What’s New with Wu

Some might know exacly where this picture was taken.

Haven’t got the Peru pictures yet so this is a stand-in!

Josh Lerner from Harvard Business School came through Columbia and our IP workshop today. Great presenter. He did a paper on patents on the finance patents, which, he finds, are litigated at about 27x the rate of normal patents.

And other findings generally suggesting that most of the patents in the financial sector aren’t held by any of the companies that are financial innovators.

Just returned from Peru, the most charming country in South America.  Some pictures soon.
In the meantime, nice to see alot of readership and response to the Sample Troll article, including the usual and expected volume of hate mail.

One thing I do regret — the piece had too many small errors in it, like calling “It Takes a Nation of Millions” Public Enemy’s first album, when it was actually their second (but their breakout album).   I wish I’d had the piece error-checked a few more times, though I did make sure the piece was clear of any potential libel problems.

Slate does fairly rough error-checking, compared with other publications, unfortunately.

Going to Peru tomorrow; will be hard to reach.

The article on the Sample Trolls ran in Slate today.   Thanks to those who have already sent comments.

Coming this week to Slate — “Sample Trolls,” the back story of the catalogue companies that make millions on rappers from Jay-Z through Public Enemy

I’m doing a mob-blog at the UChicago Blog site.

Randy Picker is in charge.

Topic is the Kal R. and Chris Springman’s paper on the IP protection of fashion, or more precisely the lack thereof.