Someone who went to law school in the early 1970s and now works as a licensing lawyer said to me today that he had had to beg his dean to provide some kind of IP course -- and all he got from his efforts was a one-term survey covering patent, trademark, and copyright, taught by a guy who used to run a movie projector and so was deemed to be the most likely to know about that kind of stuff.

No longer.  Intellectual property is hot, hot, hot.  IP law is swallowing up whole domains that used to be innocent of the rhetoric of property. 

Three stories for today:

1.  MSN has issued a Royalty-Free Protocol License Agreement that, as far as I can tell, requires that any application communicating with any MSN operating system has to license from MSN (for free) the right to use standard communication protocols -- to the extent MSN owns any rights in those protocols.  MSN isn't saying in this license agreement precisely what rights it claims to own.  But it is listing all kinds of protocols, including ftp and TCP/IP, as things that need to be licensed. 

Larry Blunk has written to the IETF expressing concern that this move by MSN "inject[s] a significant amount of unwarranted uncertainty and doubt regarding non-Microsoft implementations of these protocols." 

The agreement is non-negotiable.  

2.  Amicus briefs are flying in the Grokster case.  The betting is that the Court will take the case -- it will be hard for the clerks to ignore such an interesting set of issues.  EFF's brief is here [pdf]; PFF's brief is here [pdf]; and TFF is expected to file soon.

3.  Speaking of EFF, they're looking for amicus briefs to be filed by December 22, 2004 in the Blizzard v. Internet Gateway case in the 8th Circuit.  The district court decision [pdf] in that case upholds a very broad license agreement forbidding any kind of reverse engineering or fair use; key issues before the appellate court will be preemption and the scope of the 1201(f) exception in the DMCA for reverse engineering. 

And if you understood that last paragraph you are living evidence of the salience of IP law.