Mainstream media starts to get it on patents

The software industry has know for ages that patents stifle, rather than promote, innovation. Now the mainstream media are starting to get the same message. Here’s L. Gordon Crovitz in the Wall Street Journal:

For the third year in a row, Congress has just given up on passing a law reforming how patents are awarded and litigated. This despite growing evidence that for most industries, today’s patent system causes more harm than good. Litigation costs, driven by uncertainty about who owns what rights, are now so huge that they outweigh the profits earned from patents.

Companies as diverse as Verizon, Google, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard recently formed the Allied Security Trust to buy patents they may want to use some day and that otherwise could end up in the hands of “patent trolls.” These firms buy up old patents not to produce anything, but instead to work the system to extract settlements. A similar group formed against trolls to protect the Linux open-source operating system. A Google executive explained that helping to buy up and license patents is the “legal equivalent of taking a long, deep, relaxing breath.” Companies can rest easier, and legitimate inventors get paid for their work.

These corporate trusts seem like odd ways to protect products, but the memory is still fresh of the BlackBerry device almost being forced to shut down. Parent company Research in Motion paid more than $600 million in 2006 to settle a case. But in this and many other cases, companies can’t be sure whether or not they are complying with patent law. For example, by one estimate there are more than 4,000 patents that must be reviewed and potentially licensed by firms selling products or services online. The legal abuses arising from uncertainty are legion. More than 100 companies are being sued for alleged patent infringement by using text messaging internationally.

(via Slashdot)

The war on drugs don’t work

From Boing Boing:

According to a new international study, the United States has the highest rates of pot and coke use, followed by New Zealand. The other 15 countries surveyed by the World Health Organization didn’t even come close. Approximately 42.4 percent of those surveyed in the US say they’ve used marijuana, with 20.2 percent admitting to having tried the drug by age 15.

So the country with biggest war on drugs has the most drug use. I’m not the least bit surprised by this — but then, is anyone?

USA copies torture techniques from Communist China

New York Times, 2 July 2008:

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

George Orwell, Animal Farm:

No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

(via American Footprints)

China obsoletes aircraft carriers

China is developing an anti-ship ballistic missile:

China is developing an anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) based on a variant of the CSS-5 medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) as a component of its anti-access strategy. The missile has a range in excess of 1,500 km and, when incorporated into a sophisticated command and control system, is a key component of China’s anti-access strategy to provide the PLA the capability to attack ships at sea, including aircraft carriers, from great distances.

Work is believed to be ongoing to provide this missile with a sophisticated terminal guidance system. According to some reports the Mod 2 version of the CSS-5 will be comparable to the US Pershing II IRBM, employ advanced radar guidance to achieve extremely high accuracy.

An aircraft carrier is a big target, so it would probably not be too difficult to put sensors on a missile capable of guiding it to the target. And intercepting the missile in its re-entry phase would be quite difficult, because it would be going very fast. Think of it this way: it’s a lot more technologically difficult to hit a small missile doing 3000 m/s than a large ship doing 20 m/s. So assuming China and the USA are roughly technologically matched (which they will be over the next decade or two), it’ll be a lot easier for China to hit America’s carriers than for America’s carriers to defend themselves.

Where does this leave Britain? Britain is currently building 2 65,000 ton aircraft carriers, to be named Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales. These will cost £4 billion between them. But could they fall victim to a missile system much cheaper than themselves? I’m reminded of the fate of the last Royal Navy ships with these names — the last Prince of Wales was sunk in 1941 by Japanese air-launched torpedoes, and 8 days later and halfway around the world, Queen Elizabeth was sunk by Italian frogmen.

New Disney Tax will annoy prospective visitors to USA

The USA is proposing a law, the Travel Promotion Act (see also here, and here) which would oblige visitors to the USA to pay a tax of $25 which would trhen be spent by Disney and other large tourism corporations to promote their attractions.

This is, of course, unlikely to promote tourism. As Henry Farrell puts it:

This seems to me to be one of the more straightforwardly stupid legislative proposals of the recent past. As someone who used to visit the US a lot before I became a permanent resident, I can testify that I would have found it extremely galling to have to fork over $25 to subsidize glossy brochures for the US tourist industry, and would have likely restricted my travel to the US as a result.

What this law will in fact to is harm the US toursit industry while at the same time line the pockets of large players in that industry, such as Disney — which is why it’s been dubbed the Mickey Tax or Disney Tax.

If the USA really wanted to promote tourism, they should cut back on the TSA’s security theatre and make sure that the worst excesses by custom officials resulted in the sacking and possible imprisonment of said officials.

Tort law reform

When a person has been injured, perhaps it should be illegal for them to sue an entity with big pockets instead of suing the entity most responsible for the injury. For example, this case:

We’ve discussed in the past the concept of the “Steve Dallas lawsuit,” named after an old Bloom County comic, where the lawyer character Steve Dallas gets beaten up by Sean Penn after trying to take a photo of him. In the comic, Dallas decides to sue Nikon, the maker of the camera, and explains that you always target the company with the most money rather than anyone actually responsible for the situation you’re in. That seems to be happening again, as a woman is now suing Google because an ad on Google pointed her to a scammy ringtone provider, who did not clearly indicate what the ringtone would cost. The woman’s lawyer is trying to turn this into a class action lawsuit against Google, claiming that it failed to live up to its advertising policies, which forbid ads from companies that don’t clearly indicate their fees. It seems rather ridiculous to think that if any scammy company happens to get its ads on Google, that Google is somehow liable.

The Player of Games

Alex Tabbarok thinks the USA should evaluate the candidates for its presidential election via gameshows rather than debates:

Our system for choosing presidents doesn’t work very well. Voters are woefully uninformed on the most basic of issues and many end up voting on whim. I don’t think restricting the franchise is a good solution, however. A better idea is to create procedures that encourage voters to become better informed. Our current institutions for providing information are lousy. Debates, for example, are boring, the politicians don’t answer the questions and most importantly the voters don’t know what a good answer is.

I suggest a game show, So You Think You Can Be President? SYTYCBP would have at least three segments.

Coase it Out: Presidential candidates have 12 hours to get a bitterly divorcing couple to divide their assets in a mutually agreeable manner. (Bonus points are awarded if the candidate convinces the couple to stay together.)

Game Theory: Candidates compete in a game of Diplomacy. I would also include several ringers - say Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan and Salma Hayek. Why these three? Robin is cold, calculating and merciless - make a logical mistake and he will make you pay. Bryan is crafty and experienced. And Salma? I couldn’t refuse her anything but presidents should be made of stronger stuff so we need a test.

Spot the Fraud: Presidential candidates are provided with an economic scenario (mortgage defaults are up, hedge funds are crashing, liquidity is tight). Three experts propose plans. The candidate must choose one of the plans. After the candidate chooses, the true identities of the “experts” are revealed. One is a trucker, another a scuba diver instructor and the last a distinguished economist. Which did the candidate choose?

I think this could work in the UK too. Incidently the title of this post is a novel by Iain Banks where the leader of an empire is the person who wins a board game.

(via Marginal Revolution)

The MAFIAA is foiled again

The MAFIAA thought they had the perfect plan to destroy those pesky filesharers at The Pirate Bay. They decided they’d get their friends in the US government (as in “government by the corporations, of the corporations, for the corporations”) to confect an anti-Pirate-Bay trade agreement, and coerce the USA’s trading partners into accepting it.

However, someone’s adding keyword search to BitTorrent client software, obviating the need for BitTorrent trackers such as The Pirate Bay. So the MAFIAA’s plot is foiled before they started.

The first YouTube election

This year’s US presidential election will be the first one mediated by YouTube. Voters are making persuasive — and often funny — videos about the candidates. Here’s one nailing Senator John McCain’s contradictions in his own words:

(via Informed Comment)

The RIAA are worried

The RIAA are worried. Worried that someone, somewhere might still not hate them, after they’ve treated music fans and musicians alike with contempt for years. To rectify this, they’re trying to pass a law that would allow them to seize people’s houses (in the USA, at least) if they’re caught with unauthorised music:

I was just alerted that the House of Reps has passed HR 4279, with the lovely name, PRO-IP (Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008). Like the doublespeak PATRIOT Act and Peacekeeper missiles, PRO-IP puts local law enforcement in a position to demand the forfeiture in criminal proceedings of stuff used to violate copyright. Which means that instead of the RIAA simply trying to collect fines, they can also incite local authorities to collect all the computers and related gear that was used to pirate.

If this bill is passed in its present form by the Senate and signed, that means there’s no more pro forma RIAA lawsuit payoffs, because if you wind up settling with the RIAA, you could still lose all your stuff in addition to any fee you paid them.

In fact, you could lose your house even if you haven’t pirated music:

This is particularly irksome in light of the MSN Music shutdown, about which the EFF has written a strong and powerful letter. It is increasingly likely a normal person could have purchased music legally from an online site, burned it to an ordinary audio CD, and in the right set of circumstances be branded a pirate because the original “granting” authority no longer exists to prove that the consumer was a legitimate purchasers.

If this law passes, I’m sure a few well-publicised cases will turn everybody against the RIAA and their increasingly desperate tactics, not just in the USA but in other developed countries. And then the backlash will begin: politicians will find they can’t get re-elected unless they stop sucking up to the RIAA, and they’ll start enacting sensible copyright laws, ones that recognize that the Internet, with it’s ability to instantly, effortlessly copy and transmit information, isn’t going away.