theodp writes “Having already been burned by Amazon’s 1-Click patent, one imagines Barnes & Noble will be fuming to learn that the USPTO granted Amazon a patent Tuesday covering the use of Barnes and Noble’s physical stores to fulfill orders placed for used goods on Amazon. The e-tailer was awarded U.S. Patent No. 7,702,545 for its System and Method for Facilitating Exchanges Between Buyers and Sellers, legal-speak for arranging a place to meet to exchange cash for used goods ordered online. From the patent: ‘In an exemplary embodiment, buyers and sellers are permitted to designate exchange locations in the system 100. An exchange location may be a location that the user regularly visits. For example, users may designate locations such as health clubs, schools, coffee shops, book stores, and so on, as acceptable exchange locations.’”

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It’s been rumored for several weeks now that Palm was up for sale, with a number of different companies supposedly taking a look at it, but news has come through now that HP has picked it up for $1.2 billion. Palm’s business has been running downhill for a few years now; its worldwide market share has fallen from 3.5 percent in 2005 to 1.5 percent in 2009 — despite the relatively warm welcome its Pre device received. The Pre was the first Palm phone to run its latest operating system, WebOS, which was supposed to help the company compete in a revitalized and highly competitive marketplace against the likes of Android devices and the iPhone. But that hasn’t yet happened. The Pre (and the following device, the Pixi) hasn’t grabbed significant market share, which compounds Palm’s other problem: lack of a strong developer community for WebOS. That is actually sort of ironic, given that an older incarnation of Palm was probably better than anybody in the mobile space at cultivating a huge and loyal developer community, back in the days of Palm OS. So if scale and a lack of developers are the two biggest problems holding Palm back, does the HP deal actually do anything to help solve them? Maybe that’s looking at the situation the wrong way: perhaps the point of this isn’t for HP to fix Palm, but for Palm to bring something more to the table for HP. Like 1,500 patents.

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A few weeks back, we linked to the NY Times’ Ethicist, Randy Cohen, explaining why it’s not unethical to download a digital copy of a book, if you’d bought a hard copy of the book — even though it probably violates copyright law. That created quite a lot of anger from folks who felt that it was clearly an ethical violation as well. Mitch Wagner, apparently missed that kerfuffle, as he’s written up a short blog post for Computerworld asking people their thoughts on the ethics of downloading media that you purchased legally:

I recently got a hankering to re-read some of my favorite books. I already own them, in hardcover and paperback. But I’d like to re-read them as e-books. Do I need to buy the e-book versions, or can I download a pirated copy of the e-book for free?

The argument that says it’s wrong is pretty simple, and clear-cut: When I bought the books, I bought individual copies of the books. All I own is that one copy. If I lost the copy, I wouldn’t be entitled to a free replacement. It wouldn’t be right for me to shoplift the book from the local Barnes & Noble. I’d have an obligation to buy a new copy, or borrow one legitimately, before re-reading the book.

On the other hand: I already paid for these books legitimately. They’re my books. The shoplifting analogy is specious, because in that case, I’m depriving the rightful owner — the owner of the bookstore — of their copy of the book. If I download a copy of the e-book, nobody else is deprived of their copy.

However, he goes on to make another point that also deserves some scrutiny:

Every couple of years, TiVo hiccups and fails to record a favorite TV show. In that case, I have to decide whether to wait for the show to come out on DVD, or just download the episode from the BitTorrents.

Now there will be people who will claim that, due to the fact that it likely infringes on copyright to do so, it’s automatically unethical. But morality isn’t determined by the law. In general, I’ve always argued that if the economics increase the overall market and opportunity, then there’s no moral issue to speak of — and it’s hard to see how someone downloading an episode their TiVo missed would harm the overall economy in any way. But, I’m guessing that some folks here will disagree…

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We just got done exploring how German privacy regulators are "horrified" about how Google is (just as many other companies have been doing for years) gathering publicly-available Wi-Fi hotspot data for GPS triangulation and localized search. Of course the data being collected can’t really identify users outside of their router brand preference and use of nerd SSID humor — but that didn’t stop a flood of hysterical articles that assumed Google was using this data for some nefarious purpose. As if on cue, Germany’s complaints have now drawn the attention of UK regulators — who say they’re now going to quiz Google about the practice. While Wi-Fi clearly confuses many regulators and the press (look at the usual reaction to war driving), it is important that Google is transparent about this process, but so far there’s every indication they’re doing a good job on that front. The company posted another blog post this week and sent this filing (pdf) to privacy regulators in multiple countries highlighting exactly what’s being collected, what it’s being used for, while reiterating that the data can’t identify specific users and isn’t being published. So the question then is: how long before U.S. and other European regulators start to freak out?

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For many years, we’ve pointed out the futility of the entertainment industry’s constant focus on “shutting down” any source of unauthorized material. Every time they do so, the content sharing continues to grow — it just moves further underground and makes it that much more difficult for the industry to actually use it to their own advantage. It appears this happens not just online, but offline as well. We’ve noted recently that China has been paying lip service to external pressures to “crack down” on infringement, often by using copyright and patent laws to go after foreign companies as well. But it appears to also be playing itself out in other ways.

The NY Times is covering how Chinese officials have been going around to DVD and CD shops that have lots of unauthorized bootlegs, and telling them that for the World Expo (which begins May 1), they need to stop selling that content so directly. It appears most of the shops all responded in nearly identical ways: cutting their stores in half by putting up a wall in the middle, then placing legitimate discs upfront, and putting all the bootlegs on the other side of the wall, with a “secret” doorway. The effort was so consistent that some accuse Chinese officials of suggesting this to store owners. Some stores readily admit that after the Expo ends, they’ll tear down the wall and return to a single storefront.

Either way, it’s quite similar to what we’ve seen online. You can “crackdown” all you want, and it never actually slows down the trade in unauthorized content. It just moves it further underground… or, perhaps, behind a (not so) secret wall.

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The IFPI has put out its latest report on the state of the music business (sent in first by Nastybutler77). There aren’t too many surprises. Some of the data in the report (such as the growth in the UK and elsewhere) were already covered a few weeks ago in a presentation by Will Page, the chief economist for PRS in the UK. But there were some interesting points in the report that suggest the industry is still in quite a bit of denial. Thirteen markets saw “a return to growth” in music sales — though, amusingly, the IFPI chooses to highlight two of them — South Korea and Sweden — both of which passed ridiculously draconian anti-piracy laws, mostly due to pressure from folks like the IFPI.

Not surprisingly, the IFPI credits the “improving legal environments” in those countries for the increasing sales. Similarly, it notes that sales declines happened in Spain and Canada — two of the countries most regularly singled out by the entertainment industry for having consumer friendly copyright laws. Of course, that’s not how the industry describes it. They talk about how those countries’ laws are “out of touch” or not in line with “international standards.”

Of course, what the IFPI totally ignores (not surprisingly, since they only represent record labels) is that while the sales of music directly may have declined in some markets, the overall market for music grew tremendously. In other words, the decline in sales of recorded music has not done harm to the music industry, but just to a few record labels. This new report is really just an attempt to pretend (yet again) that the “music industry” is really “the recording industry.” And, of course, what this report doesn’t come close to acknowledging, is that in putting in place these “legal environments” in places like Sweden and South Korea, it has cut off many more efficient and effective ways for musicians to create, promote and distribute their works.

That’s what this report really shows. It shows that the IFPI wants to be the gatekeeper to make sure that more of the money going through the music ecosystem goes to its labels, rather than to others. It doesn’t care if the overall market for music is smaller, just as long as more of the money goes to its members.

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You may recall Bev Stayart (or Beverly Stayart), the woman who insisted that she was such an upright citizen that it was scandalous (and apparently illegal) that when you did a Yahoo search on her name, some of the links went to questionable sites. So she sued Yahoo. After we wrote about it, she also threatened to sue us as well. She hasn’t done that (yet) thankfully. Either way, the court quickly dismissed her lawsuit against Yahoo, seeing as Yahoo was protected by Section 230 of the CDA. She later sued Yahoo again, because Yahoo’s “suggested search” connected her name to the pharmaceutical Levitra. As we noted at the time, however, part of the reason for those suggestions were not (as she claimed) that Yahoo “knowingly connected” her name to that drug (along with Viagra and Cialis), but because of her original lawsuit, which noted that a search on her name pointed to websites relating to those drugs.

Of course, given more news coverage of her quixotic legal quest, it seemed only natural that this connection would actually get stronger, since more people were legitimately writing stories about her, and her concerns about being connected to Levitra, Viagra and Cialis. So, I guess it should come as no surprise that she’s now suing Google as well, for also “suggesting” “bev stayart levitra” when you start doing a search on “bev stayart.” The problem, which she still doesn’t seem to get, is not that Google (or Yahoo) are deliberately doing this to her, but the more she complains about it, the stronger the algorithmic connection becomes. As Eric Goldman notes in his post about this latest lawsuit:

Some unsolicited advice for Bev Stayart: stop suing search engines, and stop running vanity searches on the search engines. Life is too short to fret about sploggers!

Indeed.

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The RIAA’s blog is an endless source of fun, and its latest post is touting some figures showing the success of the recent “Record Store Day”. Record Store Day is a yearly event started by a group of indie record stores that’s grown over the last couple of years, and is marked with some festivities as well as the release of a lot of limited-edition records, CDs and other products available only in hard copy in certain participating shops. This year, there were 175 such products, and they helped boost the sales of indie shops. In particular, sales of vinyl albums were up 119 percent over the previous week, and vinyl single sales grew by 529 percent. But this isn’t proof that the “we must sell music” mantra is correct; the sales increased not because people were buying music, they increased because they were buying an attractive, scarce physical product, like special vinyl picture discs or limited-edition prints. Record Store Day is a great example of how the packaging of a product that happens to contain music can drive people to buy it. The value consumers were paying for was in that packaging, not necessarily the content within it. Whether they know it or not, the stores and bands have given customers a reason to buy.

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After publishing our post on Hans Pandeya’s bizarre and ridiculous attempt to buy The Pirate Bay again, after his failed bid last year (while still pretending that bid succeeded), Mr. Pandeya sent us an email demanding that we issue a correction and an apology for our story. Oddly, he failed to point out a single thing we got wrong in the story, so we’re not really sure what to correct and don’t see any reason to issue an apology. He did, however, send us a link to another press release that he, himself, sent out, claiming that his own company has “put the acquisition on hold.” Uh, yeah. Perhaps that’s because there’s no acquisition to be had. It also claims that GGF is “commencing an arbitration proceeding” to gain control over The Pirate Bay’s domain name. That ought to go over well considering GGF never actually paid for The Pirate Bay and that deal collapsed, it’s difficult to see what kind of claim he thinks he has on the domain now. We eagerly await future emails where he explains. Perhaps, next time, he can include more details to back up his claims.

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