An anonymous reader writes "The video game industry is finally forming a PAC by the end of March to get some political clout. A story in The New York Times yesterday reports that the video game industry has finally woken up and realized that in order to stay strong going forward, it can't rely on 13-year-old pimple-faced kids to promote its agenda."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you've read David Levine and Michele Boldrin's excellent book Against Intellectual Monopoly (there's a new version available), you'll see study after study after study showing the same thing: despite the idea that patents are supposed to encourage more research, there's simply no data that stronger patent patent protections increases the rate of research. In fact, if anything, the evidence suggests the opposite: that stronger patent laws allow researchers to rest on their laurels and use monopoly control to slow down any additional research. Much of this research is available in chapter 8 of their book.

Based on that, it should come as little surprise to see a new study coming out, suggesting that the infamous Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, that tweaked patent law to push universities to patent their research, did not actually cause greater research in the academic space. This is important, because many patent supporters point to the Bayh-Dole Act as being a key point in increasing the commercialization of research coming out of universities, thanks to the various patents. That now appears to be untrue. In the blog post linked above that discusses this, Institute for the Future blogger Anthony Townsend notes at the end "To their [Bayh and Dole's] credit, at least they didn't make things worse." Unfortunately, that's not true. They made things a lot worse. As we noted over two years ago, the Bayh-Dole Act has resulted in universities actively stifling research, using the monopoly powers granted to them under patents to prevent important basic research, driving up costs and slowing down innovation. Researchers are now less likely to share information, which has always been an important part in moving important research forward and figuring out how to build on each other's research for practical applications.

So, despite the common claims by some that Bayh-Dole's tweaks to the patent system helped drive better commercialization of basic research from universities into the market, we now have more evidence that it's done the exact opposite. It didn't increase the amount of research being done at the university level, and rather than encouraging greater innovation, the monopolies granted have helped to stifle innovative research, decrease information sharing and generally drive up the price of research and the commercial applications of that research. That's exactly the opposite of what the patent system was intended to do.

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Each year, a string of Yuri’s Night World Space Parties around the globe celebrate humankind’s first foray into space. That first human was Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, on April 12, 1961. The events are a lot of fun (I hosted one in Texas, had a blast!), and the 2008 Bay Area edition is calling for artists and scientists -- deadline is February 8.

We’re looking for visionaries of the sciences and arts to join our celebration: artists who love science, scientists who love art, and those who blur the line between all disciplines. Exhibit or demonstrate your works in the spacious NASA hangars or adjoining tarmac and structures. ively for installations, performances and demonstrations.

This is an exciting opportunity for unique collaboration between the science world and the art world. We encourage partnerships between scientific and artistic minds and may be able to assist in partnering.

We are looking for: New installations of all sizes and types, interactive works, sound works, light works, large-scale sculpture, live demonstrations, working models, table top demonstrations, prototypes, new technology, presentations, impromptu lectures, and unique performances from international and local artists. We are also seeking new video works documenting arts, humanities, performances, installations and microgravity works.

Link.

Previously:

Yuri's Night: spacemen branded me with Yuri Gagarin's head!

coondoggie writes "Yet another Star Trek-like device is making its way into the real world. VoxTec's Phraselator name sounds a bit like something the Three Stooges might have used long ago but no, this PDA-like device was developed through Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for use in Afghanistan and Iraq by American soldiers for communicating with locals who spoke Farsi, Dari, Pashto and other languages. It is now being used as one tool to help keep the peace between English and non-English speakers by police departments in California, Florida, Nevada. In a nutshell the $2,500 ruggedized Phraselator runs an Intel PXA255 400mHz processor that supports a built-In noise canceling microphone, a VOCON 3200 Speech Recognizer, 1GB removable SD card, 256MB of DRAM Memory and 64MB Flash Memory. It can store up to 10,000 phrases."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For those looking to score a reservation at the latest hot restaurant like New York City's The Little Owl, diners have to hit the phones exactly 30 days prior to their desired date and hope to be one of the few chosen. The result is less like planning a nice evening out, and more like trying to win a radio show call-in prize. Tablexchange.com is hoping to change that by allowing diners to buy and sell their reservations to hot restaurants in New York, San Francisco, and the Hamptons. The site, and others like it like Tablepronto (which covers San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas), work without the consent or knowledge of the restaurants -- in fact, when you "buy" a reservation, you are actually instructed to not change the name or details of the reservation, so you must check in under the original reservation's name. These sites are reminiscent of reservation scalper PrimeTimeTables, which was hotly debated last year. Unlike these marketplace sites, PrimeTimeTables charges their members a $500 annual fee and uses their supposed "connections" to score the hard-to-get reservations (annoying some restaurants in the process). Tablexchange claims that they are less shady since they simply provide a marketplace that is more efficient than, say, Craigslist for this purpose. However, if the Tablexchange model gains traction, it could create a legion of professional reservation traders that would then compete with diligent foodies who are trying hard to get a reservation through normal (free) means.

This debate is much like the ticket scalping debate that we have seen here again and again. This market for reservations has simply surfaced the fact that there are people willing to pay for reservations that are currently free. With any limited good, charging money is a good way to decide who ultimately ends up with that limited good. That said, the power still lies with the restaurant -- if they are really against this practice, they are free to take measures against it, such as check their diner's IDs. Or, perhaps they can recognize the existence of this market and capitalize on it by setting aside a few tables that are "biddable." The Little Owl already does the converse today -- every night, at least three tables are set aside for walk-in customers, with the rationale that this practice maintains the "neighborhood" feel of the restaurant. So, it doesn't seem like a huge stretch to allow for some reservations to be bought and sold as well.

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Wow, this is really really coooooool.

The Library of Congress is partnering with Flickr, releasing pictures that it believes are not copyrighted, through Flickr.

One of the fantastic side-effects of that is that there's an RSS 2.0 feed of those pictures that connects perfectly to FlickrFan.

If you click on this link on the machine that FlickrFan is running on, you'll automatically subcribe to the Library of Congress feed on Flickr.

This is one of those moments when the standards are working, really well.

PS: If for some reason it doesn't work, try clicking on this link to get the latest update (v0.42), then click on the link above again.

geekbits writes "For all those who have at one time or another been too lazy to get up off the couch and go to the fridge and get a beer, heat up some pizza, or change the channel when the remote is missing, we may be one step closer to being able to keep our tushes parked just a little while longer. There may also be some slightly more noble implications here. According to an article in The New York Times, in an experiment at Duke University, a 12-pound, 32-inch monkey made a 200-pound, 5-foot humanoid robot walk on a treadmill using only her brain activity. She was in North Carolina, and the robot was in Japan."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

geekbits writes "For all those who have at one time or another been too lazy to get up off the couch and go to the fridge and get a beer, heat up some pizza, or change the channel when the remote is missing, we may be one step closer to being able to keep our tushes parked just a little while longer. There may also be some slightly more noble implications here. According to an article in The New York Times, in an experiment at Duke University, a 12-pound, 32-inch monkey made a 200-pound, 5-foot humanoid robot walk on a treadmill using only her brain activity. She was in North Carolina, and the robot was in Japan."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wei Wenhua was beaten to death after he snapped photos of a confrontation on the street between village residents and authorities. His death has sparked controversy in Chinese media, and the blogosphere:

Wei Wenhua was a model communist and is now a bloggers' hero -- a "citizen journalist" turned martyr. The construction company manager was driving his car when he witnessed an ugly scene: a team of about 50 city inspectors beating villagers who tried to block trucks from unloading trash near their homes.

Wei took out his cell phone and began taking pictures. The city inspectors saw Wei and then attacked him in a beating that lasted five minutes. By the time it was over, the 41-year-old Wei was slumped unconscious. He was rushed to the hospital but was dead on arrival.

Link to CNN report by Jaime FlorCruz, here's an item from the China Media Project, and here's a statement from Reporters Without Borders.

I know it's the last minute, but it's worth a try...

A number of people have asked if there will be live or recorded video for tomorrow's FlickrFan demo at Yahoo in SF.

The answer -- yes, if we can find a way to do it.

If you have a camera and laptop and are willing to webcast it tomorrow, please post a note here in the comments, or just show up tomorrow a few minutes early.

One of the more important Supreme Court decisions concerning patents was 2006's MercExchange ruling, where the Supreme Court announced that courts shouldn't automatically grant an injunction against a company if it was found to be violating patents. This made a lot of sense, as many patent hoarders who produced no actual goods, would use the threat of an injunction (which could completely kill a business) to force the company to settle. However, the court recognized that in some cases (certainly not all), an injunction would do much more harm than good, and wasn't called for. This was especially true in cases where the patent holder wasn't making any actual products, since an injunction wouldn't actually clear up any competitive wrong -- it would just deny the market the ability to get the product. Of course, it hasn't taken long for some patent hoarders to come up with a rather ingenious (if ridiculous) way around this. It's all pointed out in a post by the Patent Troll Tracker who details how a patent hoarding firm played two competitors off of each other to grant one the rights to get an injunction on the other.

Here's how the plan works. First, the patent hoarding firm, Rembrant, sues two competitors in the contact lens space: Bausch & Lomb and Ciba. Then, it works out a settlement deal with one of those two firms -- in this case, B&L. However, part of that settlement (beyond some sort of licensing agreement) is to hand over the patent's injunction rights to B&L, while keeping the actual patent and everything else associated with it in the hands of Rembrant. Then, what you have is a patent infringement lawsuit against Ciba, just like before. Except, since B&L is a practicing competitor rather than just a patent hoarder, the company can ask for an injunction. In effect, as Ciba notes in its own filing on the matter, Rembrant sued the two competitors and then offered one a big carrot not just to settle, but to flip sides in the court case itself in order to use the very patent it had been sued over against a competitor. You have to imagine that Thomas Jefferson didn't see this coming when he laid out the details of the original US patent system.

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I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "According to a leaked internal memo, Time Warner Cable is testing out tiered bandwidth caps in their Beaumont, TX division as a way to fairly balance the needs of heavy users against the limited amount of shared bandwidth cable can provide. The plan is to offer various service tiers with bandwidth fees for overuse, as well as a bandwidth meter customers can use to help them stay within their allotment. If it works out, they will consider a nation-wide rollout. Interestingly, the memo also claims that 5% of subscribers use over 50% of the total network bandwidth."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday here on Boing Boing, I pointed to two new projects about the sex trade from my friend Susannah Breslin: Letters from Johns and Letters from Working Girls. She says:

In the comments, a reader posted a link to a project in which the artist had turned sex worker stories into comic strips. That artist is Peter S. Conrad, a Northern California based writer and artist whose work has appeared in True Porn and will appear in I Saw You: Missed Connection Comics. I dropped Conrad an email about the project. He wrote back and sent the comic I've posted here. I asked him if I could ask him a few questions, and he said yes.

So today, Susannah has posted a short interview with Conrad, and the rest of "Going Back," with larger scans of his work. Link.

Hugh Pickens writes "General counsel for NBC Rick Cotton and Tim Wu, professor at Columbia Law school, continue their debate about copyright issues and technology on Saul Hansell's blog at the New York Times discussing Fair Use of commercial music and video as the raw materials for new creations. Cotton says that content protection on the broadband internet is really not a debate about fair use The fact that users can 'take three or four movies and splice together their favorite action scenes and post them online does not mean that these uses are fair. There needs to be something more — something that truly injects some degree of original contribution from the maker other than just the assembly of unchanged copies of different copyrighted works.' Wu's position is that 'it is time to recognize a simpler principle for fair use: work that adds to the value of the original, as opposed to substituting for the original, is fair use. This simple concept would bring much clarity to the problems of secondary authorship on the web.' This is a continuation of the previous discussion on copy protection."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's nice to see that there's some buzz around the announcement today from the Library of Congress that it has teamed up with Yahoo's Flickr to put public domain images online for everyone to see and comment on. That's exactly the sort of thing the Library of Congress should be doing. The Library of Congress has been working for a while on doing a better job digitizing its archives, and it's nice to see them looking for ways to take advantage of what's out there already, rather than trying to do everything internally. Part of the deal is that the LoC is encouraging people to tag and comment on the photos, hoping that it will provide additional information on some of the images that it has little information about. Mathew Ingram wonders how effective that type of "crowdsourced" effort will actually be. He's right, that it probably won't be all that useful, but it probably can't hurt either. However, what could be even more interesting was if they did something like the ESP Game to more accurately tag photos by making it into something of a game.

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Drawn! has a post about tile art in New York City's transit systems, including Ann Schaumberger's tile piece (seen here) in the Fifth Avenue subway station. A Drawn! commenter even points to a guidebook to transit art in NYC, called Along the Way: MTA Arts for Transit, which focuses on works commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Link to Drawn!, Link to buy Along the Way, Link to Arts For Transit

Reservoir Hill writes "Pope Benedict XVI canceled a speech at Rome's La Sapienza university in the face of protests led by scientists opposed to a high-profile visit to a secular setting by the head of the Catholic Church. Sixty-seven professors and researchers of the university's physics department joined in the call for the pope to stay away protesting the planned visit recalled a 1990 speech in which the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, seemed to justify the Inquisition's verdict against Galileo in 1633. In the speech, Ratzinger quoted an Austrian philosopher who said the ruling was 'rational and just' and concluded with the remark: 'The faith does not grow from resentment and the rejection of rationality, but from its fundamental affirmation, and from being rooted in a still greater form of reason.' The protest against the visit was spearheaded by physicist Marcello Cini who wrote the rector complaining of an 'incredible violation" of the university's autonomy. Cini said of Benedict's cancellation: 'By canceling, he is playing the victim, which is very intelligent. It will be a pretext for accusing us of refusing dialogue.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Artist Kako Ueda makes beautiful, complex, lacy papercuts worked with insect and bird motifs. I just lost myself in the gallery of Ueda's work. Link (via Craft)