The 1999 American Inventors Protection Act (AIPA) added a procedure by which interested outsiders could argue the case for patent invalidity during the USPTO examination process. The law told the PTO to report to Congress on the effect of the program within five years.

The report is now complete, and, as TechDaily (subscription required) reports, PTO is not entirely happy: "Only 53 requests for such re-examinations have been made in five years. The PTO report found that in the same time, it has issued almost 900,000 patents after receiving 1.6 million applications."

The report contains further recommendations to improve the process.

The USPTO will host a conference on Feb. 3-4, 2005, "to discuss the current state of substantive patent law harmonization and possible approaches for moving harmonization forward."

The meeting is for government reps only, and is (reading between the lines of the announcement) an attempt to resolve current disagreements in preparation for the WIPO meeting now scheduled for May.

Comments filed with the FTC in connection with last week's session on Peer-to-Peer Filesharing Technology: Consumer Protection and Competition Issues are available online. Closing date for further comment is Jan. 18, 2005.

The Social Science Research Network just had its 10th anniversary. For a report from the Chairman, go here . 45,000 authors have uploaded 81,000 papers, and users have downloaded 7 million full-text documents.

Hmmm, evidently this copyright tax business can get complicated as well. The levy on MP3 players in Canada has been declared illegal. Go figger.

Sometimes bad ideas refuse to go away, because people ignore reality, like a dot-com executive who doesn't care that he's losing money on every sale because he'll make it up in volume. At today's second and final day of the FTC P2P Summit, one horrendously bad idea resurfaced, namely compulsory licenses, while couched in a false free-market argument.

The first proponent of a compulsory license for music online, former ASCAP attorney Bennett Lincoff, called for "statutory licenses." EFF's Fred von Lohmann, who seconded the notion, insisted they shouldn't be called compulsory licenses because the rate isn't compelled if the parties agree to their own rate before going before a rate court or a Copyright Office arbitration panel. But von Lohmann was confusing rate-setting with the act of requiring the licenses themselves. Under a compulsory (or statutory) license, content producers are required to reach agreement on licensing. Thus, the content producer lacks the right to walk out of unproductive negotiations and go home. That producer either has to agree to reach a rate in negotiations or take his or her chances with a government-appointed rate-setter.

Shockingly, von Lohmann actually said he was in favor of a free-market solution to the P2P problem. It would be great if true, but his free-market solution was a compulsory license, in which negotiations are not free and market-based, and a world in which P2P software providers operate without fear of liability. That's a free market for the P2P software makers in isolation, but it's at the expense of an existing, highly competitive, and legal content market. Don't be fooled by P2P supporters calling compulsory licenses or liability-free P2P software part of a free-market solution. They mean a free-content solution.

Neil Turkewitz, Exec VP of the RIAA , has a thoughtful piece on copyright on the Cultural Commons website.

He articulates nicely some important central themes, starting with the point that copyright is a cooperative venture between consumers and creators, not the hostile relationship posited by the Copyleft:

The U.S. copyright system, like most, is based on the very notion that the public has an overt interest in protecting intellectual property, and not merely in restricting it. Stated in another way, the public interest in copyright is not limited to the notion of fair use or the public domain, but rather extends to the entire system of copyright. While the public certainly has an interest in securing cheap access to copyrighted materials, society's primary interest is in ensuring the production and distribution of original materials so that there exists something to access.

He adds:

It is essential that policy makers keep in mind that the copyright system replaced private patronage as the mechanism for permitting creators to live through their craft. By permitting creative genius to be fuelled by market forces, we unleash the cultural power and potential of the public at large, freeing creative impulses from the tyranny of government control and making creative works accessible to the public at large. While the copyright system carries with it the potential for abuse, it remains by far the most powerful tool for fostering creativity and democratizing cultural production and access thereto.

He also notes that creators do not want mindless expansion of copyright; they care deeply about the appropriate limits embodied in the doctrines of Fair Use:

[W]e recognize that the creative process indeed is an evolutionary one, and that present creators draw upon past expression for inspiration. The copyright community relies upon the idea/ expression dichotomy, and the concept of fair use. As a consequence, copyright owners have a greater interest in preserving limitations to copyright protection to permit new forms of expression than do general members of the public. Creators need to stand on the shoulders of giants, right? For Lessig and his allies, fair use is little more than a useful slogan.

To all of which we say: Amen, brother!"

JoelonSoftware has an excellent and amusing piece on pricing software, including fundamental education on such topics as marginal cost pricing and price discrimination.

For an interview with Joel Spolsky by tech author Scott Rosenberg, see Salon (Dec. 9).

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) , has released Architecture of the World Wide Web, Vol. 1 . The purpose, described by the W3C:

The Web uses relatively simple technologies with sufficient scalability, efficiency and utility that they have resulted in a remarkable information space of interrelated resources, growing across languages, cultures and media. This architecture document discusses the core design components of the Web in an effort to preserve these properties of the information space as its technologies evolve. Read the press release , Member testimonials , and visit the TAG home page . ( News archive )

A spokesman told C|Net :

"I'm hoping that people who have a lot of experience doing other stuff besides the Web will use it to get up to speed on how to design Web applications," said Dan Connolly, a W3C technical staffer and member of its Technical Architecture Group (TAG), which prepared the architecture document. "If your expertise is in financial transaction processing and you want to hook your thing to the Web, this can tell you everything you absolutely must know."

The big news out of the FTC's summit on P2P Wednesday was that several times due to raucous audience members it was in danger of turning into the food fight scene in Animal House. Still, there was wisdom to be heard from some of the panelists, including PFF board member Jim Miller, even though it wasn't clear that FTC officials wanted to hear it.

The FTC's Acting Director for the Bureau of Consumer Protection, Lydia Parnes, reiterated the unfortunate conclusion of her agency that P2P software providers don't appear to be violating the unfair and deceptive provisions of Sec. 5 of the FTC Act. She even seemed to rule out future action, saying the FTC doesn't believe that P2P providers have an affirmative duty to disclose the risks of their software.

I find that conclusion baffling. So do numerous members of Congress. And so does Jim Miller, who before becoming chairman of CapAnalysis was chairman of the FTC. His presentation on a panel titled "Government and Private Sector Responses to Protect Consumers Using P2P File-Sharing Programs" made it clear that the FTC can act, and that P2P providers are in clear violation of the law. But materials he had outside the FTC meeting room were even clearer, presenting a gift-wrapped enforcement case to the FTC against Kazaa.

We've noted here that Computer Associates recently called Kazaa the Number One spyware threat. Miller pointed out that Kazaa's "no spyware" claim on its web site is undermined by its saying spyware isn't installed "without your permission." Since you can't download the free Kazaa without the spyware, you're giving permission, but what the spyware does -- and the fact that you're forbidden to remove it or monitor it with third-party software -- is buried deep in a legalistic EULA of 60 on-screen pages and almost 6,000 words. That consent isn't informed.

On the same panel, super-slick attorney Adam Eisgrau, who represents 5 P2P companies, boasted about the new disclosures his members are planning. One disclosure, to be used on eDonkey (which is now being sued by MPAA, as Jim DeLong noted), will inform users that downloading copyrighted files without authorization "may be illegal." Well now. I'm imagining myself showing up as an 18-year-old freshman at the Delta house's toga party and being handed a beer by Otter, Delta's Pledge Chairman, while he says with a wink, "Remember, drinking alcohol underage may be illegal."

C|Net has a roundup of news on P2P.

What with the Grokster cert, the MPAA law suits, the Australian trial, the FTC hearing, and child porn issues, it's hard to keep current.