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Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » What We’re Reading: Landes & Posner’s “Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law”

Adam Thierer — Tue, 24 Aug 2004 09:21:35 -0000

Grant... These are interesting suggestions and it reminded me that such a proposal for graduated or tiered terms of protection was put forward a few years ago by Jeff Bezos of Amazon for business method patents.

As you may recall, Bezos had quite a spat with Tim O'Reilly over Amazon's "one-click" business method patent. O'Reilly and others made a fairly powerful case that the patent should have never been granted. To his credit, Bezos responded to the critics and acknowledged that some high-tech patents should probably not received the same term of protection. He sent an open letter to O'Reilly advocating shortening the life span of software patents to three to five years instead of 17 as well as helping to improve the PTO's "prior art" search capabilities before granting such patents in the first place. See this old Wired story for more details:

http://wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,34887,0...

I'm not sure anything ever came of all this, but it would be worth exploring. One obvious problem, however, is: What standard do we use to determine term length for one type of industry or technology versus another? Why should software only be 3-5 years while drug companies get 20? And on the copyright front, one might ask why a copyright owner should be forced to renew - - for an increasing fee no less - - every few years. I think the idea still has merit, but someone needs to sweat the details here and justify the plan.

For more details on the "one-click" spat, see the O'Reilly site: http://www.oreilly.com/news/patent_archive.html

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » A Rapidly Developing Market in Music Downloading

Adam Thierer — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 13:11:20 -0000

Check out this excellent Business Week article ("Kissing Off the Big Labels") for more on this theme:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04...

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » But “It’s for the Children!”–The Violent Stupidity of Regulating Violence in Media

Adam Thierer — Thu, 02 Sep 2004 14:35:39 -0000

The Senate rider is part of the annual DOD appropriations bill. Of course, it could certainly be cut in conference, especially since it's not in the House DOD approps bill.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Is Live Radio & TV a Thing of the Past?

Adam Thierer — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 14:07:09 -0000

Gattuso is right... you can no longer separate out the two issues (media ownership controls and censorship). In fact, the current indececy bill going through Congress contains specific language about media ownership regulation. And during the debate last year over the FCC's new media ownership regs, several members of Congress argued that we needed more study into the question of whether increased consolidation led to more indecent programming on TV and radio.

You can't have it both ways. If you want to govenment to come in and police the economic structure of industry, they will use it as an excuse to also regulate content.