Our board member Hal Abelson points us to Modeling a Paradigm Shift: From Producer Innovation to User and Open Collaborative Innovation , an important new paper by Carliss Y. Baldwin and Eric von Hippel. If you’re interested in the theoretical case for the ascendancy of innovation and creativity in the commons — and for policy that does not cripple the commons — read, or at least skim these highly readable 29 pages.

The "Compulsory Licensing" paper attacks this question directly - looking at an episode where the US "stole" a bunch of inventions by compulsory licensing after World War I. The consequent effect on innovation in the areas covered by the licenses? It went up by 20%.

Abstract: A copyright system is designed to produce an ecology that nurtures the creation, dissemination and enjoyment of works of authorship. When it works well, it encourages creators to generate new works, assists intermediaries in disseminating them widely, and supports readers, listeners and viewers in enjoying them. If the system poses difficult entry barriers to creators, imposes demanding impediments on intermediaries, or inflicts burdensome conditions and hurdles on readers, then the system fails to achieve at least some of its purposes. The current U.S. copyright statute is flawed in all three respects. In this article, I explore how the current copyright system is failing its intended beneficiaries. The foundation of copyright law’s legitimacy, I argue, derives from its evident benefits for creators and for readers. That foundation is badly cracked, in large part because of the perception that modern copyright law is not especially kind to either creators or to readers; instead, it concentrates power in the hands of the intermediaries who control the conduits between creators and their audience. Those intermediaries have recently used their influence and their copyright rights to obstruct one another’s exploitation of copyrighted works. I argue that the concentration of copyright rights in the hands of intermediaries made more economic sense in earlier eras than it does today. The key to real copyright reform, I suggest, is to reallocate copyright’s benefits to give more rights to creators, greater liberty to readers, and less control to copyright intermediaries.

Examples of Outrageous Patents and Judgments Examples of (at least apparently) ridiculous patents and patent applications abound (more at PatentLawPractice): * Amazon's "one-click" patent, asserted against rival Barnes & Noble * Cendant's assertion that Amazon violated Cendant's patent monopoly on recommending books to customers (since settled) * The attempt of Dustin Stamper, Bush's Top Economist, to secure a patent regarding an application for a System And Method For Multi-State Tax Analysis, which claims "a method, comprising: creating one or more alternate entity structures based on a base entity structure, the base entity structure comprising one or more entities; determining a tax liability for each alternate entity structure and the base entity structure; and generating a result based on comparing each of the determined tax liabilities" * Apple's patent application for digital Karaoke * the suit against Facebook by the holder of a patent for a "system for creating a community for users with common interests to interact in" * the "absurdly broad patent [issued to Blackboard] for common uses of technology if that technology is employed in the context of education" (see also Patent Office Rejects Blackboard E-Learning Patent One Month After It Wins Lawsuit, Techdirt (Mar. 31, 2008) * Compton's (now Encyclopedia Britannica's) patent that "broadly cover[s] any multimedia database allowing users to simultaneously search for text, graphics, and sounds basic features found in virtually every multimedia product on the market" * Carfax's patent on a "method for perusing selected vehicles having a clean title history" * Acacia's patent for putting a unique transaction number on a receipt[26] * Pat. No. 6,368,227, covering swinging sideways on a swing

via: http://digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/2009/07/23/fair-use-evaluator-and-exceptions-for-instructors-etool-released/

the flexibility that fair use offers versus the certainty offered by more specific exceptions for research and teaching found in the copyright laws of most other countries