News and Commentary
Mark Bilby makes an impassioned case for why research should be available to make the publishing industry a means of human progress by allowing the free flow of knowledge.
Writing for the India China Institute, James Love of Knowledge Ecology International discusses Paul Samuelson’s analysis of a “public good.” Though it is certainly possible to exclude information (via patents or trade secrets), making it less of a public good, we must embrace the idea that knowledge is by its nature a public good and not be caught up in academic considerations of the term at the expense of global progress.
Loeb and Loeb LLP hosted a webinar discussing the Copyright Office’s recent Section 512 report.
Dean Baker and Gerald Scorse write in the New York Daily News on the problems with drug pricing in the pandemic, how government is investing significant sums of money to firms that will likely be able to claim patent monopolies on developed drugs, and how ensuring pharmaceutical companies only get paid once will bring drug prices back to earth.
Gerald Barnett discusses the problems with patent metrics at the university management and federal policy level. While they each have some value, they are possible to manipulate and details about the patent, licensing, and commercialization costs obscure the underlying goal of the Bayh-Dole act and the patent system more broadly, the promotion of innovation.
A letter from the “Ni Censura ni Candados” campaign calls on Mexican public institutions to reject the overly-broad DMCA-style copyright law recently passed by the Mexican Congress.
Two panels for the Comic-Con @ Home broadcast on YouTube were shut down during the livestream for copyright infringement.
Kyle Jahner for Bloomberg Law discusses the problems with the DMCA’s current notice-and-takedown system. There is plenty of abuse of the system, but the Section 512(f) guardrail is too underutilized to go after bad-faith use of the takedown system and while the volume of infringing content is high, the system is at worst prone to abuse and at best prone to flagging many false positives.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the artist Drake in a fair use decision. Drake was sued for copyright infringement by the estate of James Oscar Smith for sampling the “Jimmy Smith Rap.” The former espouses the supremacy of jazz music, while the allegedly infringing song “Pound Cake” uses sampling from it to criticize the idea expressed.
The controversial watchdog group Truth and Transparency Foundation has settled a lawsuit with Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, which publishes materials for the Jehova’s Witnesses, after leaking 74 videos fro which Watch Tower claimed copyright protection.
An article from Science Magazine explains why the patent system is ill-suited to deal with a pandemic. The private incentives created by a patent lend themselves to high-expected value products, and not those for low-probability (but high cost) diseases like coronavirus.
New Research
A study from Research Integrity and Peer Review examined the preferences of reviewers and authors on the open and non-anonymous review process for papers of the Computer Human Interaction (CHI). They found that while authors and reviewers were generally receptive to the process, they were skeptical of the broader implementation of a system.
A paper from European Science Editing makes the case that peer review, the main “value proposition” from academic publishing journals, should include compensation for those conducing the peer reviews.
A study examining the growth of technological progress across a variety of domains found not only a wide range of improvement between domains, but also that the rate of improvement was not a function of the number of patents in a given set.
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