NEW BOOK: ALEX GRAHAM BELL STOLE IDEA FOR TELEPHONE

Newswires report that a new book has been published, "The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret" by Seth Shulman, in which Shulman attempts to prove that Bell stole the key idea for his telephone. Shulman argues that up until the year 1876, Bell was unable to figure out how to transmit sound electromagnetically over a wire, as evidenced by reports of failure in his laboratory notebooks. Then, after a 12-day gap in 1876, when Bell went to Washington to discuss patent issues at the Patent Office - Bell began developing a new mechanism for voice transmission, which proved to be successful. Did Bell get a look at his competitor's patents, the patents of Elisha Gray? Shulman argues yes, by comparing the diagrams Bell made of his new transmitter to diagrams in Gray's earlier patent applications. Shulman argues the two sets of diagrams are substantially similar to conclude that Bell stole his key idea from Gray. Of course, nowadays, thanks to the security morons in USPTO management (no one in PTO management has any real experience with national security), all you have to do to steal some important new piece of technology is to find the name of the tele-working examiner who is handling the technology, easily break into his house one night when he is gone, and quickly make copies of technology nowhere else disclosed.

RIAA: PERSONAL COPYING IS ILLEGAL

The RIAA has exponentially insane passion for
defending its members' copyright interests.

   "In an Arizona case against a defendant who has no legal
   representation, Atlantic v. Howell, the RIAA is now arguing -
   contrary to its lawyers' statements to the United States Supreme
   Court in 2005 MGM v. Grokster - that the defendant's ripping of
   personal MP3 copies onto his computer is a copyright infringement.
   At page 15 of its brief (PDF) it states the following:  'It is
   undisputed that Defendant possessed unauthorized copies... Virtually
   all of the sound recordings... are in the ".mp3" format for his and
   his wife's use... Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs' recordings
   into the compressed .mp3 format and they are in his shared folder,
   they are no longer the authorized copies..."

The brief is at: www. ilrweb.com/

Movie Industry Admits Error in MPAA Statistics

This week's National Journal's Tech Daily news reports that: Movie Industry Admits Error On Downloading Study Hollywood laid much of the blame for illegal movie-downloading on college students in a study. But AP reports that now the industry says its math was wrong. In a 2005 study it commissioned, the Motion Picture Association of America claimed that 44 percent of the industry's domestic losses came from illegal downloading of movies by college students, who often have access to high-bandwidth networks on campus. The MPAA has used the study to pressure colleges to take tougher steps to prevent illegal file-sharing and to back legislation that would force them to do so. But now the MPAA has told education groups a "human error" in that survey caused it to get the number wrong. It now blames college students for about 15 percent of revenue loss.