Against Intellectual Monopoly

unilateral
refusal to license practice. For a list of the nine no-no's, and a not-unbiased discussion
of the opportunityto dispose of them, clearly favoring the disposal option, see Gilbert
and Shapiro (1997). For a very different view, cogently applied to the two recent
Microsoft antitrust cases, see First (2006).
    9. Information about the Verizon v. Trinko case can be found widely on the Internet,
for example, Evans (2004), available at http://www.aei-brookings.org/policy/page.
php?id=174, or the summary by George Hay at http://www.accessmylibrary.com/
coms2/summary_0286-25484663_ITM, (both accessed on February 24, 2008). With
a bit of patience the Supreme Court ruling can be found online at its Website, http://www.supremecourtus.gov, or (as of February 24, 2008) at http://www.
law.cornell.edu/supct/html/02-682.ZO.html for those in a hurry.
    10. Information and news about the digital rights management initiative (in its multiple
versions) and its very controversial nature are widespread on the Web and in other media. The curious reader may want to begin with the Wikipedia entry and then
continue from there.

    11. For detailed information about the Grokster case, Wikipedia is again a good starting
point, and additional info can be found at the Electronic Frontier Foundation page
on MGM v. Grokster. A middle-of-the-road legal assessment is in Samuelson (2004).
For the sad effect of the Supreme Court ruling on economic innovation, just go
to http://www.grokster.com and read the scary message welcoming you, even on
February 24, 2008.
    12. On July 2, 2005, the European Parliament voted 648 to 14 (with 18 abstentions) to
scrap the so-called Directive on the Patentability of Computer Implemented Inventions. Although this was good news, the battle on software patents in Europe is far
from over. The vote is attributable more to a general fight with the EU Commission, which tends to ignore whatever the Parliament suggests, than to a widespread
opposition to software patents within the latter body. In the meanwhile, though,
grassroots opposition has grown and, especially within the business community, a
variety of action groups have sprung up that oppose software patents along probusiness lines and on the basis of pro-free market arguments such as those exposed
in this book.
    13. News and information on this topic are widespread through all kinds of media.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations' online Forum on
Biotechnology in Food and Agriculture, at http://www.fao.org/biotech/forum.asp
(accessed February 24, 2008), is a particularly informative starting point for the
interested reader. A number of very reasonable reforms that would improve developing countries' situation in the agricultural sector can be found at http://issues.org/
17.4/barton.htm (accessed February 24, 2008).
    14. Having abundantly clarified why genomic patents are a pretty bad idea, here are
a couple of references to people who like them for all the wrong reasons: Putnam
(2004) and Hale, Tolleri, and Telford (2006).
    15. This is the main, if not the only, reason behind the existence of WTO-TRIPS, as
is easily verified from the documents contained on its Web page, http://www.wto.
org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/trips_e.htm (accessed February 24, 2008).
    16. Information about the IBM and other companies' protective patent pool on Linux
is widespread on the Web and other media. Visit Wikipedia under "OSDL" and
"Free Standards group" to learn more, or go directly to http://www.
open inventionnetwork.com and http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Main_Page,
(both accessed on February 24, 2008).
    17. A detailed discussion of possible, and all very reasonable, reforms can be found in
Jaffe and Lerner (2004).
    18. Obviously, the "how to swing a swing" patent (U.S. Patent No. 6,368,227) is here just
a label for a gigantic and ever-growing class of patents that are so crazy and unbelievable that one may think we fabricated the whole thing. Well, we must admit that
we do not have the level of insane imagination needed to reach the heights achieved
by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in cooperation with the most shameless
rent seekers of the world. For entertaining surveys of this modern zoo of legal
monstrosities, out of an almost endless list of sites are the following few: http://
www.freepatentsonline.com/crazy.html, http://www.crazypatents.com, http://www.
totallyabsurd.com, and