Posts tagged: intellectual property
Behold! What the Stop SOPA blackout managed to accomplish in 24 hours.
High five, internet.
Beautiful.
(That is: $16M of payments to lawyers netted $391K of file-sharing lawsuit settlements.)
A trenchant and funny infographic from Cracked.com (which really is a worthy successor to the beloved print magazine of my boyhood) illustrates the absurdity of the damages that the RIAA seeks in music downloading cases.
Via BoingBoing.
GE bought a patent for a device called a Stamet Pump that was developed with significant taxpayer money by DOE and then refused to share the device with other firms or the public at large. DOE argued unsuccessfully that the patent should be part of the public domain. This device has tremendous potential in aiding gasification of certain types of coal, something that would pave the way for carbon sequestration from coal-fired power plants. DOE argued with GE execs that they should either release the technology to the public domain or license it to multiple other firms in the interest of the public, since it was funded with public money. Also intriguing in this story is that the state of Wyoming has partnered with GE to build a $100 million gasification test center using this technology—Wyoming is chipping in half of the money from federal funds that were released to the state after a long battle by coal-friendly legislators. Wyoming released the documents detailing the partnership with so many pages blacked out because of “intellectual property, commercial, and trade secrets” that no one can figure out the answer to questions like “what does Wyoming get for its $50 million?”
The White House is refusing to release documents about the secretive Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a super-maximal copyright treaty that a bunch of rich countries are negotiating behind closed doors to escape the activists who’ve started to report on their shenanigans at the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organisation.
Incredibly, the Obama administration claims that disclosing the details of this secret copyright law would endanger “national security.”
But now, like Bush before him, Obama is playing the national security card to hide details of the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement being negotiated across the globe.
