i read this as good news. The fact that IP is proving too hard to handle for some corporations speaks to the needless challenge of trying to maintain monopoly privileges over information, ideas, drugs, music, etc. Is this an unqualified victory? Should we be concerned that underground gangs of criminals are stealing the fruits of legitimate firms' research and development dollars?

In fact, according to Peter Drahos, a frontline strategy corporations use to patrol the borders of their IP includes the attempt to link intellectual property piracy with organized crime. In other words, linking IP theft with things the public are ACTUALLY afraid of, to galvanize lacking support for diverting police hours to this fake crises. In fact, Drahos points out that IP and organized crime do go hand-in-hand at times. For example, IP owners often have to pay mafia to help shut down IP property rings cause the state doesn't give a damn.

That's why this other story is so good: "Lone hacker makes life tough for Microsoft [2]." Here's a story about a hacker who keeps repeatedly releasing a free program that strips away the software lock the company created to protect digital movies and music from being freely copied. Viodentia - the hacker - has made clear that the program was made available for users to exercise their fair-use rights to copy material they had acquired. Microsoft keeps trying to patch the system, but can't keep up with the cracked versions that keep on coming out. Here's a hack that's explicitly for the good of the people -- flying in the face, again, of the corporate frontline strategy that IP theft is dangerous, criminal activity in need of more public money to properly enforce IP protection.

Finally, Joseph Steiglitz, the Nobel Laureate economist fired by the World Bank, recently published an editorial in the British Medical Journal [3] entitled, "Scrooge and Intellectual Property Rights" - all about how these rights were intended to reduce access to generic drugs, upon which billions of poor people around the world rely and can now no longer afford their medicines. He also attacked, among other things, the patenting of breast cancer genes, which has made testing costs "enormous" and therefore prohibitive in some parts of the world.

i did read recently (I will have to try to find this new item again) that U.S. officials were forced to use mafia members to enforce IP, since the Russian government does not see this use of police forces as a priority, and therefore the U.S. had no choice to turn to a vigilante justice system, ironically, to protect their private property rights.