“Mortality, n. The part of immortality that we know about.”

“Neighbor, n. One whom we are commanded to love as ourselves, and who does all he knows how to make us disobedient.”

[ A shout out to all the 1Ls enjoying nuisance and servitude cases in their Property Law classes … ]

“Painting, n. The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.”

I’m the first to admit, I don’t know as much as I want to (or should) know about China’s IPR systems, past and present.

A great resource that’s new to me … IP Dragon, a blog that I’m adding to my blogroll this evening.  Check it out!

Today’s New York Times has the story … IBM plans to put its patent applications on line, for public view (presumably earlier than they would be published by the PTO, at the 18-month mark).

From the story …

The policy, being announced today, includes standards like clearly identifying the corporate ownership of patents, to avoid filings that cloak authorship under the name of an individual or dummy company. It also asserts that so-called business methods alone — broad descriptions of ideas, without technical specifics — should not be patentable. … “The larger picture here is that intellectual property is the crucial capital in a global knowledge economy,” said Samuel J. Palmisano, I.B.M.’s chief executive. “If you need a dozen lawyers involved every time you want to do something, it’s going to be a huge barrier. We need to make sure that intellectual property is not used as a barrier to growth in the future.”

An experiment to keep an eye on.

Concurrently, IBM has released a new report called “Building a New IP Marketplace.” It’s on the web, of course.

UPDATE: Andy Updegrove, at Consortiuminfo.org, offers a detailed analysis here. [Hat tip to James DeLong at IPCentral.info.]

With a hat tip to Michael Smith’s E.D. Texas Blog, here’s the New York Times story about the sharp increase in patent infringement trials in Marshall, Texas.

This arresting fact from the piece: “More patent lawsuits will be filed here this year than in federal district courts in San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Washington. Only the Central District of California, in Los Angeles, will handle more patent infringement cases.”

“Pitiful, adj. The state of an enemy or opponent after an imaginary encounter with oneself.”

“Plagiarize, v. To take the thought or style of another writer whom one has never, never read.”

An interesting, short piece on lawblogs from Prof. Doug Berman, at National Law Journal.  Prof. Berman is justly famed for his blog, Sentencing Law & Policy.

Today’s New York Times includes a feature about Second Story, a multimedia company here in Portland, Oregon.
From the NYT story:

A breakout new-media company here is changing the art of storytelling through the convergence of computing, graphic design, audio, video, text and the Internet. How it invents techniques to use these platforms, and who it recruits to do that work is a journey that large media companies should watch.

The company is Second Story, and in the language of the digital age it describes itself as an “interactive multimedia production studio.” Founded by an artist and a graphic designer and housed on (what else?) the second floor of a renovated scrap-metal recycling building in north Portland, Second Story is a fast-growing company that is setting new standards for how to communicate in the Internet age.

RTWT!