Minor updates

From BoingBoing, here is an article on how intellectual property policy is made. The gist of it is that the people who want more rights go begging to policy makers with weak economic models and anecdotes, expecting increased legal rights which are supposed to lead to more creativity and innovation, and that policy makers in general simply capitulate. The lack of investigation and empirical data on the impacts of creating artificial monopolies in the form of intellectual property rights is lamented. Empirical evidence regarding the impact of "database rights" in the EU is presented.

It's an interesting article, more so than the practice abstract above might suggest. Another interesting article, from an IEEE newsletter via Marli: IP Fundamentals. The IEEE Spectrum Intellectual Property archive has other interesting articles. Engineering is all about the intellectual property. Oh my yes.