Interesting piece over at Technology Review:

New O.J. Trial: Recipe for Disaster

Why would the U.S. Patent Office hand out a 20-year monopoly on something like this? I think it is because the good people there have lost track of what an invention is. By no stretch of the imagination has Tropicana patented an invention. It has patented a recipe. And it is a recipe for disaster with implications far beyond the breakfast table.

Puts me in mind of Siva Vaidhyanathan's opinion piece on MSNBC....

Copyrights and copywrongs

The dawn of the 21st century has illuminated an array of conflicts over the regulation of information in America: Napster, DVD-hacking, the right to create a parody, the rewards for freelance writers in a digital world, and the future of the Microsoft monopoly.
Each of these cases rests on several distinct pedestals of ideals. As a nation, we would like to reward enterprise and creativity, allow free and open access to ideas, and benefit from a rich trove of music, literature, journalism, and art. Often these goals conflict, and courts must choose among them.

Seems that both are classic examples of phenomena described by Virginia Postrel, eh?