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We're at a watershed moment for intellectual property. Not a day after online protests drove Congress to shelve SOPA/PIPA, the feds demonstrated that they don't even need new laws to crack down on websites that threaten the interests of moneyed rights holders. They unceremoniously shuttered Megaupload, spooking other services that cloud-host users' files.

TechCrunch reports today that the Megaupload crackdown cut the site off at the knees just before it planned to launch a disruptive and legal music player. Another popular boogeyman for copyright holders, The Pirate Bay, announced a new, legitimate direction yesterday: It's going to host physibles, downloadable models for constructing 3D objects. Are the "pirate" sites actually Big Content's worst nightmare for legitimate reasons?

Google's lashing out at competitors over patent claims has set off another round of discussion about the role and value of software patents (be sure to read Microsoft's response). It's an issue that lawyers and technologists have been discussing for a long time.

The nuances of such a debate are beyond the capabilities of a simple poll such as this one, but just to gauge the community's response to the issue, we're asking you: is it time to end software patents?

YouTube has long had to battle complaints and lawsuits - most often from record labels and film studios - that the video-sharing site is awash in copyright infringements. YouTube does take measures to pull content when an infringement claim is made, and it has had a longstanding policy to ban users who repeatedly post videos that violate copyright.

But in YouTube's words, "copyright law can be complicated," and so rather than just banning without recourse or reform, the service has redesigned its copyright help center and made a few changes to its policy.

WikiLeaks surfaced legal issues that are good to consider about cloud computing in general. Like anything else in business, cloud computing poses its own set of legal issues that customers are required to consider before signing with a service.

The blog Digital Inspiration reviews some legal questions to ask. It's a good introduction to thinking about the legal issues that cloud computing customers will face.

Would be patent-trolls searching through commit logs for ideas to patent sounds like a scare-story on a local news station, and the goods news is that there aren't any cut-and-dry cases of this happening yet. However, Tech Dirt's Mike Masnick has found two suspicious instances of patents that may be "borrowing" technology from open source projects. In one case, IBM made the case that it had "improved" on prior art and was granted a patent. Is this something open source developers should be worried about?

In a move to reduce some of the barriers to IP transfer between academic research and entrepreneurship, the University of Glasgow has launched a new website "Easy Access IP" that will make some its intellectual property available to the public for free of charge, without cumbersome licensing rules and restrictions.

Creative Commons announced the release of the Public Domain Mark today, a tool that will help easily identify those works that are free of copyright restrictions. The mark - the letter C that's associated with the symbol for copyright, but with a slash through it - is meant to make it clear that the material is free to reuse.

Works are part of the public domain when their copyright expires or when the artist designates the work as such. This means that people can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work - even for commercial purposes, without asking permission.

The notorious U.S. patent 6,411,947, a broad "method" for automatically classifying and responding to email inquiries known as the Firepond/Polaris patent, has finally been invalidated after 12 years on the books.

The patent was on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's list of top ten most bogus patents because it claimed nothing more than a system using natural language processing to select and send responses to customers' online or email inquires.

When the Supreme Court ruled last month on the Bilksi case, denying Bilski's patent claim that Bilksi's patent but not making any real statements on the overall patentability of business methods or software, several opponents of software patents, including VCs Jason Mendelson and Brad Feld expressed their disappointment.

Today marks the fifth anniversary of IP Ventures, Microsoft's program that opens up technologies developed internally at Microsoft to entrepreneurs and new businesses.

The IP Ventures team within Microsoft identifies technology not being used by the company - or that could be used in a different way - and treats this IP as a form of currency that can be invested in other businesses. While the new companies that take advantage of these technologies still need to find financial backing, the Microsoft program helps provide ample technology support and business guidance throughout the process.