today in intellectual property

Popular sentiment often has it that intellectual property (IP) law exists to keep powerful corporations from having to share their IP with little-guy competitors and the broader culture -- Disney is frequently cited for having reworked public domain stories into copyright-protected imagery to great profit. Today we hear about a little-guy competitor using the very same IP laws to protect itself from a very powerful corporation.

Toronto-based i4i Inc. has succeeded in winning a $290 million (USD) judgement against Microsoft Inc. after the software giant apparently included some of i4i's intellectual property in past versions of Microsoft Word.

And, on the other side of the constantly spinning IP wheel, Amazon's proprietary Kindle code has been hacked, rendering their entire store of e-books vulnerable to illegal p2p sharing.

No word yet on whether or not the "little-guy" who hacked the Kindle gets the irony of my reporting these two stories together in one posting.

UPDATE: One more little thing in IP today:

American fantasy writer Ursula K. LeGuin resigns from the Authors Guild, citing her disagreement with them on the Google settlement. Thanks for the tip, NMcG.

Annnnnd finally: I ran across this entirely confusing IP-related posting on Boing Boing -- by way of context, one normally visits Boing Boing to find all sorts of comments supporting the idea that locking anything away from the consumer is an idea spawned in the underworld. But judging by the comments after this criticism of a Google policy, I now understand that Boing Boing fans believe they should be allowed to hack anything they want to, except for Google's code. Because?

when is the work of the intellect "property?" (part 635)

Just in time for the federal government's copyright consultations, Amazon.com has managed to make a complex issue a whole lot denser.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported on consumer advocates lobbying Amazon to drastically alter their current business practices for fear the new tools of retail may someday be used as tools of oppression.

It seems Amazon recently flipped one of their all-powerful switches and erased illicitly obtained copies of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four from the Kindle reading devices of many Amazon customers. This spawned countless uses of the adjective "Orwellian" by headline writers around the globe; inspired a potential class action lawsuit; and somehow managed to align those who do not believe in the concept of intellectual property with the idea that files they have acquired to their digital devices are some form of "property" others should not be allowed to arbitrarily yoink from their hands -- especially when that "property" represents the "intellectual" freedom we as a society demand.

I think what I find most interesting about the Boing Boing posting (see link above) is the house-breaking analogy they quote:

"it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands..."

So, unauthorized use of intellectual property is somehow like the unauthorized use of physical property? As Mr. Spock would say... fascinating.

UPDATE:
One-stop shopping for both the catchy headline and the physical property analogy can be found at e-consumer advocate Michael Geist's blog.

if Dan Brown can't make e-books work, who can?

(image courtesy Simon & Schuster)

Simon & Schuster will announce tomorrow they are making 5,000 of their titles available for sale as e-book files on Scribd.com, a website formerly criticized by publishers for allowing piracy.

In a report in the New York Times, S&S is portrayed as taking on Amazon.com and their proprietary Kindle e-book format. S&S titles will apparently not be available in a Kindle-friendly format, but will be available to iPhone users and Sony customers.

From the Times story:

Simon & Schuster will sell its books on Scribd for 20 percent off the list price of the most recent print edition. Amazon sets a price of $9.99 for many popular e-books, meaning titles there might be less expensive. But Scribd will allow publishers to see what is selling and change their prices accordingly.

Scribd also gives publishers 80 percent of revenue. Amazon reportedly gives publishers about half of the list price of books sold for the Kindle, but also discounts many titles and in some cases chooses to make no revenue itself from those sales.

Simon & Schuster will sell its books with anticopying software from Adobe, which means those books can be transferred to devices like the Sony Reader and some mobile phones, but not to Amazon’s Kindle.

At the recent bookcamp Toronto, one early presentation suggested e-books would not become truly marketable until publishers give up on the idea of anti-copying DRM -- apparently there's no market for e-books you can't share with anyone and everyone. Simon & Schuster and Amazon seem to be betting on other ponies.

... and in further electronic reading news

(image courtesy Amazon's blog kindle)

Coming soon to the Discovery Channel... Is the Kindle the result of patent subterfuge?

Amazon's increasingly popular electronic reader is now the subject of a patent dispute. Discovery Communications, owners of the Discovery Channel, are suing Amazon, saying the Kindle violates a patent Discovery has held since 2007.

It's funny -- for an industry generally thought to be teetering on a precipice, there seems to be a lot of interest in the potential profits of publishing's future.

Thanks to artsjournal.com for the tip.

kindle me this

That's right, I own an iPhone. So what?

In my increasingly complicated life, it is a comforting constant -- calendar, e-mail device, camera and podcast library all in one. Ironically, the phone part of my iPhone is probably the least used, though that will change as my kids get a bit older.

I promise you I am not one of those iPhoners who play ridiculous body contorting video games on the subway. Seriously people, you're in public.

Awhile back, I browsed through the iPhone app store and discovered eReader, an inexpensive application that turns my phone into a book. I already use the device to listen to audiobooks, but now I can also read full texts. I downloaded The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper -- a hole in my North American classics reading and, I'm discovering, a fascinating text with all sorts of cultural questions and challenges wrapped into it. My favorite feature of the eReader (other than my ability to make the print size gigantic) are the endnotes, which appear as numbered hyperlinks. I touch one of the numbers, read the related citation or information, touch the return arrow and am brought right back to the endnoted section of the main text. Oh the wasted time and energy of my student days spent physically flipping back and forth in old fashioned paper books. No more!

Yesterday it was announced that Amazon.com wants my twenty minutes per day of commuter iPhone reading time, and it's willing to fight eReader for it. Amazon has launched a Kindle application for the iPhone, for free. I now do not have to buy a Kindle (are they even available in Canada?) to read Kindle formatted books, and with Amazon's recent reversal on the text-reading feature of the Kindle I am more willing to give their format a look-see. So, let the electronic book format wars begin.

I'll report back once I'm out of the northern New York woods of 1757.

so there's free!... and then there's free?

As mentioned in the previous posting, this is Freedom to Read Week in Canada -- a time to celebrate and insist upon the right to free expression.

But just to be clear, "free" does not necessarily mean "unpaid."

From the New York Times today:

The Kindle Swindle?

... thanks to Bookninja for the link.