Patent & Trademark Applications at All-Time High
“In fiscal year 2005 [which ended Sept. 30], the Department of Commerce’s United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) received a record number of patent and trademark applications. The agency received 406,302 patent applications, and 323,501 applications for trademark registration as reported in its fiscal year 2005 Performance and Accountability Report.
“The USPTO granted 165,485 patents, including 151,079 utility (inventions), 13,395 design, and 816 plant patents. Since 1790, over seven million U.S. patents have been granted.
“The USPTO registered 143,396 trademarks and renewed 32,279 registrations in fiscal year 2005. Over 3 million trademarks have been registered since the first in 1870. At the end of fiscal year 2005, there were 1,255,570 active trademark registrations.”
U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. 2005 Performance and Accountability Report. (.pdf, 5.75 MB) Nov. 22, 2005.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
Buying E-Content: Librarians, Salaries, & Opportunities
Commentary by K. Matthew Dames, executive editor.
A friend and colleague sent me this job posting from a well known academic institution located in a major city in the Middle Atlantic region:
Collection Management & Electronic Resources Librarian. [institution name omitted] seeks an energetic and innovative librarian to join the library team and be responsible for the development and management of the library’s collection, including its electronic resources, and for managing the transition from print to electronic resources. He or she will coordinate various aspects of collection development, licensing, and management and implementation of electronic resources, including promotion, access, patron assistance, and troubleshooting. This position reports to the library director and has one paraprofessional assistant. The successful candidate also will participate in library planning and in the library’s education and outreach programs.
Requirements:
– Master’s degree in Library Science from an ALA accredited library school or equivalent
– Demonstrated organizational, time management, and team work skillsHelpful:
– Background or experience in managing electronic resources or licensing
– Experience with electronic resource management systems or digital library implementations
– Training and experience searching MEDLINE and other biomedical databases
– Basic database creation and management skills
– Ability to handle multiple projects
– AHIP accreditationSalary: Hiring range $38,000 – $45,000, depending on qualifications and experience.
This job solicitation reflects a recent trend: organizations have begun to appreciate the cost of buying electronic content (or “e-content”), the skill needed to negotiate e-content contracts, and the skill needed to manage and distribute e-content once it enters the building. To the extent that this posting is an institutional acknowledgment of the importance of e-content use, access, and procurement, I think it is positive.
Unfortunately, this posting reflects another trend: organizations — particularly libraries — still are not compensating e-content managers and negotiators at a level that is commensurate with the importance of the position. Said more simply, the salary range for the instant job posting is a joke, and suggests that the institution is not taking the position seriously, is unaware of what the position entails, or both.
In this article, I’ll discuss why this salary is woefully inappropriate, why most librarians are ill-prepared to fill such positions, and offer some suggestions to improve both circumstances.
Buying E-Content: Librarians, Salaries, & Opportunities
Commentary by K. Matthew Dames, executive editor.
A friend and colleague sent me this job posting from a well known academic institution located in a major city in the Middle Atlantic region:
Collection Management & Electronic Resources Librarian. [institution name omitted] seeks an energetic and innovative librarian to join the library team and be responsible for the development and management of the library’s collection, including its electronic resources, and for managing the transition from print to electronic resources. He or she will coordinate various aspects of collection development, licensing, and management and implementation of electronic resources, including promotion, access, patron assistance, and troubleshooting. This position reports to the library director and has one paraprofessional assistant. The successful candidate also will participate in library planning and in the library’s education and outreach programs.
Requirements:
– Master’s degree in Library Science from an ALA accredited library school or equivalent
– Demonstrated organizational, time management, and team work skillsHelpful:
– Background or experience in managing electronic resources or licensing
– Experience with electronic resource management systems or digital library implementations
– Training and experience searching MEDLINE and other biomedical databases
– Basic database creation and management skills
– Ability to handle multiple projects
– AHIP accreditationSalary: Hiring range $38,000 – $45,000, depending on qualifications and experience.
This job solicitation reflects a recent trend: organizations have begun to appreciate the cost of buying electronic content (or “e-content”), the skill needed to negotiate e-content contracts, and the skill needed to manage and distribute e-content once it enters the building. To the extent that this posting is an institutional acknowledgment of the importance of e-content use, access, and procurement, I think it is positive.
Unfortunately, this posting reflects another trend: organizations — particularly libraries — still are not compensating e-content managers and negotiators at a level that is commensurate with the importance of the position. Said more simply, the salary range for the instant job posting is a joke, and suggests that the institution is not taking the position seriously, is unaware of what the position entails, or both.
In this article, I’ll discuss why this salary is woefully inappropriate, why most librarians are ill-prepared to fill such positions, and offer some suggestions to improve both circumstances.
Patent Challenge Could Derail iPod Growth
“Apple could be in for a bruising legal fight with rival Creative over the technology used in iPod music players.
“Creative boss Sim Wong Hoo has told the BBC he plans to ‘pursue aggressively’ a US patent it owns on a system used to navigate music on digital players.
“Mr. Sim was speaking at the launch of Creative’s latest rival to the iPod video, the Zen Vision: M.”
Alfred Hermida. Apple Faces iPod Patent Dispute. BBC News. Dec. 8, 2005.
See also:
United States Patent & Trademark Office. Automatic Hierarchical Categorization of Music by Metadata (U.S. Patent No. 6,928,433). Aug. 9, 2005.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
New PATRIOT Act Bulges With Filler
“A fraction–a mere 16 sections–of the Patriot Act’s awesome surveillance powers expire Dec. 31. They expanded secret methods the FBI can use to obtain business records; authorized more information sharing between Internet providers and police; and listed computer hacking as an offense permitting increased eavesdropping.
“The Bush administration and congressional Republicans spent last week arguing that speedy approval of the larded-up conference report was necessary to keep America safe. But what Gonzales didn’t say was that the conference report has become a political version of a Christmas tree: It’s ornamented with dozens of senators’ pet projects. The result is a structure so weighty with irrelevant amendments it’s nearly twice the size of the original Patriot Act.”
Declan McCullagh. Must We Renew the Patriot Act? News.com. Dec. 12, 2005.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
L.A. Times Crushes Big Content
Commentary by K. Matthew Dames, executive editor.
This is from the “you know you’re unpopular when your hometown paper is crushing you” department:
Scarcely a week passes without the entertainment industry warning us that its business model is about to be exterminated by some new technology.
The Internet, satellite radio and TiVo are among the mortal threats that have sent media executives scurrying to Washington with proposals to rein them in, tax them, even ban them. The music labels, TV networks and movie studios never propose to alter their own models to accommodate new technologies — they merely insist that everybody else change to accommodate them. When they don’t get their own way with lawmakers, they take it out on consumers.
Plainly, the media companies are engaged in an all-out attack on the principle of “fair use.”
Whenever a community is home to a particularly successful industry, it is common for that community’s newspaper to think twice about criticizing that industry or the domestic large companies that are in that industry. When I was just beginning to get started in journalism in the late nineties, the Cincinnati Enquirer published a scathing series about Chiquita Brands International, Inc., the banana company, accusing it of various and sundry unethical business practices, including improper (and perhaps illegal) uses of pesticides and environmental toxins. At the time, Chiquita was based in Cincinnati, and its owner, Carl Lindner, was one of Cincinnati’s most powerful business figures.
Many of the critical stories were published prominently in a special section in the Enquirer, and included several Page One stories.
Chiquita, sensitive to damage to its corporate reputation, fought back, claiming that one of package’s lead reporters, Mike Gallagher, had improperly obtained voice mail to support his stories. The Enquirer retracted the entire package, apologized to Chiquita on its front page, and fired Gallagher. The newspaper, part of the Gannett newspaper empire, also paid a financial settlement to Chiquita believed to be worth as much as $50 million. (See Columbia Journalism Review coverage.)
To my knowledge, none of the information in the Chiquita package has been discounted as untrue. In fact, research for the core claims in the package — including money laundering, violations of child labor laws, and sweatshop work conditions — did not depend on any voice mail material, as Salon later reported.
I recount this story because since that time, media outlets have been loathe to do investigative reporting. They also have, to a great extent, abdicated their role as a governor on corporate and government abuses. Put in this context, it is rather unusual for the Los Angeles Times to criticize Big Content so directly. There once was a time, however, where this sort of critical reporting and editorializing was routine.
Michael Hiltzik. An Industry Unwilling to Play by Rules of ‘Fair Use’. LATimes.com. Dec. 12, 2005.
See also:
Nicholas Stein. Banana Peel. Columbia Journalism Review. September/October 1998.
Bruce Shapiro. Rotten Banana. Salon.com. July 8, 1998.
John Nolan. Chiquita Accepts Apology, $10M from Enquirer. Cincinnati.com. June 29, 1998.
The Cincinnati Enquirer. An Apology to Chiquita. Cincinnati.com. June 28, 1998.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
HarperCollins Offers Digitized Catalog to Online Players
“In the latest salvo in the fight over the future of books on the Internet, one of the country’s biggest publishers said it intends to produce digital copies of its books and then make them available to search services offered by such companies as Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com., while maintaining physical possession of the digital files.
“News Corp.’s HarperCollins Publishers Inc. hopes to head off the prospect of these big Internet companies taking charge of books that it has purchased, edited and published.”
Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg and Kevin J. Delaney. HarperCollins Plans to Control Its Digital Books. The Wall Street Journal. Dec. 12, 2005.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
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