I first took up a camera around the age of nine, but it wasn't until I discovered Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO)'s Flickr photo-sharing site that my "career" in photography really took off. While I'm certainly not hitting the runways of Milan with my Pentax PZ-1P anytime soon, this year I sold several photographs and permitted dozens of others to use my work under the Creative Commons license with which I offer my photos. (My choice is a non-commercial attribution license; as I use many of my photos for work, here on BloggingStocks, I'd hate to see rivals utilizing them as well.)

After extensive conversations with IP attorneys and other authorities in the industry, and given my responsibility of overseeing the use of thousands of photos each year, my grasp of all the legal issues surrounding commercial use of intellectual property is deep. One of the thorniest issues is that of what's called "model release," in other words, if someone's IN your photo, can you still use it?

When at first (and second, and third) you don't succeed, sue. According to the news this morning, that's IBM's strategy. International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) filed two lawsuits against Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), claiming that Amazon was violating five of its patents, including those for technology that provides customer recommendations, advertising, and the way data is catalogued.

Not only had IBM tried to negotiate license fees with Amazon -- which Big Blue says everyone else simply pays -- but it had tried "over a dozen times" with zero response from the internet retailer.

Has Jeffrey Bezos lost his marbles? No media outlet was able to garner a response from the company at this early hour on the West Coast. But it's certainly well-known that Bezos has a history of staking his claim, but big, in the world of IP -- most recently, demanding license fees from everyone who tried to copy their one-click ordering system (I feel I should put "copy" in quotes as many pundits and lawsuit subjects believe there is significant prior art here, which the US Patent & Trademark Office plans to soon review).

In my knowledge of the IP world, IBM's ownership isn't much challenged here. The customer needs prediction algorithms are used by many different companies and taught in statistical marketing courses. While Amazon.com's use of them is considered smart, I've never heard claim that it's of the company's own design. Is Amazon.com a wronged innovator, or is the company's management just playing dirty pool?