My old Against Monopoly Blog Posts

Here are some of my older AgainstMonopoly.org blogposts, which were not cross-referenced here (but will be going forward): The IP Dogs! The post Animal Abuse mentions the state's use of "DVD-sniffing anti-piracy dogs."Res ipsa loquitur. [Posted at 06/03/2009 08:53 AM by Stephan Kinsella on IP as a Joke comments(0)] Imagining the Fate of Copyright in a Future World There's been much talk lately of the imminent death of copyright, due in part to the increasing digitization of information and media, the Internet, large bandwidth, and encryption. Nora Ephron, for example, recently observed, "We're in the last days of copyright, if you want to be grim about it...." And see The Death of Copyright, Item #241, Encryption, Strong Privacy, and the Death of Copyright, The Death of Copyright, and many other such comments.Imagine a world 150, 200, 500 years from now--when virtually every work of art, every novel, ever movie, song, and recording ever produced until today--and many years after--is public domain. Now imagine you want to play muzak in your elevators, or nice background music in your dental office, or car repair waiting room, or restaurant. Or imagine you want to publish a book (or website) of great paintings. If you want to do these things today, most of the works you'd be intersted in are still covered by copyright. Sure, there are older recordings on scratchy 78 rpm LPs, and musty tomes from the time of the Civil War or earlier--but modern stuff, in color, stereo, hi-fi, with modern acting and special effects--most is still subject to copyright. So to play muzak in your elevator or pipe in nice background music to the ceiling speakers of your waiting room, you have to pay annoying royalties each month. But even now we are starting to see, with the advent of Google Books, The Internet Archive, and Gutenberg, and so on, increasingly modern books entering the public domain. Imagine 400 years from now, and every movie, song, painting, novel published from the dawn of time, every movie made in the 20th and 21st and 22nd centuries, plus hundreds of thousands or even millions of songs, photographs, paintings, ... and the last 100 years or so is still locked up. Now let's say you want to put up a website the 10,000 great paintings; or stream a music or movie station playing great songs and films--will you pay out the nose for the rights to publish the recent stuff? Well, maybe, but if you have an almost unending cornucopia of great, free stuff to choose from--methinks this might exert a strong downward pressure on the ability of copyright holders to extort much money from you. (And this is disregarding practical problems they face, such as some kid downloading all the world's media into his petabyte thumb drive in 17 seconds via a totally secure encrypted link.) [Posted at 05/20/2009 10:05 PM by Stephan Kinsella on Copyright comments(0)] Kevin Carson's Intellectual Property A Libertarian Critique Kevin Carson has just released his Intellectual Property--A Libertarian Critique. I haven't had a chance to read all of it yet, but from a quick skim it looks good, and with a title like this--and given that IP is turning out to be an insidious tool wielded by the state to destroy and re-route wealth--it's worth looking into. [Posted at 05/13/2009 07:01 PM by Stephan Kinsella on Against Monopoly comments(16)] Lawyer Layoffs--A Silver Lining! Thompson & Knight lays off lawyers, staff firmwide notes something we're hearing more and more about nowadays--law firms laying off attorneys, due to Great Depression II. As the piece notes, the Dallas-based firm recently "laid off for economic reasons 17 lawyers and 25 support staff in all of its U.S. offices, including Dallas, Houston, New York, Fort Worth and Austin. ... All of the lawyers are associates -- only two of them are first years -- who practiced in real estate or other business-related areas that require bank money to operate."But not all is lost: "not all of the firm's practices are doing badly by a long shot, [the managing partner] says. 'There are areas of our firm like IP litigation that are going crazy.'" [Posted at 05/13/2009 11:28 AM by Stephan Kinsella on IP Law comments(2)] A State-Granted Property Right in Preventing Teenage Drunk Driving As reported on Patently-O, two "inventors" have files patent applications on two "inventions". The first is for SoberTeen(TM) driving insurance. The application claims a new auto insurance product where a driver receives a 10 to 30 percent discount in premium in exchange for allowing the insurance company to monitor his or her car to determine if anyone drives it while under the influence of alcohol. I wonder what MADD would say about the patentee trying to use the courts to stop an insurance company from offering this product without paying a ransom? The other attempts to claim a monopoly on A method wherein the life or health risk of a person is evaluated based on information maintained in a Risk Profile Data Base (RPDB) and the result of said evaluation is used for one or both of the following purposes: to offer an insurance policy in an underwriting class determined by the said evaluation; to provide said person with a life or health expectancy report containing suggestions on how said person can improve said life or health expectancy. Is any comment really needed? [Posted at 05/11/2009 01:51 PM by Stephan Kinsella on IP as a Joke comments(1)] Those Dreaded "frivolous patent challenges" Will Proposed New Post-Grant Review Procedures Invite Abuse? that "The Innovation [sic] Alliance" is opposed to reforming the patent system to allow "post-grant review mechanisms"--that is, ways for potential victims of patent extortion to challenge the validity of issued patents. The group is worried this might permit "repeated frivolous patent challenges"! Got that--not frivolous patents, but frivolous patent challenges! This is like a plaintiffs' lawyer who files frivolous lawsuits complaining about people defending themselves from it--they ought to just cough up the demanded money and quit finding "frivolous" defenses!Here, people who use the power of the state to unjustly acquire a monopoly that gives them the right to legally extort victims are complaining about "frivolous patent challenges". Wow, some chutzpah. The post also notes: The fear is that such service provides will offer to "creat[e] uncertainty about a problem patent by tying it up in a long reexamination process and effectively nullify the problem patent" to get lower rates during license negotiations "until the uncertainty ends." So.... to avoid reducing the amount of extortion holders of "problem patents" can demand, we should just presume patents are valid--even if they might not be--and don't allow any kind of challenge that could just "cause uncertainty." Wow. I don't know. I prefer justice to certainty. Call me crazy. [Posted at 05/11/2009 01:44 PM by Stephan Kinsella on Patent Lawyers comments(0)] The Other Dr. No: HIV Researcher Fighting the IP Pirates I don't mean the James Bond movie, or Ron Paul, Congress's "Dr. No." This wonderful, eye-opening piece by the heroic IP-abuse reporter Joe Mullin, The Fight of His Life (Mullin's blog, The Prior Art) highlights the appalling ordeal of Dr. Bob Shafer, a bioinformatics expert. Yet another case of patent law victimizing innovation and innocent people.As such stories tend to be, this one is complicated, but it's crucially important, so bear with my attempt at a concise summary. Dr. Shaffer, an associate professor of medicine and pathology at Stanford University, established the HIV Drug Resistance Database (HIVdb) (wikipedia link) in 1998. As the article reports, Since then, the database has built a following among HIV researchers and practitioners around the world, attracting some 50,000 unique visitors a month. Those who use it generally fall into three categories: academic researchers, commercial and noncommercial laboratories, and doctors. ... The database allows users to enter genetic information for viruses from individual patients or groups of patients, and to retrieve drug resistance information, which can then be used to help devise treatment regimens. Such information is critical to HIV research and drug development, as well as to treating individual patients. HIVdb is especially popular in the developing world not least because it's freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. In some developing countries, medical practitioners have heard of Stanford University mainly through their interactions with HIVdb. This is quite obviously a heroic, important, noble and benevolent effort. As the article notes, it's "a highly regarded free resource that he developed, Stanford hosts, and doctors and scientists around the world rely on." However, in January 2007, ABL, a medical software company based in Luxembourg, claimed that the database infringed its patents. Read the article for more details, but in short: Stanford first moved to invalidate ABL's patents by filing a declaratory judgment suit in California in October 2007; but then later settled with ABL, where ABL agreed not to sue Stanford for patent infringement and Stanford agreed to put a prominent disclaimer on the HIVdb, informing those who used it that, depending on the nature of their work, they might need a patent license from ABL. However, Shafer wasn't required to sign the agreement with ABL and was not told him about the settlement's terms until after it was reached. Shafer at first refused to post the notice, and bully for him. He was afraid it would lead doctors to think they owe money to ABL, "and that the database built mostly with taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health grants is no longer free." Finally, under pressure, he did post a notice but he appended his own language arguing the patents are overbroad and invalid. See about halfway down on this page, where Dr....