Category Archives: Intellectual Property

The Da Vinci Code case

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Nick Cohen has an interesting piece in today’s Observer.

Initially, he was indifferent about the outcome.

How much of The Da Vinci Code is – ahem – ‘borrowed’ from Holy Blood, Holy Grail is the subject of the plagiarism case at the High Court in London that enters what should be its final week tomorrow. ‘Too bad they can’t both lose,’ said Henry Kissinger about the Iran-Iraq War and I felt the same when I went to the court.

But, on reflection, Cohen alighted on a spot-on appreciation of the significance of the case for free culture.

David Hooper, a specialist in intellectual property, said the case was something new. The Holy Blood authors are not saying that Dan Brown had copied chunks of their work verbatim. Instead, they are suing him for taking some of their ideas, researching them, playing with them and turning them into a novel. If they win, Hooper believes a chill will go through cultural life as publishers face the next to impossible task of separating original thoughts from other people’s thoughts.

“I hate to be the one who has to say it”, Cohen concludes, “but Dan Brown needs to win. If he doesn’t, free thought may be stifled in the name of protecting ideas.”

Amen.

Thumbs up!

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All those US Crackberry addicts can relax and go back to thumb-twiddling with a clear conscience. Here’s the Toronto Star‘s report of the outcome of the legal poker game between RIM and NTP:

More than two million Americans and the U.S. government are breathing easier today knowing that their BlackBerry devices, those highly addictive email gadgets invented and perfected in Canada, have escaped the horror of a nationwide ban.

Canadian tech darling Research In Motion Ltd. announced yesterday it has paid a whopping $612.5 million (U.S.) to patent nemesis NTP Inc., ending more than four years of hostile litigation and heeding the advice of a U.S. judge poised to trigger a BlackBerry blackout on the world’s largest economic power.

Shares in RIM surged nearly 20 per cent higher in after-hours trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Don’t you just love that phrase “Canadian tech darling”? Who writes this drivel?

The Crackberry saga

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This morning’s Observer column…

The Blackberry saga has turned out to be a high-tech rehash of Bleak House’s Jarndyce v Jarndyce. And, as in the Dickens novel, nobody comes out of this looking good. RIM was foolish to have ignored NTP’s claims early on, when it could have settled for a modest amount. But it didn’t, and its product took off and suddenly made it a valuable target, which in turn stiffened the resolve of NTP’s lawyers to stick with the case.

The story also highlights the absurdity of the legal chains that now entangle the technology industry. After all, NTP makes nothing, delivers no service, makes no contribution to society other than by paying its taxes. RIM has created a service that apparently offers fantastic benefits to consumers – and may enhance governments’ ability to communicate in crisis situations. Yet it’s RIM which may go under. It’s daft. But that’s intellectual property for you…

Quirky note: Just noticed (Sunday, 10:06 UK time) that the column is top of Google News coverage of the saga. As far as I know, that’s a first for me.

A billion legal downloads!

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Yes, siree! The Apple iTunes store has sold its billionth song.

The billionth song, ”Speed of Sound,” was purchased as part of Coldplay’s “X&Y” album by Alex Ostrovsky from West Bloomfield, Michigan. As the grand prize winner, he will receive a 20-inch iMac, 10 fifth generation iPods, and a $10,000 Music Card good for any item on the iTunes Music Store. In addition, to commemorate this milestone, Apple will establish a scholarship to the world-renowned Juilliard School in his name.

I wish some corporate psychiatrist from Harvard Business School would write a comprehensive explanation of why the music industry didn’t see the opportunity.

Divine (IP) Rights, contd.

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Further to my comment about whether the pope is entitled to assert IP rights over papal encyclicals (on the grounds that he is merely a conduit for the Word of the Lord), Joe Newman writes,

Encyclicals do not necessarily constitute ex-cathedra pronouncements, invested with infallible authority (see http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05413a.htm).

Further, according to that inerrant source of all knowledge Wikipedia “papal infallibility is the dogma that the Pope is preserved from error when he solemnly promulgates, or declares, to the Church a decision on faith or morals.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_infallibility

i.e. he isn’t acting as a conduit, but is creating an original attributable work (hence copyrightable), on his own behalf. Whether it is divinely free of error (hard to digest I admit) or not is neither here nor there where the intellectual property rights are concerned.

Er, amen to that. Mark Stephens, a lawyer with a big London firm, wrote to the Creative Commons mailing list pointing out that while the Vatican is defending its imposition of a copyright on papal pronouncements it is placing no bar on dissemination and publication of the pope’s works by the news media, so it would be most appropriate for His Holiness to use a Creative Commons licence! (Might I humbly suggest the Attribution, No derivative works, no-commercial-use version.)

Quote of the day

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We’ve learned a valuable lesson, I hope, from the music industry: if somebody doesn’t give people what they’re looking for, then someone else will fill that void. If I hear a song on the radio, they don’t say, “Oh, and in four months you can buy the CD.” Right? They say, “Hey, download it to your iPod today!”

Todd Wagner, CEO of 2929 Entertainment, the company (cofounded by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban) that’s experimenting with the “simultaneous release” program for movies. From an interview with David Pogue of the New York Times.

The e-book phenomenon

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The Times asked me to write a piece about the e-book phenomenon, so I did. Sample:

Two factors will limit the size of the e-book market. One is that reading substantial amounts of text on a screen is a masochistic, headache- inducing experience that makes one appreciate the merits of paper: high resolution and low power consumption; great portability and infinite flexibility. And it will still function after you’ve poured a cup of coffee over it.

The other reason e-books won’t become dominant is that they usually embody tiresome “digital rights management” (copy-protection) systems. Publishers love DRM because it gives them control. Consumers hate it because it takes away time-honoured freedoms. If you buy a printed book, for example, you can resell it, lend it to a friend or donate it to the school jumble sale. But the licensing and DRM provisions on many e-books remove these freedoms. The e-book does not “belong” to you: all you have is a licence to use it in ways that have been approved by the publisher…

At the end of the piece I am described as “a commentator on the internet”, which is a bit grand. All references to the Observer have mysteriously disappeared!

Chancellor announces review of intellectual property regime

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Well, well. A Treasury announcement reveals that Andrew Gowers, recently deposed Editor of the Financial Times, will lead an independent review into intellectual property rights in the UK. The terms of reference are:

The review will provide an analysis of the performance of the UK IP system, including:

  • the way in which Government administers the awarding of IP and their support to consumers and business;
  • how well businesses are able to negotiate the complexity and expense of the copyright and patent system, including copyright and patent licensing arrangements, litigation and enforcement; and
  • whether the current technical and legal IP infringement framework reflects the digital environment, and whether provisions for ‘fair use’ by citizens are reasonable.

    The Government has previously committed to examining whether the current term of copyright protection on sound recordings and performers’ rights is appropriate. This will also be conducted within the review.

    • The inquiry will run for twelve months. Its web site is here.

    US Crackberry addicts breathe again

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    From today’s New York Times…

    Research in Motion won a second ruling yesterday from the United States Patent and Trademark Office over one of the patents at the center of a dispute over its BlackBerry wireless e-mail device. NTP, a patent holding company based in Arlington, Va., contends that Research in Motion, based in Waterloo, Ontario, infringed on its patents for technology used in the BlackBerry. The patent office issued what it called a nonfinal action yesterday, saying that one of the five patents owned by NTP is invalid. Still pending is a reconsideration of another patent that was found to be infringed by Research in Motion.