Bank of America knows nothing about intellectual property

A reader sent this in:

As you quote from Bank of America et al. Bilski amicus brief:

"To the contrary, methods of doing business - and even inventive
means of hedging risks, accounting or structuring financial
relationships - have existed since the earliest days of the
Patent Act and went for decades without the type of protection
Appellants and other similarly situated applicants seek."

Wrong. It only took a few decades after the Founding Fathers for
such business method patents to issued. Take a look at U.S. Patent
1700 from 1840, "Improvement in the Mathematical Operation of
Drawing Lottery-Schemes". It appears that financial innovators
have always sought patent protection on their inventions.

How about Bank of America funding a study to see how many business method
patents were issued in the 1800s, so Seth Waxman can argue with some
actual facts?

Web 3.0 - here?

On SocialSpark I found a blog that is beyond the social/blogosphere dimension. Sybil Amber has it all: the Entrecard avatars, radio/entertainment widgets, Google Desktop-like toolbar with loads of functions, and, in what people say is the essence of Web 3.0, an additional dimension to the content - a real, auto-peeling look into whatever else "behind" the landing page. That's a respectable and fitting place for PPP and Direct PPP - the $100 fee maybe justified.

Vanity Fair(?) vents at Monsanto

The current issue of Vanity Fair, May 2008, has an article whose title

gives you a good hint of the article: "Monsanto's Harvest of Fear".
Whether or not you like the article, it is worth the cover shot with
Madonna. The article's blurb:

Monsanto already dominates America's food chain with its
genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk
production. Just as frightening as the corporation's tactics
- ruthless legal [patent] battles against small farmers - is
its decades-long history of toxic contamination.

The article starts out like a movie pitch starring Jimmy Stewart:

Gary Rinehart ... was behind the counter of .. his "old time
country store" ... in a tiny farm community 100 miles north
of Kansas City. The [store] is a fixture. Everyone knows
Rinehart ...

Cue in violins and some cute kids trying to steal some candy from a hay
strewn barrel, with a grandma rocking in a chair. Sweet innocence. But
then, the gradually increasing theme music from the movie Jaws, as
dark clouds role across the sky, and .......

... when a stranger walked in ... and came up to counter and asked
for [Rinehart] by name. "Well, that's me.", said Rinehart.

Lightning strikes outside, children start crying, as .....

As Rinehart would recall, the man began verbally attacking him,
saying he had proof that Rinehart had planted Monsanto's
genetically modified (G.M.) soybeans in violation of the
company's patent. Better come clean and settle with Monsanto,
Rinehart says the man told him - or fact the consequences.

But Rinehart wasn't a farmer, so how could he be accused of planting
anything? Boohoo - what do the facts have to do with anything, as ...

When the stranger persisted, Rinehart showed him the door. On
the way out the man kept making threats ... to the effect of ...
"Monsanto is big. You can't win. We will get you. You will
pay."

Sometime thereafter, Monsanto filed a federal patent infringement
lawsuit, claiming that a Monsanto investigator, one Jeffrey Moore,
had reams of evidence of Rinehart's illegal seed planting. Whoops
- are we stupid - turns out Moore identified the wrong person, and
Monsanto dropped the lawsuit. The article goes on from there.