From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Intriguing news, this: The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office plans to review Amazon.com’s overly broad and decidedly unoriginal 1-Click business method patent after a New Zealand actor successful raised a “substantial new question” of patentability. Irked about a slow book delivery, actor Peter Calveley went digging in the USPTO archives and uncovered a patent describing a “single action” to be used in ordering an item, a method very similar to Amazon’s 1-Click. That patent, written up by a company called DigiCash, was filed in 1996 — years before Amazon was awarded the patent that would inspire its infamous infringement suit against rival bookseller Barnes & Noble.com…

Calvely posted news of this potential prior art to his blog and sparked enough interest that he was able to raise the USPTO’s $2,520 re-examination fee. And now the USPTO has decided to follow through. Watch this space.

From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

EBay started off the week on a high note this morning when the U.S. Supreme Court sided with it in its long-running patent scuffle with MercExchange …. Saying a permanent injunction against the use of infringing technology need not be automatically issued once it is determined that a patent has been infringed, the high court unanimously set aside a ruling that would have barred eBay from using patented technology owned by MercExchange and ordered a lower court to reconsider the matter. The ruling is a victory not just for eBay, but for any tech company accosted by a patent troll hoping that the threat of a court injunction will win it an easy settlement…

There’s some serious skullduggery afoot at WIPO, the UN organisation that makes life comfortable for copyright thugs. It’s an outrageous attempt by broadcasters like Rupert Murdoch (and, it seems, the BBC) to create a new IP ‘right’ which would enable them to tax most of the multimedia content transmitted via the Internet — including stuff that is in the public domain.

The lobbying to secure this is breathtaking in its arrogance. And it might just succeed. But the issue is arcane and complex, and most people — including politicians — don’t understand it, or its implications. But they are scared of broadcasters like Murdoch, who control networks like Fox News, and so the land grab might just succeed — unless citizens wake up.

Which is where James Love comes in. I’ve met him a couple of times and find him the lost lucid living guide to the WIPO netherworld. He’s just written the first clear account of what’s going on. It’s well worth reading in full, but here’s a flavour…

WIPO is debating whether or not to create a new intellectual property right in information that is distributed over television, radio, cable television, or through any wired or wireless computer network, including the Internet. This is something different from copyright. Indeed, it is designed to benefit people who cannot get a copyright, because a work belongs to someone else (the person or group that created it), or because the information is in the public domain. The new right is not a “copyright,” but a “broadcaster” or “webcaster” right. It is a bad idea when applied to television or radio, but a disaster if applied to the Internet.

In different ways, the US and the EU both think they can use this right to extract money for simply distributing information over the Internet into foreign markets.

The right comes at the expense of consumers and copyright owners — benefiting the distributors of information. It might be called the “middleman right.” This has attracted a large group of corporate lobbyists who want to see their clients named as beneficiaries of the treaty.

It works like this. If the owner of a broadcaster or webcaster publishes anything, they get an ownership right in the information, equal to the rights of copyright owner, so before you could make a copy, share or reuse the information in any way, you would have to get permissions from both the copyright owner and distributor of the work. This is supposed to “protect” the “caster” for its investments in broadcasting or webcasting…

Good Time Magazine Article on the absurdity of the patent system in the US.

The ultra-conservative Washington think-tank, the Cato Institute, has come out with an astonishingly perceptive critique of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Here’s an excerpt from the summary:

The result has been a legal regime that reduces options and competition in how consumers enjoy media and entertainment. Today, the copyright industry is exerting increasing control over playback devices, cable media offerings, and even Internet streaming. Some firms have used the DMCA to thwart competition by preventing research and reverse engineering. Others have brought the weight of criminal sanctions to bear against critics, competitors, and researchers.

The DMCA is anti-competitive. It gives copyright holders—and the technology companies that distribute their content—the legal power to create closed technology platforms and exclude competitors from interoperating with them. Worst of all, DRM technologies are clumsy and ineffective; they inconvenience legitimate users but do little to stop pirates…

Wow! Full report here. (pdf)

Thanks to Owen Barder for the link.

More insanity. According to Ars Technica, the troubled electronics giant Philips has filed a patent application for a device which prevents a user from changing the channel during commercials.

It’s a given that the TV networks need to somehow generate revenue in order to produce content. With commercials becoming less lucrative, TV has borrowed a dirty page from the movie industry and begun engaging in product placement within the programs themselves.

As a result, in the past few years, we’ve seen sitcom plots involving competition for a role in an Herbal Essences TV ad, various characters discussing how much they enjoyed “Memoirs of a Geisha,” and a wife waxing philosophical about a Wal-Mart perfume as her husband lays dying a few feet away. Enter Philips, a company prepared to put its foot down on that sort of artistic compromise.

The device Philips envisions would scan any broadcast or recording for digital signals labeled as commercial content. Just as many new DVDs begin by displaying ads that the viewer cannot bypass, a channel running a commercial would be locked until that commercial was over. Similarly, the fast-forward or skip controls on your digital video recorder would be disabled while a commercial is playing…

Surprise, surprise! Macworld UK report…

The US government has taken Apple’s side, condemning France’s move to legislate for interoperable copy protection technologies.

Speaking on CNBC, US Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said he needed to take a close look at France’s proposals, but warned: “Any time that something like this happens, any time that we believe intellectual property rights are being violated, we need to speak up and in this case, the company is taking the initiaitive.”

French lawmakers this week passed a bill which would force Apple, Microsoft and others to ensure that files purchased with one form of digital rights management (DRM) would work on computers and portable devices that employ another of the standards.

The move seems set to open up the industry, allowing songs purchased from Napster to play on an iPod, or tracks acquired from iTunes to play on a Windows Media-backed player.

Apple has condemned the move as “state-sponsored piracy”.

Ho, ho! See what Cory Doctorow has to say about that.

A terrific idea from James Boyle and his law colleagues at Duke University — a comic book that explains vividly the problems that our current IP regime poses for creative people.

A documentary is being filmed. A cell phone rings, playing the “Rocky” theme song. The filmmaker is told she must pay $10,000 to clear the rights to the song. Can this be true? “Eyes on the Prize,” the great civil rights documentary, was pulled from circulation because the filmmakers’ rights to music and footage had expired. What’s going on here? It’s the collision of documentary filmmaking and intellectual property law, and it’s the inspiration for this new comic book. Follow its heroine Akiko as she films her documentary, and navigates the twists and turns of intellectual property. Why do we have copyrights? What’s “fair use”? Bound By Law reaches beyond documentary film to provide a commentary on the most pressing issues facing law, art, property and an increasingly digital world of remixed culture…

The comic is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, and can be downloaded or purchased in hard copy from Amazon.