Sunday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Just as in this year's federal election, the NDP will need to look to move voting intentions once the campaign is underway. But also just like in the federal election, there's reason to like the party's chances - particularly as it's promising to limit the sniping that's been going on for months between the other two main parties.

- The Washington Post points out that our current system of intellectual property protection - supposedly designed to encourage innovation - in fact does little but to create a cottage industry for high-tech non-inventors:

Patents were originally conceived to protect inventors—people and companies who contribute to the advancement of society by creating new products. But in the past decade, something went horribly wrong. Patents are increasingly became nothing more than financial and legal weapons, to be amassed in portfolios by “non-practicing entities” (i.e. patent trolls) and used to extort protection money from economically productive companies.
...
Most of the money from patent lawsuits is going to the trolls and the lawyers. Between 1995 and 2001, practicing entities were getting higher median awards ($6.3 million) in patent lawsuits than non-practicing entities ($5.2 million). Those numbers flipped between 2002 and 2009, when the median award given to patent trolls climbed to $12.9 million, while awards given to operating patent holders dropped to $3.9 million. The trolls obviously got very efficient and found friendly court districts like the Eastern District of Texas where they could push their claims (patent trolls have a 55.6 percent success rate in cases in the Eastern District of Texas). And it is not just the trolls that are bringing lawsuits as a course of business, companies like Microsoft are getting in on the action too, using their patents as a strategic weapon against their rivals.

It’s this combination of a growing pool of patents that should have never been granted in the first place with the rise of the patent lawsuit industry that is creating huge costs for technology companies of all sizes and the economy at large. All of those bilions (sic) of dollars spent in defending questionable patent lawsuits and buying up patents that will never be used to create anything new is a terrible waste of money. The patent system has been broken a long time, but if we don’t fix it soon it will slow down one of the few engines of the economy still humming.

- It didn't receive much attention compared to the news about the CUPW's planned challenges to the appointment. But after they went out of their way to undermine the concept of collective bargaining as we know it, should we have expected anything other than for the Harper Cons to then appoint an arbitrator with as little labour experience as possible?

- Rene Najera's story looks like a particularly egregious example of an employer trampling on a worker's ability to participate in any public debate.

- Finally, the Halifax Chronicle-Herald weighs in on Tony Clement's G8 patronage and cover-up:

Auditor General John Wiersema said he had never before come across the "unusual and troubling" situation of there being "absolutely no paper trail."

But last week, NDP MP Charlie Angus turned up a paper trail of sorts.

Doing an end-run of his own, Mr. Angus used provincial disclosure laws to access minutes of municipal leaders’ meetings on G8 projects that Mr. Clement chaired. They indicate federal officials did attend some meetings and Mr. Clement’s constituency office managed an application process for projects through unofficial forms.

The government should explain how this squares with what it told the auditor general — that departments were not involved in designing the fund and selecting projects.

And Mr. Clement should explain why his office ran this process outside the auditable framework of Treasury Board rules and policies for which he is now responsible.

If he can’t do that, he shouldn’t be at Treasury Board.