Earlier this year, we noted that intellectual property issues were moving into the restaurant business, as one restaurant owner accused another of stealing both a restaurant concept and recipes from her restaurant. Last year we also had a story about some chefs trying to get additional copyright protection for their meals, which was a silly request. However, it seems like intellectual property concerns continue to flood the food space, with the firm Attributor, who sets themselves up as something of an online policing system for copyright infringement, has come out with a report about just how common it is for recipes to get passed around the web and posted by multiple people, potentially violating someone's copyrights. As the US Copyright Office makes (somewhat) clear, you cannot copyright a list of ingredients -- but you can copyright "substantial literary expression in the form of an explanation or directions." In other words, the explanation of what to do with the ingredients could be subject to copyright.

But the real question is whether or not this is really an issue. Attributor comes up with a bunch of made up numbers about how much this is "costing" certain sites, but that's not true. As with any bogus copyright "loss" stats, the numbers are both made up and exaggerated -- and have nothing to do with "losses." Rather, they represent dollars that the copyright owner failed to capture, meaning that it's a marketing problem, not a legal one. The story notes that top recipe sites like Epicurious and Allrecipes are losing out on traffic, but it fails to explain how. I use Epicurious quite a bit, and I go to the site not just because I trust it to have good recipes, but because of the additional features Epicurious provides -- including user ratings and reviews. In other words, even with the same recipes being available all over (and, perhaps infringing on copyrights) Epicurious has effectively bypassed this legal issue through smart business practices: building in additional features that make the site valuable enough to me that it's better than just searching out any random recipe online.

Furthermore, it seems especially silly to worry about copyrights in the recipe space. The purpose of copyrights (broken record, I know) is to encourage the creation of content. It is quite difficult to believe that anyone out there believes there is insufficient efforts in creating new recipes. In other words, without enforcing copyrights, there is already sufficient incentives for people to continually create new, interesting and delicious recipes. Historically, recipes have always been a type of content that was eagerly and willingly shared and passed around -- and it has always been common for people to create "derivative works" in modifying and adjusting the ingredients and the instructions to try to improve upon the product. To suddenly bring copyright protections into the space seems both a rejection of that history as well as against the entire purpose of copyrights.

Todd Cochrane noticed that feedvalidator.org is acting strangely. I checked it out and verified the problems he reported. There's nothing wrong with Todd's feed, at least as far as I can see, and the validator should not be warning about the problems it's warning about, imho.

Please, would the maintainers of the validator check this out and make whatever corrections are necessary. Thanks!!

kickabear writes "AT&T has filed a lawsuit against Vonage, claiming patent infringement. This is the third major lawsuit to have been brought against Vonage by a major phone company. Vonage lost the previous two lawsuits, brought by Sprint-Nextel and Verizon. How much more money can Vonage afford to give away? How can Vonage educate a jury on prior art? 'It said in a filing to the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission that AT&T is seeking injunctive relief, compensatory and treble damages and attorneys' fees in unspecified amounts. Vonage said the lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court of the Western District of Wisconsin on October 17.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I added his expand/collapse code to the HTML rendering of Scripting News, per my recent request.

It seems to work nicely.

Does it work in Opera? Please let me know.

Within the patent attorney/patent trolling world, there's been a story gathering steam over the last couple months that seems to only get more bizarre every week. It started, simply enough, at the beginning of September when a company, which was just formed a few months ago, called Illinois Computer Research, sued Google for patent infringement. The patent in question (which amusingly enough, can be found hosted at Google) is officially for "Enhancing touch and feel on the internet". The details show that it's really just describing how you might represent a book online -- and, in fact, the lawsuit points to Google's book scanning project as being infringing. There's nothing all that interesting there, other than yet another case of a company doing nothing suing a company that's doing quite a bit of innovating using an overly broad an obvious patent. However, at the end of the article linked above there's a small aside that has turned out to be much more important: "The inventor listed on the patent is Scott C. Harris of San Diego, Calif. Presumably, he is the same Scott C. Harris listed as a Principal in the San Diego office of Fish & Richardson P.C, a patent prosecution firm." From that, you would probably assume that Fish and Richardson was behind ICR's lawsuit. In fact, you'd be wrong. Google is actually a Fish & Richardson client... whereas ICR is represented by Niro, Scavone, a firm that has fought against Fish & Richardson quite a bit.

Then the details started to come out. It appears that a top partner at Fish & Richardson was filing for patents on the side and then licensing them out to patent trolls, often so that they would then sue companies -- including companies represented by his own employer, Fish & Richardson. Now, I know I said that I'm not a fan of the term "patent troll," but in this case it appears completely warranted, as the very same Scott Harris happens to run a website (currently taken down) called ImAPatentTroll.com. If he's okay with it, then I see no reason not to use it to describe him. Fish & Richardson fired Harris, but the story doesn't end there. Illinois Computer Research isn't just suing Google... it's also suing Fish & Richardson for supposedly trying to get Harris to get it to drop the suit. Now, Fish & Richardson has filed quite a response, claiming that Harris used company time, equipment and resources to file for a bunch of patents -- and then, rather than just licensing or selling those patents, would work out special deals with the companies he licensed the patents to, allowing him (personally) to get a cut of any legal wins those firms get in suing for infringement. He even would point out firms that might be infringing on the patent. Many of the negotiations for those relationships were done using his Fish & Richardson email -- even one email discussion that pointed out that Google (again, an F&R client who Harris had even done some work for) was potentially infringing on Harris' patent and could be a good target for a lawsuit. Welcome to the lovely world of patent extortion, where the money from the practice is so lucrative that one of the highest paid lawyers at a top law firm would quietly license his patents to be used against his own firm's clients in exchange for a cut of the profits.

Radiohead's "groundbreaking" decision to let fans choose what price to pay for 160k MP3s of "In Rainbows" was just a promotional tactic to boost CD sales, according to the band’s management.

If we didn’t believe that when people hear the music they will want to buy the CD, then we wouldn’t do what we are doing,’ Bryce Edge of Courtyard Management told Music Week, the UK’s industry magazine.

Whoah, way to ream the trust and goodwill of your entire (online) audience. Link to Idolatr item, via Warren Ellis.

Apparently two executives from Village Voice Media (publishers of The Village Voice and other independent newspapers) were arrested yesterday for revealing grand jury information that was supposed to be private. Specifically, they had published an article in one of its publications, the Phoenix New Times, accusing a grand jury of unconstitutional behavior in issuing a subpoena for all sorts of information about the Phoenix New Times and its readership. Now, before you click on the link to the article, it's worth noting that the subpoena in question demands that the newspaper hand over incredibly detailed log information on every visitor to that website since January 2004. This is because someone is upset about four articles dealing with a local sheriff. Yet, though the supposed problem is with the four articles, the subpoena demands information on every visitor to the site, including such things as their IP address, which articles they read, any information obtained by cookies, the referral links that got them to the website, their type of browser and their type of operating system. In other words, all the info typically found in a log file -- but it's unclear why this information could possibly be necessary in a complaint about 4 specific articles.

prostoalex writes "MSNBC has a special report on discovering online cheats at AbsolutePoker.com. A Costa Rican company belonging to a Canadian tribe at first denied all the accusations of any cheating going on, but after Serge Ravitch made a scrupulous analysis of the games' events, the reputation of AbsolutePoker.com was at stake. A detailed log file provided investigators with necessary details: an employee and partial owner of the site was one of the players involved, and having direct access to other players' cards allowed him to improve his game substantially."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We recently wrote about how the US gov't has been saying repeatedly that it won't let Russia into the WTO if Allofmp3 comes back to life. This does seem rather ridiculous for a variety of reasons. After all, within Russia, the company has been found to be legal. And, secondly, it's not as if the US is in the WTO's good graces after ignoring the WTO's ruling on online gambling. If the WTO really wanted to punish the US for ignoring that issue, why not ignore the US's pleas to keep Russia out of the WTO itself? In the meantime, there's a bizarre statement in an article discussing Rep. Howard Berman once again saying that Russia needs to stop Allofmp3.com if it wants into the WTO. The article discusses how Russia has been slowly changing its laws following all this pressure from the US, and under the new laws, Allofmp3 may now be considered illegal. Yet, rather than focus on how it was the change of laws that made a previously legal service suddenly illegal, the article notes that "those legal changes could confirm what record companies have believed all along--that the Russian music stores are illegal." That seems rather bizarre, doesn't it? If the law gets changed, that doesn't confirm what's been said all along at all. It actually confirms the opposite. That the services were perfectly legal until a bunch of protectionist politicians who represent districts where the entertainment industry is based, bullied a foreign country into changing its laws to protect outdated business models.

UtahSaint writes "The Electronic Design site has nabbed a short interview with the Woz, where he waxes poetically about his time growing up as an Engineer and founding Apple. Even to this day, he says, he still misses the Homebrew Computer Club and his days running around Apple leading the technical teams. 'I miss the technical camaraderie ... The whole feeling of being on a revolution, on the edge. I miss the intuitive philosophies.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in August, there was a report that Comcast was throttling certain types of BitTorrent traffic making it difficult to impossible to seed a download. In response, Comcast vehemently denied this was happening, despite many people saying they were experiencing it. Specifically, Comcast said: "the company doesn't actively look at the applications or content that its customers download over the network. But Comcast does reserve the right to cut off service to customers who abuse the network by using too much bandwidth." The EFF went and spoke with Comcast and got the same story. However, with so many people reporting the same thing, some were wondering how truthful Comcast was. Now the Associated Press has done their own investigation (trying to transfer the Bible since it's in the public domain) and found that Comcast is clearly blocking the ability to upload completed files via BitTorrent, inserting a message to a computer trying to upload a file pretending to be from the downloading computer, telling it to stop sending. This seems to go against what Comcast originally said, though when the AP asked for a comment, Comcast subtly changed it's story. Rather than saying it doesn't look at applications or content, now it says: "Comcast does not block access to any applications, including BitTorrent." No, it doesn't block "access" but it does limit the functionality greatly (including perfectly legitimate uses of BitTorrent) without letting people know about it.

mytrip passed us a link to a Wired article indcating that if music industry estimates are correct Radiohead has made as much as $10 million on the 'In Rainbows' album so far. This despite the estimates of widespread piracy of the album as well. "[The estimate assumes] that approximately 1.2 million people downloaded the album from the site, and that the average price paid per album was $8 (we heard that number too, but also heard that a later, more accurate average was $5, which would result in $6 million in revenue instead).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Claire sez, "Maybe I've seen one too many horror movies already this year, but I'm totally into the idea of a Hallowe'en cupcake that bleeds when you bite into it. Especially since they bleed cherry filling (actual blood would probably put me right off cupcakes)."

I baked my cupcakes, used the cupcake-filling technique I used on my devil's food cupcakes to fill the cakes up with pureed cherry pie filling (canned or homemade) and topped them off with white icing to best accentuate the red bite marks. I made the marks using a skewer dipped in leftover cherry filling, making sure to leave a clear impression of a fang bite, rather than just a red streak on top of the cake.

Link (Thanks, Claire!)

Ribofunk science fiction writer Paul Di Filippo rounds up the big picture on transgenic plants and animals for Contract Pharma magazine:

Meanwhile, at GTC Biotherapeutics in Framingham, MA, goats seem to be the ideal solution to that company's particular quest. And certainly this choice of caprine platform has paid off enormously; GTC can now boast a historical milestone with the release of "ATryn®, our recombinant form of human antithrombin, the first transgenically produced protein to be approved anywhere in the world, having recently been approved by the European Commission for the prophylactic treatment of deep vein thrombosis in patients with hereditary antithrombin deficiencies that are undergoing surgical procedures," according to a company statement.

Link (Thanks, Paul!)

These wildly impractical bookcases from the Dutch firm of Sloom and Slordig are nevertheless awe-inspiringly weird. The idea of having an entire wall lined with them is weirdly compelling. Link, Additional photos: 1, 2 (via Cribcandy)

The domain name business is hot again, driving up the price of popular domains names, sometimes to ridiculous levels. However, it appears that no one briefed the Dallas Cowboys on what these types of things typically cost. The owner of the domain cowboys.com recently sold it in a domain auction, with the winning bid of $275,000 going to the Cowboys. Apparently, on receiving the invoice, the Dallas Cowboys are claiming that it was a mistake -- they thought the bid had been for $275, not $275,000 -- and therefore, they wish to cancel the sale. Of course, some people are suggesting that this is merely a cop out from a team that has a bit of buyer's remorse. It does seem a bit bizarre that anyone would think they could get such a domain for $275.