The Libertarian Standard – Page 660 – Property – Prosperity

But what about the authors’ IP rights?

IP Law, Technology

By Jeffrey Tucker / December 1, 2011 / 1 minute of reading

British Library digitizes 300 years worth of newspaper archives, brings 65 million articles online

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Property Title Records and Insurance in a Free Society

Anti-Statism, IP Law, Libertarian Theory, Taxation

By Stephan Kinsella / December 1, 2011 / 5 minutes of reading

Land registry — Land Registry: Land Certificate, from A Short History of Land Registration in England and Wales

Opponents of intellectual property often point out that modern patent and copyright are purely legislated, artificial schemes. For anarcho-libertarians and libertarians opposed to legislation as a means of forming law, this is yet another stake in the heart of IP. (See my post The Mountain of IP Legislation, and my article “Legislation and Law in a Free Society.”)

So it’s not surprising that one retort of the IPers is to argue that patent- and copyright-like rights “could” evolve in common law courts. Even though they didn’t; even though the idea of statutorily enacted schemes arising from judicial decisions is more than implausible: it’s ridiculous. Some of them simply posit that there could be private “title” offices in a free society akin to real property title records in use today: you just go down and “register” your “idea”; later, when you sue an “infringer” of “your” idea in court, you can prove you “own” it by introducing evidence from the IP title records office. For example, in a recent Mises blog threat, someone suggested there might be some private invention title office (my reply). And the anarcho-libertarian Tannehills, in their classic The Market for Liberty, argue (pp. 58-59):

Ideas in the form of inventions could also be claimed by registering all details of the invention in a privately owned “data bank.” Of course, the more specific an inventor was about the details of his invention, the thought processes he followed while working on it, and the ideas on which he built, the more firmly established his claim would be and the less would be the likelihood of someone else squeezing him out with a fake claim based on stolen data. The inventor, having registered his invention to establish his ownership of the idea(s), could then buy insurance (from either the data bank firm or an independent insurance company) against the theft and unauthorized commercial use of his invention by any other person. The insurance company would guarantee to stop the unauthorized commercial use of the invention and to fully compensate the inventor for any losses so incurred. Such insurance policies could be bought to cover varying periods of time, with the longer-term policies more expensive than the shorter-term ones. Policies covering an indefinitely long time-period (“from now on”) probably wouldn’t be economically feasible, but there might well be clauses allowing the inventor to re-insure his idea at the end of the life of his policy.

One problem with the Tannehills’ reasoning was the question-begging assumption that it’s “theft” to use an idea if it’s “unauthorized”; this presupposes there is property in information. …

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Not Being Evil? Google patents Google Doodles

Business, IP Law

By Stephan Kinsella / December 1, 2011 / 2 Comments / 3 minutes of reading

This image is patented by Google, not being evil

I was reading about the cool Mark Twain Google doodle here and was surprised to find that Google had actually managed to obtain a patent related to the idea of using homepage doodles. The inventor is Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin; the patent application was filed back in April 2001 but not granted as a patent until March 2011. The patent’s title is “Systems and methods for enticing users to access a web site” (PTO version; Google versionwith PDF). The abstract and claim 1 are below:

Abstract: A system provides a periodically changing story line and/or a special event company logo to entice users to access a web page. For the story line, the system may receive objects that tell a story according to the story line and successively provide the objects on the web page for predetermined or random amounts of time. For the special event company logo, the system may modify a standard company logo for a special event to create a special event logo, associate one or more search terms with the special event logo, and upload the special event logo to the web page. The system may then receive a user selection of the special event logo and provide search results relating to the special event.

Claim 1. A non-transitory computer-readable medium that stores instructions executable by one or more processors to perform a method for attracting users to a web page, comprising: instructions for creating a special event logo by modifying a standard company logo for a special event, where the instructions for creating the special event logo includes instructions for modifying the standard company logo with one or more animated images; instructions for associating a link or search results with the special event logo, the link identifying a document relating to the special event, the search results relating to the special event; instructions for uploading the special event logo to the web page; instructions for receiving a user selection of the special event logo; and instructions for providing the document relating to the special event or the search results relating to the special event based on the user selection.

This got me curious as to what other patents Brin might have obtained. Here they are (sigh):

1	8,037,065	Information extraction from a database
2	8,024,326	Methods and systems for improving a search ranking using related queries
3	8,009,141	Seeing with your hand
4	7,912,915	Systems and methods for enticing users to access a web site
5	7,650,330	Information extraction from a database
6	7,505,964	Methods and systems for improving a search ranking using related queries
7	7,366,668	Voice interface for a search engine
8	7,136,854	Methods and apparatus for providing search results in response to an ambiguous search query
9	7,027,987	Voice interface for a search engine
10	6,865,575	Methods and apparatus for using a modified index to provide search results in response to an ambiguous search query
11	6,678,681	Information extraction from a database
12	6,529,903	Methods and apparatus for using a modified index to provide search results in response to an ambiguous search query
13	6,185,559	Method and apparatus for dynamically counting large itemsets

Another search reveals 925 patents owned by Google (the thousands of patents acquired from Motorola Mobility are evidently not yet assigned to Google in the PTO database so don’t show up here), plus a bunch of pending patent applications.

You can’t really blame Google for playing the patent game and trying to build up a defensive patent portfolio.¹ Still, asserting this patent against innocent companies would surely violate the company motto “Don’t be evil“.

[c4sif]

See, e.g., Google’s Defensive Patent Acquisition; State robs Google of 1760 defensive patents; The Patent Defense League and Defensive Patent Pooling; A Patent “Don’t Be Evil” Policy; and related posts. ↩

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Is Power Stupid or Smart?

Fiction Reviews (Movies), Vulgar Politics

By Jeffrey Tucker / November 30, 2011 / 3 Comments / 8 minutes of reading

If you seek power over others, how much of an advantage does raw intelligence gain you?

If you look at the makeup of the U.S. Congress — which now has a 9% percent approval rating — or if you watch the Republican debates, you are not immediately inclined to label either the smart set. In fact, you have to be a dim bulb to repeatedly say many of the things that seem necessary for electability. On the other hand, a certain amount of cleverness is obviously necessary to outwit the media and your opponents.

Which is it? Two films that explore the relationship between power and brains are “Being There” (1979) and “Limitless” (2011). The films came out thirty years apart but deal with the same issues. “Being There” suggests that being dumb as a chicken is a huge advantage for those who seek political success. “Limitless” suggests that politics is the inevitable trajectory of a person who is far more intelligent than everyone else. Which is more realistic?

I’ll state my own view up front: politics is a gigantic waste of brains. If a person really has a gift for high-level thought, almost any profession would be a greater better to society and probably more self-fulfilling in the long run. Whereas it was probably once true that the political life attracted some of the best and brightest, it no longer seems true at all today.

“Being There” is both hilarious and serious, worth sitting down with at least once every few elections seasons. Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine star in this adaptation of a novel by Jerzy Kosinski about an illiterate and simple-minded man named Chance who happened to be in the right place at the right time. His utterances are few and most concern what he has done his entire life, which has been to tend one garden on one estate and otherwise watch television. …

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