From Google. (Big surprise.)

http://www.google.com/patents

UPDATE:  News coverage of Google’s beta patent search functionality, at Wired and at c|net.

CSIRO owns a patent that, it asserts, covers implementation of the wifi standard.  According to this c|net story, CSIRO won an important infringement liability victory last week in the Eastern District of Texas.

Jennifer Granick has a new essay at Wired, called “Second Life Will Save Copyright.” She considers how Second Life denizens may, in responding to the copybot problem, help demonstrate the power of norm-based and contract-based alternatives to traditional copyright law.  (For more on the copybot problem, check out this news.com story.)

From the New York Times, a funny story about an invented teen repellant noise turned adult-evading ringtone for the cell phone. Talk about unintended consequences …

The story includes a link to an mp3 file of the ringtone in question. I, for one, can’t hear it. But then, I’ve been deaf in one ear my whole life, and even the one that works has some deficits. Can you here it?  If so, how do you describe it?

A BNA Electronic Commerce & Law report sparked my interest in a recent suit a subscriber filed against online virtual world provider Second Life. (Wikipedia offers this on Second Life.) I tracked down two stories about the suit, here and here. The case may raise interesting questions about who (game developer, or subscriber?) owns what (virtual property, intellectual property?) in the massively multiplayer online game context. Given that subscribers are quitting their meatspace jobs for Second Life careers, the questions are not as trivial as they might at first appear.

Of course, because Second Life’s clients are, in the end, human beings, much of its subscriber-created content is about sex:

Produced by San Francisco-based Linden Lab, Second Life is already something of an online Gomorrah, with adult activity so prevalent that in August the company created an alternative Teen Second Life with strict rules against sexual content.

In any event, we’ll watch with interest as the new suit against Linden Lab progresses.

UPDATE: To explore a law professor’s take on questions about virtual property, take a look at Prof. Joshua Fairfield’s Virtual Property (at SSRN).  You can download the final, published version of Prof. Fairfield’s article in the Boston University Law Review here.

Interesting story in the New York Times about web-based book publishing.

A fun paragraph:

Yochai Benkler, a Yale University law professor and author of the new book “The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom” (Yale University Press), has gone even farther: his entire book is available — free — as a download from his Web site. Between 15,000 and 20,000 people have accessed the book electronically, with some of them adding comments and links to the online version.

As the saying goes, read the whole thing …

The most recent issue of The Economist offers an editorial supporting greater availability of H-1B visas for highly skilled workers to work in the U.S. In urging this greater availability, the editorial offers this supporting point:

“America’s high-tech industries have been powered to a remarkable degree by people born outside the country. According to one calculation, 3,000 of the technology firms created in Silicon Valley since the 1980s—more than 30% of the total—were founded by entrepreneurs with Indian or Chinese roots. The science and engineering departments of America’s leading universities have drawn the brightest graduate students from around the world. A great many have stayed and created wealth for themselves and the country they chose to settle in.”

Food for thought …