U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Office of International Trade announced today that the domestic value of counterfeit and pirated products seized by CBP and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement increased by 2.7 percent in mid-fiscal year 2008 to $113.2 million compared to $110.1 million in mid-FY 2007.

The number of large-scale seizures also increased: rising from 296 IPR seizures with a domestic value equal to or greater than $100,000 in 2008 compared to 266 such seizures in mid-FY 2007. The first half of the fiscal year extends from Oct. 1 to March 28.

If you are looking for the general financial motivation for our customs search policies...

CBP Releases Intellectual Property Rights Seizure Statistics for Mid-FY2008

So here's our new policy on A.P. stories: they don't exist. We don't see them, we don't quote them, we don't link to them.

Hard to say if this is bold or timid under the circumstance. It sure talks bold. I'd be more impressed with WaPo if they had the guts the take AP to the mat on their IP claims, but at least they are sending a clear message that they aren't going to join them.

Here's Our New Policy On A.P. stories: They're Banned - washingtonpost.com

I suggest it’s better described as yet another attempt by a big media company to replace the established legal and social order with with a system of private law (the very definition of the word “privilege”) in which a few private organizations get to dictate to the rest of society what the rules will be.

Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.

People are basically fucking pissed about the AP's announcement.

Associated Press expects you to pay to license 5-word quotations (and reserves the right to terminate your license) - Boing Boing

Rogers Cadenhead tells THREAT LEVEL on Monday he has taken down works from his Drudge Retort blog that The Associated Press has deemed an infringement of the nation's oldest and largest newsgathering operation's copyrights.

The AP recently sent seven takedown notices to his social news site for the offense of reposting a few sentences or more and reprinting their headlines, sometimes linking those sentences and headlines to the full stories generated from the New York-based media concern.

Drudge Retort Episode Highlights 'Fair Use' Uncertainties | Threat Level from Wired.com

Copyfighters in Tennessee have scored a massive win, defanging a crappy, RIAA-written state bill:

I agree. The final text of the bill was far more reasonable than the one originally proposed. If you called, wrote, or joined this protest thank you for making a difference.

Copyfighters beat down Tennessee bill - Boing Boing

[1] Meet up with us next Wednesday (March 5th) to go to Nashville and protest! (5:00 AM - March 5th) we will have a bus - we will leave at 5AM in Knoxville (meet at COPYSHOP).

Gather at 8AM (if you can get there by yourself)
on the corner of 6th and Union St in Nashville!

The primary broken thing about the rule being protested here is that it would require Universities to institute a surveillance system that watched network traffic and identified transfers of copyrighted content.

Copyright protest in Nashville March 5th - COPYFIGHT NOW!

If the advertiser is using the trademark in ad text, we will require the advertiser to remove the trademark and prevent them from using it in ad text in the future. Please note that we will not disable keywords in response to a trademark complaint.

Lets say you run a company called "Bob's Auto Supply" and your competitor Jim runs a company called "Jim's AutoWorld." Jim buys a google ad on the keyword "Bob's Auto Supply" which directs people to his business. Jim is attempting to use your trademark and brand recognition to drive traffic to his competing business. He is basically stealing your advertising. Apparently, however, this matter was litigated and Google won. So there is no recourse under U.S. law. The theory is that web users would know that Jim is your competitor. The problem with that theory is that the value of your brand is being diluted. Its the name recognition that you have built that drives people to his advertisement.

What an awesome system we have. I can't deal with what is a blatent attempt to profit from a brand I'm trying to build, and yet a friend of mine was successfully prevented from using a bank's logo in an informational blog posting due to a broken normative use precident that states that only the minimum amount of the trademark necessary may be used.

If I am using a trademark in a nominal way it shouldn't be a problem regardless of what I'm doing. If I'm attempting to profit from someone else's advertising expenditures I'm commiting a crime. This seems real simple and I don't understand why our courts have gotten it so completely wrong.

Google's broken Trademark precedent

Web radio will keep playing, rather than play dead, come July 15. The music industry won't impose higher royalty rates, which were to take effect that day, but the good news for Webcasters may prove fleeting.

"SoundExchange is in the business of generating revenues, and it's not going to help them if a good chunk of the industry goes out of business," explains Paul Palumbo, research director for AccuStream iMedia Research.

A Reprieve for Net Radio

The second part of the paper focuses on the specific case of copyright term. Using a simple model we characterise optimal term as a function of a few key parameters. We estimate this function using a combination of new and existing data on recordings and books and find an optimal term of around fourteen years.

A stark view of the economics of copyright.

Forever Minus a Day? Some Theory and Empirics of Optimal Copyright

A company called Acacia has claimed a patent on an “information distribution system” that amounts to the idea of shipping a CD-ROM that contains hyperlinks to online resources. (EFF is currently working on busting another Acacia patent that covers streaming audio and video over the Internet.)

To help bust this overly broad patent, we are looking for prior art that shows the use of this technology before 1994.

Someone on MemeStreams MUST have something like this: