Vnunet reports on an academia-industry agreement for the transfer of intellectual property. Parties include UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, IBM and Intel.

The transfer of intellectual property rights between academia and industry is crucial for innovation. Without technology transfer, important academic research may languish in school labs rather than lend value to society through commercialization. Industry benefits from collaboration with academia, as university research is a major source of basic R&D, while academia gains input on practical uses of that R&D.

For readers interested in academia-industry collaborations and technology transfer in the history of Internet innovation, an excellent resource is Steil, Victor and Nelson, Technological Innovation and Economic Performance, Princeton Univ Press, 2002- particularly the chapter by Mowery-Simcoe.

posted by Noel Le @ 5:25 AM | Academia

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In a lawsuit filed by movie studios against a Net-based service that indexes BitTorrent downloads, the service has been ordered to log users' IP addresses as a part of discovery. EFF and CDT have filed an amicus brief objecting.

The concern with privacy in this case puzzles me. The principle seems to be that copyright is

Continue reading Privacy and Security in Conflict . . .

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 11:29 AM | Enforcement & Remedies , Privacy and Security

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For a little light reading, the office of the United States Trade Representative's special 2006 report on piracy, including discussion of the two treaties on copyright protection online.

And the material at WIPO itself, including links to the treaties.

The increasing importance of international lawmaking bodies in the area of technology is both promising and alarming. Alarming, because the United States is an outlier in areas such as free speech, and is likely to be outnumbered going forward. Also interesting and maybe alarming, because when treaties are being negotiated the policy side is driven by officials from the executive branch rather than from the legislative branch (though the latter come in later during ratification). And finally promising because greater uniformity of law regarding commerce from the Law Merchant, to Admiralty Law, to the Uniform Commercial Code, has been a cornerstone of gains in trade and higher standards of living. But also alarming because competition between jurisdictions (especially in matters such as tax policy) and the mobility of capital helps to protect the private sector from overreaching by the public sector. All in all, something to watch.

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 11:14 AM | International

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It looks like MySQL is growing up. Business Week reports of a forthcoming IPO for the FOSS database firm. Good for MySQL for showing that FOSS is not all hoopla over peer-production nor the emergence of non-monetary economics in innovating activity.

As I've argued, the more FOSS technologies and the FOSS community mature, the more FOSS firms will adopt formal capital and organizational structures. FOSS supporters who disagree with this point aim to deflect standard business and economic scrutiny of the FOSS movement. However, when a FOSS firm like MySQL joins the big leagues and holds obligation to shareholders, it must be scrutinized as any other commercial entity. There is no more "but FOSS code gives you the freedom to tinker." FOSS entities may downplay the role of capital and profit motive in innovation when they are not capable of forming sustainable businesses, but then...

[Kevin Harvey, a general partner at Benchmark Capital, and MySQL's chairman] "It's not a story of profits at first; it's a story of profits you'll generate as you grow."

MySQL's ability to keep selling service contracts for software that's also available free will affect its valuation, though. "A lot of people think the open-source market for database software is very lucrative," Le Blanc [Jereme Le Blanc, VP at investment bank Boston Corporate Finance] says. "It's too early at this point to gauge whether the model works."

posted by Noel Le @ 7:44 PM | Free Culture Movement

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Aliya Sternstein's techdaily article "Moving the Campus Bookstore Online," covers proposals for the future of a digital marketplace and licensing clearinghouse for textbooks and a recent federal report on making textbooks more affordable, California state models, and publisher reactions.

The driving factor behind the study is of course the rising cost of education, of which textbooks are a part (a rather small part, but never mind). No one seems in a hurry to put the puzzle together; the two sectors of the economy in which prices notoriously rise with little accountability to consumers are education and medicine--two areas heavily subsidized by the federal government. Whither price sensitivity?

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 9:16 AM | Books , Internet: P2P, Search Engines... , Universities

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AP reports on the failure of talks to outline principles for the copyright treatment of broadcasting and webcasting.

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 9:13 AM | International , Internet: P2P, Search Engines... , Radio

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Yesterday I picked up a copy of Innovation and its Discontents, Princeton Univ Press (2004) with a new preface by authors Adam Jaffe and Joshua Lerner. Perhaps more than any other academic work, this book has stirred broad interest and debate in patent policy, yet not always in ways the scholars would recommend. In the new preface Jaffe and Lerner warn against mis-direction that has marked patent discourse following important cases such as eBay and Research in Motion:

We applaud the greater attention that policy makers and the general public have been giving to patent policy in the last year or so. Yet in many cases observers are still drawing the wrong conclusions about what needs to be fixed to get the system on the right track. Many have concluded that certain kinds of technology, such as Internet business methods or biotech drugs, should not be patentable. Or they have demonized certain firms for ruthlessly enforcing patents “instead of” concentrating on making and selling products.

But the problem with the patent system is nether that it does not fit certain technologies nor that certain kinds of firms should not be allowed to enforce patents. The problem is that the system that we use for determining who should get a patent in the first place is not sufficient. While no patent system will ever be perfect, the technology world today is awash in patents that should not have been granted in the first place, because they either are not new ideas, are overly broad, or did not sufficiently flesh out the invention at issue to deserve patent protection.

posted by Noel Le @ 6:02 AM | Academia , Patents

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Steven Levy's column for Newsweek bemoans the trouble that some fellow has gotten himself into, selling mash-ups of hip-hop songs without licensing. Fair use? Transformative use? Why bother with the technicalities? Levy and a legislator likes the fellow, so they weigh in on the side of legislating (yet another) exception. Maybe jam transformative and fair uses together into a whole new category, "rave" use, with a safe harbor for "hipster" use and for the older set "cool" uses? The principle behind it might be that if you offend only a little, you are liable, but if you offend multiple players a lot, you are home free.

The problem of how to license a whole bunch of stuff (167 artists in this case) all at once for a reasonable fee is a daunting one. Not so daunting that one ought not to try. But is proposing yet another exemption or exception or compulsory license or combination thereof really an intelligent approach to the problem? It is not. It is flatly embarrassing that legislators and experienced commentators on copyright cannot do better than this perpetual handing out of legal privileges to the favorite information cause du jour, simultaneously screwing creators and leaving the next innovative technology who comes along to face the same administrative problem--how to license a whole bunch of stuff.

Continue reading Newsweek on mashups--defending hipster use. . . .

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 12:20 PM |

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The chap who sued the dry cleaner for millions for losing his pants has been ordered to pay costs.

Loser pays is a good idea for patents, too. (The law & econ literature critiquing it is off base).

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 12:15 PM | Big Tent , Patents

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Hance Haney weighs in on current patent reform legislation with his thoughts on the Rooklidge article critiquing current proposals to limit patent damages.

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 12:12 PM | Enforcement & Remedies , Legislation and Legislators , Markets: Business, Investment & Innovation , Patents

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