The Register reports on a new Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) report on Intellectual Property which points out that “IP is starting to matter more and more in acquisitions: firms are being bought for what they know as much as anything else. This means working out the value of IP as an asset is becoming a serious consideration: it’ll have tax implications, even if you’re not buying anyone this year.”  However, according to the PwC report, “executives still think they are not ‘extracting the full value’ from their stashed IP. They also report they are not ‘as competent in the management of intellectual property as they need to be.’”  Moreover, it is not always clear “within an organisation who should be responsible for managing IP.”

The International Herald Tribune writes that eBay’s efforts to combat the sale of counterfeit items have led to “a 60 percent decline in the number of complaints from luxury goods makers that counterfeits of their products are being sold on the site. 

[EBay] also says that in the last four months it has banished tens of thousands of sellers from its auction marketplace who did not meet new, elevated standards.”

Reuters points out that, contrary to the claims of pro-Apple bloggers, [e]nvironmental groups say “the music industry’s transition from physical to digital has no discernible benefit to the environment and, in the short term, is actually causing more harm than good.  […]  [T]here’s no noticeable decline in the number of physical CDs found in landfills. While music fans are buying fewer CDs at record stores, they are buying more blank recordable CDs to burn their own discs from music acquired digitally.”

Yahoo!News reports that “[i]n a recent MIT-Harvard study to determine online gullibility, 36 percent of test subjects logged in to their online bank accounts despite being presented with a strong warning page saying that their bank site’s security certificate was not valid. Not one person noticed when HTTPS, the secure form of HTTP, was stripped away–they offered up their passwords anyway.”

According to the Washington Post, “[a]lthough virtual environments are still at an early stage in development and adoption, many companies are already dabbling in one or more virtual worlds or closely observing them prior to getting their feet wet.  Businesses that may have been slow to embrace the Internet are keen this time around to actively engage with the technology before it becomes mainstream.”