I read this piece from Glynn Moody and thought he had lost his mind in considering it a step towards patent sanity. Then I read the New York Times piece he linked to and I now think that it's possibly more reasonable.

Glynn's summary is unfortunate, though. Switching to a first to file, rather than first to invent system for awarding patents is a large step away from sanity. On a purely intellectual level, there is no logic in awarding a patent — remembering that it's a limited restriction grant designed to make knowledge available to the public whilst providing some compensation for the inventor's efforts — to anybody other than the inventor. At that point, you aren't rewarding inventors (and their investors), you're rewarding people who file patents fast and you're writing into law that those are your priorities. There might be some logic behind bring US laws into alignment with other countries, but that just means things are more broken than before (and, as Eben Moglen points out quite often, the law is not logical).

The sanity appears to be in the other parts of the bill, so leading off with the craziest part was unfortunate.

Topics: law, venting

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The proceedings of a 2005 conference, "Open Content Licensing: Cultivating The Creative Commons", held at Queensland University of Technology are now available.

I've only read a few articles so far, but the contents look interesting and read well. I originally noticed this via Glynn Moody's "open..." blog and he made a throwaway remark wondering why it took so long to produce. These are well-edited articles. Given the caliber of the speakers (some law professors, judges, lawyers, ...), it's not surprising they are busy people, so a bit of time for the back-and-forth is not unexpected. The results seem worth the wait.

One thing I did note about the list of speakers, though: nobody that I recognised as representing the Australian Open Source community. Yes, Open Source development is not the same as Creative Commons production, but Open Source contributors do generate both a lot of Creative Commons content and tools for working with said content. They aren't completely disjoint fields.

Topics: law/Australia, conferences

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This is going to break all sorts of rules I set myself for this blog. Chief amongst them, not talking about contemporary politics. Screw it. Rules are made to be challenged and I need to write this thinking down somewhere.

I was reading through the overnight news this morning, catching up on the world, when I noticed quite a lot of comments about a decision from the US: the New Jersey State Supreme Court handed down an interestingly couched decision about same-sex marriages. Originally I though this was great, then I thought it was tricky, then I just thought a lot. All in the space of 12 hours. Challenging day.

(Read more...)

Topics: law, politics

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All the stupid (and let's not mince words here) US legal cases I hear about such as requiring labels explaining that hot coffee may, in fact, be hot would be funny if they weren't true.

Fortunately, at least one such case has been overturned in the state of New Jersey. Turns out, it is not reasonable to be awarded USD 179,001 for falling out of a loft bed just because you were not smart enough to realise it may happen.

Remember, this is the same state that has Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Studies?! Looks like they may need to focus on their secondary school education system a little bit more. The lessons here? Gravity operates in a downwards direction and if you are prone to leaping about suddenly after waking up, do not sleep on what is effectively a ledge without adequate tie-downs.

(Via The Volokh Conspiracy.)

Topics: funny, law/USA

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