This Month in IP Insanity (January 2015)

In keeping with my new monthly feature, here is this past month’s IP news:

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1. We know Tom Petty won’t back down. He just won a lawsuit against Sam Smith for infringing Petty’s copyrights on the song “Stay With Me,” requiring Smith to give Petty royalties. This is the third time Petty has sued someone for copyright infringement over similar sounding songs. Perhaps it is because Petty’s music is so fundamental as a building block for Rock n’ Roll that everything starts sounding the same. Either way, looks like Tom Petty is okay with free fallin’, not so much free ridin’.
2. Not quite a story on the intellectual property wars, but I find it relevant. A Harvard Ph.D student had a manuscript of complete gibberish (literally written with Random Text Generator) accepted in seventeen medical journals. Granted, they are lower-tier journals who spam out email solicitations, and he would have to pay $500 to “process” them, so this isn’t Nature or the New England Journal of Medicine. His paper is entitled “Cuckoo for cocoa puffs? The surgical and neoplastic role of cacao extract in breakfast cereals” and you can read the whole “paper” at the link. Reminds me of the heroic Sokal affair.
3. Another offbeat story but I find it interesting, television producers no longer focus on the first season as a metric for deciding to produce future seasons. With more people cutting cords, binge watching on their own schedule, and simply waiting for word of mouth to rate shows they’ve “gotta see,” the real money is now in the second season.
4. If you needed a new casebook study of what was once an innovative industry giant turning to rent-seeking and the political process once they lose their competitive edge, look no further than BlackBerry (formerly RIM). The company wants Congress to pass a law mandating that all app developers must develop a BlackBerry version to go with the more popular iOS and Android versions. Their argument? We should broaden the definition of “net neutrality” to “application neutrality,” meaning developers should be forced to produce for all platforms, no matter how irrelevant and obsolete, in the name of openness. Maybe BlackBerry forgot about the Open Source movement.
5. As if they were trying to make it harder for me to begrudgingly root for them tomorrow, the Seattle Seahawks are trying to trademark the words “boom,” “go hawks,” and the number “12.”
6. Taylor Swift, who is transforming me into a hater for her views on music, is trying to trademark “this sick beat” and other catchphrases from her 1989 album, like “Party Like It’s 1989.”  Do people say even that?
7. Yet another trademark story, this time it’s the MPAA who forced a local Minneapolis brewer to stop selling “Rated R” beer. Apparently, as long as the beer contained the trademarked word ‘rated’ it would still be liable, according to the MPAA. Frankly I don’t really see how consumers are likely to be confused, deceived, or mistaken about the source of the goods or services. Does the MPAA even sell beer?
8. Torrentfreak posted a link to a new art project out of Australia, Pirate Cinema, which livestreams a collage of videos that people are streaming simultaneously on Bittorent. If you want to try to watch 3 or 4 movies at the same time, try this.

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9. A revealing natural experiment in Norway. From 2009-2014, Norwegians under 30 dramatically stopped illegally downloading music, from 80% of those surveyed saying they did download, to just 4%. Yet, in that same period, despite the collapse of music piracy (mostly due to legal streaming services), Norwegian music revenues increased just 1.5% in nominal terms (likely negative when including inflation). Maybe piracy isn’t the real problem in the media industries?
10. Lastly, like a Phoenix rising from the ashes, the Pirate Bay is back. It’s apparent return will disrupt the innovation and competition that’s been going on between spinoffs and rivals like Kickass Torrents and isoHunt, the latter of which recently offered $100,000 to the old Pirate Bay’s most active contributors to boost its publicity. Also, apparently not all of the former TPB staff are happy about TPB’s return.

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