Stanford Center for Internet and Society

I’m starting to feel like the only person who thinks the Google Books settlement with authors and publishers is a good deal. One voice that seems not to be heard, however, over the din of Google competitors, panicky law professors, and regulators who wouldn’t know a workable solution to a copyright problem (created by regulators) if it bit them, is anyone speaking for consumers.

My opinion piece today on CNET (see http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10398838-93.html?tag=mncol;title) argues that the real problem with the settlement has nothing to do with the 165-page document, which is increasingly coming to look like the sausage-making that it is.

Intel and AMD announced today that they were settling their many antitrust and patent disputes, with Intel to pay $1.25 billion and the two companies to cross-license the affected patents. Intel also agreed to “a set of undisclosed new business practrices,” as The New York Times puts it.

Let’s be clear what this agreement doesn’t do. It doesn’t erase the pending antitrust actions taken by the European Union and elsewhere against Intel, or the recently filed antitrust lawsuit filed in federal court in the U.S. by New York attorney-general Andrew Cuomo. (Recall that in May the EU fined Intel $1.45 billion, a judgment the company is appealing.)

My view on today’s Supreme Court case regarding business method and software patents appears on Slate.com's "The Big Money." (See http://larrydownes.com/the-bilski-case-not-with-my-digital-economy-you-d...)

This case, which concerns the patentability of a paper-and-pencil system for hedging weather risks in consumer energy prices, drew over sixty friend-of-the-court briefs, more than any other case this term.

The reason has little to do with the claimed method, which almost no one (except the inventors) seem to think deserves the denied patent.

The real issue here is the deeply troubled intersection of information age inventions and the badly broken patent system. Nearly all of the briefs are concerned that a ruling from the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, if left standing by the Supreme Court, will eliminate patent protection for some if not all inventions implemented in software.