Patents and Trolls

According to Technology Review, patent law is becoming saner due to recent Supreme Court rulings. The cases were Ebay V. Mercexchange; Medimmune V. Genentech; and KSR International v. Teleflex.

Several people left interesting (and some dissenting) comments, including Ronald Riley of the nonprofits InnovatorEd and the Professional Inventors Alliance, Anthony Kuhn of the new Innovators Network, and Gabriel Kent of Future Progress.

VA Tech to Transfer More Tech

According to the Roanoke Times, Virginia Tech is significantly expanding their tech transfer capacity, in anticipation of increasing the number of inventions that Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties (VTIP) licenses and doubling revenue in the next few years.

John Fraser, past president of the Association of University Technology Managers, is quoted as saying that "perhaps 12 of the more than 200 technology transfer offices in the U.S. are self-sufficient", a near-term goal for VTIP. Virginia Tech is a member of ALCOVe, the Academic Licensing Community of Virginia.

Libraries in a Crowded Universe

Peter Brantley's post at O'Reilly Radar, If Libraries had Shareholders is a summary of Jerry McDonough's recent talk We Are Not Alone: The Role of the Research Library in a Suddenly Crowded Information Universe.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the University of Virginia Fisher Library have built a simple web interface to the main ARL statistics.

Pollock's Term - 14 Years

Nate Anderson of Ars Technica summarizes a recent paper on copyright length as follows:

It's easy enough to find out how long copyrights last, but much harder to decide how long they should last—but that didn't stop Cambridge University's Rufus Pollock from using economics formulas to answer the question. In a newly-released paper, Pollock pegs the "optimal level for copyright" at only 14 years.

Rufus Pollock, a Cambridge doctoral candidate, has applied economics
tools (factoring in decline of production and reproduction costs) to
calculate optimal copyright term.
The Value of the Public Domain is available at the Institute for Public Policy Research. Pollock's work was presented at the 2007 Society for Economic Research on Copyright Issues (SERCI) Congress this week.

Patents and Tech Workers in Virginia

Dr. Christine Chmura writes for the Richmond TimesDispatch that

The American Electronics Association says Virginia had the highest concentration of tech workers in the country in 2005. However, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation ranked Virginia 26th in the number of U.S. patents issued to companies or individuals per 1,000 workers.

Copyrights, Lessig and Helprin

Lawrence Lessig has started a wiki discussion of copyright in response to Mark Helprin's recent OpEd article in the NY Times, "A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?", who suggests that copyrights, like physical property rights, should last forever. Helprin concludes: No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.