Canadian Government re-inacts ACTA despite itself.

US Trade Rep orders Canada to comply with the dead-and-buried ACTA treaty, Canada rolls over and wets itself – Boing Boing

Wired: The Mother of All Patent Articles

From the first patent troll to the present – a wicked piece of reporting on the state of patent law and its death-grip on innovation.

The Patent Problem | Wired Opinion | Wired.com

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Steven Levy on the patent wars – Boing Boing

Supreme Court Screws Pfizer – Viagra is Now Public Domain in Canada

On November 8th, the SCC stripped Pfizer of its patent because the company would not disclose sufficient detail about how the little blue pill actually works. Therefore: no patent.

The patent system is based on a “bargain”, or quid pro quo: the inventor is granted exclusive rights in a new and useful invention for a limited period in exchange for disclosure of the invention so that society can benefit from this knowledge. This is the basic policy rationale underlying the Act. The patent bargain encourages innovation and advances science and technology.

The benefits due to society from limited IP protections were violated. This is the crux of the SCC’s ruling.

Canadian Supreme Court puts Viagra in the public domain because Pfizer wouldn’t disclose enough of its workings – Boing Boing

Canadian Copyright Bill Comes into Effect

Bill C-11 came into effect. And – here’s a surprise – it actually has a lot of good stuff in it. Michael Geist has the breakdown and analysis, but here’s the highlights:

• The addition of education, parody, and satire as fair dealing purposes.
• The creation of a non-commercial user generated content provision that creates a legal safe harbour for creators of non-commercial UGC (provided they meet four conditions in the law) and for sites that host such content. 
• The adoption of several new consumer exceptions including time shifting (recording of television shows), format shifting, and the making of backup copies.
• Changes to the statutory damages rules that distinguish between commercial and non-commercial infringement. The law now includes a cap of $5000 for all non-commercial infringement. The change reduces the likelihood of lawsuits against individuals for non-commercial activities and would apply to educational institutions engaged in non-commercial activity and significantly reduce their potential liability for infringement.
• The inclusion of an exception for publicly available materials on the Internet for education. This covers the content found on millions of websites that can now be communicated and reproduced by educational institutions without the need for permission or compensation.
• The adoption of a technology-neutral approach for the reproduction of materials for display purposes. The current law is limited to manual reproduction or on an overhead projector. The provision may be applicable in the online learning context and open the door to digitization activities.
• The implementation of a distance learning provision, though use of the exception features significant restrictions that require the destruction of lessons at the conclusion of the course.
• The inclusion of a restrictive digital inter-library loans provision that will allow for digital transmission of materials on an inter-library basis, increasing access to materials that have been acquired by university libraries.
• A new exception for public performances in schools, which will reduce licensing costs for educational institutions.

Michael Geist – Canadian Copyright Reform In Force: Expanded User Rights Now the Law

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Canada gets a huge raft of user-rights in copyright – Boing Boing

Full book scanning is fair use … until the appeal

The Author’s Guild lost another round to Google books when it sued one of the Libraries which has partnered with Google to digitize its collection. Hathitrust Digital Library (HDL) uses the scanned versions to permit, among other things, blind patrons to access the collection. Judge Baer’s ruling:

“The use to which the works in the HDL are put is transformative because the copies serve an entirely different purpose than the original works: the purpose is superior search capabilities rather than actual access to copyrighted material,” wrote Judge Baer. “The search capabilities of the HDL have already given rise to new methods of academic inquiry such as text mining.” Similarly, Judge Baer noted, the scanning program allows blind readers to read the books, something they can’t do with the original.

Court rules book scanning is fair use, suggesting Google Books victory | Ars Technica

Publishers settle with Google — leaving Authors on a Limb

The objections to Google Books just got a little quieter. Ars Technica is reporting that “five large publishers” have come to an agreement with Google. Critically this leaves the Author’s guild in a difficult spot:

“This does exacerbate the publisher-author tension,” Grimmelmann told us. “It used to be the publishers and authors are in this together against Google.” Now, he said, “Google is going to increasingly use the consent of the publishers as an argument that the authors don’t even speak for copyright owners.”

Publishers abandon fight against Google book scanning | Ars Technica

 

Pirate Party blocked from observer status at WIPO.

Whether you agree with their politics or not, they are a legitimate political party and have a vested interest in IP issues at the UN. But the objections of USA, France and Switzerland have stopped the group from being able to attend WIPO meetings as observers.

Pirate Party International satisfies every one of the criteria used to evaluate NGOs for WIPO observer status. Nevertheless, WIPO’s general assembly has postponed approval of PPI’s application for status. According to a report by Knowledge Ecology International founder James Love, the assembly rejected the Pirates after pressure from Switzerland, the USA, France and other EU nations…

Pirates (PPI) blocked from becoming observer member of WIPO | PirateTimes

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UN’s copyright agency won’t let the Pirate Party in – Boing Boing

 

Ars Technica: Judge decries “excessive” copyright and software patent protections

The Judge who tossed the Apple v. Motorola patent fight this summer has been blogging about patent proliferation. His comments are unusually well thought through (he is known for being a loose cannon).

Nowadays most software innovation is incremental, created by teams of software engineers at modest cost, and also ephemeral—most software inventions are quickly superseded. Software innovation tends to be piecemeal—not entire devices, but components, so that a software device (a cellphone, a tablet, a laptop, etc.) may have tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of separate components (bits of software code or bits of hardware), each one arguably patentable. The result is huge patent thickets, creating rich opportunities for trying to hamstring competitors by suing for infringement—and also for infringing, and then challenging the validity of the patent when the patentee sues you

And while the Ars coverage is focused on this I could not help but laugh when I read the following line:

He is traditionally regarded as a conservative, but he commented in July that “I’ve become less conservative since the Republican Party started becoming goofy.”

Goofy indeed.

 

Judge decries “excessive” copyright and software patent protections | Ars Technica

Why Google Likely Won’t Pull Down the Innocence of Muslims … (Hint: its an IP thing)

Interestingly it seems that Google has to keep a hands-off approach to YouTube content if it wishes to avoid liabilities connected to copywrited material that users upload on to its site. For an explanation see below and the linked article.

It’s easy to blame Google’s algorithmic obsession for this mess, but I don’t think that’s at work here at all. Yes, Google is very good (which means very bad in this case) at blaming one algorithm or another for pissing-off users. Google customer support is, in a word, terrible for this very reason, and it often seems like they don’t even care. But this case is different, because it has less to do with algorithms than it has to do with intellectual property laws.

Google lives and dies by its IP and YouTube in turn lives and dies primarily by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), specifically the Safe Harbor provision of that act that allows YouTube to simply pull infringing content on the demand of the IP holder rather than have to pay a $25,000 penalty as they’d do in, say, Australia.

But the DMCA Safe Harbor provision comes with certain rules which require a generally hands-off approach to content censoring by the carrier, in this case YouTube. The DMCA puts the onus on the IP holder to tell YouTube (and all YouTube competitors) to pull down infringing content. We do this every day, by the way, with pirate copies of Steve Jobs — The Lost Interview. Without eternal vigilance my children won’t be able to afford college.

Muhammad v. YouTube ~ I, Cringely via

If Google yanks “Innocence of Muslims,” will it lose its DMCA Safe Harbor? – Boing Boing

You don’t own your ideas…

Walter Frick for technologyreview.com has a nice little piece on the slippery (and frankly false) notion of the idea-as-property.

The fact is that we don’t to own most of our ideas, and that’s a good thing.

You Don’t Own Your Ideas, and That’s a Good Thing – Technology Review