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Blogging as antidote to Sikahema effect?

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

In December 2008, there was a back-and-forth between Joe Mullin and Gary Odom (aka Patent Hawk) about Odom's patent infringement suit against Microsoft, then in ED Texas.

At the bottom of the Mullin post was the text:

Update: Gary Odom responds to this story.

Update II: Odom's response has been taken down, but was preserved by a commenter (below).

At IPBiz, we refer to such an instance as an example of the Sikahema effect. See for example:

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/12/favreau-pic-with-hillary-sikahemad-from.html

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/11/holy-sikahema-batman-obama-agenda.html

In the science fraud area, Lucent (now part of Alcatel) removed the Beasley report on the Jan-Hendrik Schon matter from its website, but certain bloggers preserved it. Of course, with bloggers preserving key material, there might be questions of chain of custody and authenticity, but what can one do? Separately, what about spoofing, wherein a blogger might claim to have "preserved" something that never existed in the first place?

Part of the material preserved by the Mullin commenter included:

Joe Mullin penned a sagging saga of supposedly secret patenting in his entry about Odom v. Microsoft. The Joe Zone of the Unknown will shrink soon, as infringement contentions are due Friday.

Joe seemed mesmerized by Microsoft's bodacious brouhaha about long-expired contracts, flashed his claim construction IQ, and got some details wrong. But, hey, he's just a reporter for the mainstream press, working his beat.

It does seem that the original link is gone.

Query: if someone wanted to cite Odom for the great prose, who are they going to cite? The commenter on Mullin's website?

Full post as published by IPBiz on February 22, 2009 (boomark / email).