In its statement on the results of the Transatlantic Economic Council negotiations, issued last week, the council made brief reference to the intellectual property rights issue. A single bullet point in the statement references a roadmap issued jointly by the European Commission and US Patent Office aimed at advancing "global patent harmonization".

In their paper Money Ruins Everything, Australian law professor Dan Hunter and economist John Quiggin (right) argue that open source and Internet creativity mandate changes in copyright law, which now favor industries whose costs have disappeared.

Alex Brown admit ISO fails (a door of opportunity opens)

Astrum Inc., a software security company in Carrollton, Texas, has filed suit against Novell Inc. Astrum claims that Novell violated its contract regarding development of the mini-operating system appliance that Novell launched last month.

An update on OOXML complaints in Europe: Yesterday we mentioned only a quick translation of an article written in Danish. Andy Updegrove and Groklaw have picked it up by now and there is now a minor update on this. It comes from Denmark in the form of another snippet that’s published in English.

We’ve heard from folks that the final post-Ballot Resolution Meeting version of OOXML has still not been made available to national standards bodies. This would be the updated 6000+ page document that included all the edits voted on at the BRM. With such a document one could actually, for example, check correctness of the edits and ensure that changes were actually inserted.

We have already seen street protests in a few places including Norway (photo above; here is a video and the full story). The BSI (UK) came under legal fire as well. The European Commission is dealing with several investigations as complaints continue to come (more recently from BECTA, whose formal complaint was added to the pile).