A total of 16% of all respondents reported that their work had been affected by difficulties in attempting to obtain patented technologies. A total of 40% of respondents who had acquired patented technologies since 2001 reported difficulties in obtaining that technology"...
Lots of good stats...

European Telcos Want Protection Against "Patent Ambush"

Financial Times: Large European telcos -- including Vodafone, T-Mobile and Telefónica -- have criticized the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) charging that the body's current rules on intellectual property rights leave companies exposed to "unsustainable" and "excessive" demands for royalties...which are eroding the benefits of standardization.
Their big complaint is that companies are able to pull off a "patent ambush", where they push for a particular technology to be included in an industry standard and once it is accepted and deployed announce they have a patent on the technology... this is not a direct reference to Qualcomm but that is the company currently being accused of unfairly using its patents on 3G technology to charge excessive royalties and licensing deals. Is it any wonder so few in the industry are particularly keen on MediaFLO?

Sony May Be Hoist By Own Copyright Petard

The Inquirer: Here's an interesting comment on Sony's alleged infringement of copyright with its DRM technology...
"So, what is a company to do? It sets a precedent of a few thousand dollars per 'wrong', and now it has millions of Lexan disks of wrong on the books, and an auditable paper trail. This, if you use their own numbers could add up to billions of dollars owed to the Lame crew and the others alleged to have their virtual toes stepped on."
Of course, Sony will never pay the same penalty it demands of people who infringe its own copyright...

Japanese Cherry War

The Mercury: A Tasmanian fruit grower, Reid Fruits, has been accused by the Yamagata prefectural government of stealing cherry trees. From the story it appears that Reid went to Japan five years ago to get new fruit variety to grow, and no-one informed them there were restrictions on benishuho cherries, which are bigger than other cherries.

Infringing Copyright On Purpose

PC PRO: Sony's recent sabotage of the DRM movement is continuing apace with revelations that its DRM technology actually infringed copyright itself: "It seems that the XCP software from UK company First4Internet that Sony had been using to prevent unauthorised copying of its music CDs, until it agreed to recall some 4.7 million discs, contains code 'infringing the copyright of several open source projects', Johansen notes in his blog. This includes code that he himself wrote for VLC, a free cross-platform media player."
Which brings me neatly to a post I've been meaning to write for a while...

Sometimes I think it's right to infringe copyright.
Since I've been living in Mexico I've been trying to convince people of the need to respect intellectual property. They had previously been working on the assumption copyright infringement is inherently a good thing. My argument has been made very well many times before by many people, but to sum it up it is this: If the people of a country don't respect intellectual property they won't be interested in developing their own, and the country will be left further behind in the future world economy.
This point was driven home when one friend who does a radio program as part of his work looked to be in danger of losing his job and was trying to work out if he could still do the radio program. He asked me who owned the intellectual property involved in his program (he didn't know what type of IP it was, he just said the signature sounds, the format etc). My first question was what his contract had to say about it, and of course it didn't have anything to say because it hadn't occured to him until it was too late.
So far so froody... but once I had made a case for the importance of respecting intellectual property (so they understood the argument, even if it didn't follow through in actions) I then had to point out that their suspicion that corporations were abusing copyright was in many cases well founded. For example, I think that regional encoding goes against the very ideals of globalisation that many corporations stand behind with many of their business practices -- and in fact in my home land of Australia the process "breaks the spirit of the law, if not the letter" to quote Electronic Frontiers Australia. For that matter, copying something even for personal use is illegal in Australia, a situation I disagree with and conciously ignore. And to tie this post back into the beginning, companies often put onerous restrictions on their goods which not only deny "fair rights" usage but break the rights of their consumers -- Sony's DRM being a case in point. I just informed my wife of Sony's acts and told her not to buy any CDs from the label. If she really wants a band's album she should buy a pirated copy since it's the only way to ensure the CD is safe. I realise Sony has said that it has stopped using the technology, but I no longer trust the company.
Finally, there's the issue of education -- which my wife brought up expecting a fight only to find that I thoroughly agreed with her. Some of her classmates studying English wanted to photocopy some study materials that Karla had bought in Australia. They're not available here and even if they were the average Mexican certainly couldn't afford them. But these girls needed a good IELTS score to continue their studies overseas, so they could eventually return to Mexico and generate their own intellectual property, adding not only to the development of this country but also to the general belief that IP should be respected. Countries are not going to respect intellectual property unless they have a decent amount of their own. In that situation I think sharing the study guides is the right thing to do.
There's a more insidious aspect at work in the education sector. The same text books that retail in Australia for about $100 a sold for around $400 in Mexico. I cannot think of any reason why this should be so, except for the idea that some countries don't want other countries to become educated enough to develop their own IP. I can't argue against piracy in situations like this.
My end point is this: People need to be educated and learn about the importance of respecting intellectual property, so they can identify those times when it is right to break it.

IP. A World Of IP.

AllAfrica:
"Imagine a world where absolutely everything is owned - and sold to those who can afford it. Every person would be a market. There would be nothing freely available in the public domain. Knowledge and culture could only be learnt if you paid for it."
This article is based on the World Summit on the Information Society which was held in Tunis on Wednesday. Most of the articles on this focussed on the debate between the US and the rest of the world on who should be in charge of the administrating body ICANN, which the US won by basically telling the rest of the world to get f**ked. Nothing new there then. The Guardian's take is here, basically arguing that the whole thing was pointless. The other big issue to be reported from Tunis is exemplified by this Register story about press freedom in Tunis, and the tumult that occured when the Swiss prime minister criticised it at the beginning of the conference. (Look at IndexOnline for a more complete piece)
However, the big issues are really about intellectual property and how it is used and abused by both the copyright owners and the copyright breakers.

Companies complain that consumers are ripping them off by making illegal copies - for example of music or movies. Creative people are certain the companies are exploiting them. An example cited in the Tunis debate was Jamaica, whose reggae music conquered the world - with very little benefit to the country.

Librarians and scientists say the system means that only those who can pay for it can access expensive copyrighted information and culture. Meanwhile, indigenous people say their knowledge is taken and sold without any benefit to them.

Both sides have points, but the fact that companies are repeatedly shown to be hypocritical in their attitude to intellectual property doesn't work in their favour.

Apple Denies Support For Other DRM

Yahoo News: This is pretty classic...

"Apple is nearly finished with the technical work necessary to enable consumers to transfer music from content protected discs to their iPods," said the EMI statement.

"The information EMI provided regarding iTunes and iPod compatibility with Macrovision's technology is not true and we have no idea why EMI made this statement," Apple said in a statement provided to MacCentral.

"We have read Apple's statement and we have no comment," an EMI representative, told MacCentral.

I had to roll on the floor laughing when I read this... the idea that Apple would let another company's DRM work on their MP3 players... Apple doesn't play well with other people. It never has. Even if it was working with EMI the response probably would have been the same -- remember how it handled the partnership with Motorola? It refused to say anything to support the device, in fact Steve Jobs managed to insult the device's biggest customer base (carriers), and then when the thing was finally launched Apple launched the Nano on the same day. (Slogan: "Just like an iPod but with less songs and easier to lose"). As an aside, another company has alleged that Apple infringed its patents in making the iPod, although any company with a successful product has to expect that these days. The patent is reportedly for "a list building system", which on first look seems a little unwarranted.

Tamiflu Maker To Release Patent

Taiwan News: "Gilead Sciences, the firm which developed Tamiflu, has agreed to release the patent on the anti-viral medicine and has commissioned Roche Holding AG, Tamiflu\'s rights holder, to handle all transactions." There has been a lot of talk from various governments for a while now about declaring a national emergency in response to a possible outbreak of avian flu and breaking the Tamiflu patent...
Time has an article suggesting the release of the patent was a direct result of this: " Roche probably had no choice. Most countries, including the U.S., have in their laws a provision that permits their governments to overturn patents in exceptional circumstances. "If Roche plays hardball," says Redpath, "governments could just say, 'we're going to overturn the patent. This is a national emergency.'"
Whatever the reason, it's probably a good thing. True, there isn't really enough evidence to say that Tamiflu will protect against an avian flu pandemic, but it does indicate that IP rights are not yet totally in the hands of corporations...

Sony Ends DRM Debacle

BBC: Sony has suspended production of its CDs with anti-piracy technology after crackers wrote viruses which used the technology to hide on a computer. Sony used a rootkit (check out Wikipedia) to hide its DRM from people playing the CD. The stated aim of the rootkit was to stop people copying the CD to their harddrives, but as BetaNews reports the research who originally found the rootkit reports that it also "phones home".

In a follow-up report, Russinovich discovered that Sony's DRM "phones home" to Sony's Web site. First 4 Internet responded saying, "No information is ever fed back or collected about the consumer or their activities." But Russinovich notes that, "Sony can make a record of each time their player is used to play a CD, which CD is played, and what computer is playing the CD."

Even Microsoft has decided that supporting DRM at any cost is not worth the damage done to its customers' computers and has announced that its security tools will "seek out and destroy" the rootkit.
But wait, there's more: Digital Copyright Canada has noted that the Homeland Security Office has scolded Sony...
"It's very important to remember that it's your intellectual property -- it's not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it's important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days.