It was just a couple months ago that Pope Benedict began tweeting to great fanfare and attention. He quickly had well over a million followers. Of course, as you may have heard, the Pope decided to become the first Pope in about 600 years to retire. And, now that this has taken effect... the Vatican appears to have deleted every one of his tweets. That is, uh, not how you use Twitter. Sure, tweets can be deleted, but it seems particularly bizarre to delete the entire historical record of this one Pope's tweets, even if there were a small number of them. Of course, at the very least, this means they won't have to deal with the ex-Pope still having his Twitter login going and rogue tweeting from retirement.

Update: As a few people have pointed out, the Vatican has set up an archive of his tweets on their own website. Still doesn't explain why they had to erase the originals.

A recent blogger meet up hosted by the Vatican received some attention for comments with which Techdirt readers would be familiar on copyright, attribution, and new media business models. For example, Italian blogger and author Mattia Marasco highlighted the importance of attribution, but said that copyright is "an old model," when it comes to new media, and Dutch podcaster Father Roderick Vonhogen said that journalists will have to get used to their material being reused, but those who focus on quality will make it. The ideas are nothing new (and just some of many expressed at the event), but it'll be interesting to see if the Vatican is listening. Marasco and Father Roderick are not Vatican officials, though in recent years the Pope and other Vatican officials have expressed concern over "an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property." (The Holy See has, however, asserted its own right to protect the figure of the Pope, but it's unclear what exactly that means.) The Vatican also announced an upcoming News.va website, which will make extensive use of social media and apparently use a non-commercial Creative Commons license (according to Father Roderick [33:40]). Not bad for a 2000-year-old institution. There was also a call for the Holy See Press Office to consider bloggers, when releasing advanced copies of Vatican documents. The meeting was intended to open a dialogue between bloggers and the Vatican, so it'll be interesting to see what the Vatican takes to heart from the encounter and how they continue down the new media path.

Last year, we noted that in one of the Pope's speeches, he had expressed concerns about how intellectual property laws were being used to hurt economic development and hold back things like medicines. It appears the Vatican has continued to study this subject. Jamie Love points us to a speech given by the Vatican's representative to the UN, Archibishop Silvano M. Tomasi, at the WIPO meeting back in September, where he highlights worries by the Vatican about how intellectual property can stifle access to knowledge and economic growth, especially in developing countries. The statement is so much more accurate than almost anything you hear from a politician concerning intellectual property.

Unlike most claims from politicians that intellectual property only provides benefits, it notes that the economic research is "contradictory," because while granting someone a monopoly certainly increases activity in those areas, it also limits other areas of growth:

Evidence to date is fragmented and somewhat contradictory, in part because many of the concepts involved have not yet been measured. A stronger system of protection could either enhance or limit economic growth. While strengthening IPRs has potential for enhancing growth and development in the proper circumstances, it might also raise difficult economic and social costs. Indeed, developing economies could experience net welfare losses in the short run because many of the costs of protection could emerge earlier than the dynamic benefits. This situation explains why it is often difficult to organize a convergence of interests in favor of reform of intellectual property in developing countries.

The adoption of stronger IPRs in developing countries is often defended by claims that this reform will attract significant new inflows of technology, a blossoming of local innovation and cultural industries, and a faster closing of the technology gap between developing and developed countries. It must be recognized, however, that improved IPRs by itself is highly unlikely to produce such benefits.

Of course, this actually applies to developed countries as well, but we'll skip over that for now. Still, it's nice to see at least some folks recognizing that intellectual property creates competing incentives, and that the only way to judge whether or not it's a net benefit involves looking at both impacts.

And we thought the Pope was concerned about intellectual property misuse these days. As a whole bunch of you have sent in, reports are coming out claiming that the Vatican has announced a special sort of "copyright" on all things Pope-related:

"...the Vatican has felt it necessary to declare that "it alone has the right to ensure the respect due to the Successors of Peter, and therefore, to protect the figure and personal identity of the Pope from the unauthorized use of his name and/or the papal coat of arms for ends and activities which have little or nothing to do with the Catholic Church."

As the report makes clear, this is targeted at those who are using the symbols to "attribute credibility and authority to initiatives," so it actually seems more like a makeshift "trademark" (without the "trade" part) or maybe a "publicity right" rather than a copyright. That is, this is much more about preventing people from falsely suggesting that the Pope is endorsing something he is not. That said, it's unclear how such a rule is enforceable, since every country has their own laws that this shouldn't impact at all. I guess since this is likely directed at Catholic organizations misusing Papal symbols that they will then obey the Pope, but otherwise, this doesn't seem like a huge deal.

ICANN is having one of its regular meetings in Mexico City, the kind where proposals for all the latest and greatest top-level domains get kicked around. But some TLDs you may not be seeing soon are .catholic, or .hindu, or .churchofthefsm, after The Vatican said it didn't think it was a good idea. Essentially, they don't like the idea of some registrar or other group being given control of the TLD of a particular religious tradition, with ICANN forced to determine who gets to be the gatekeeper for each particular set of beliefs. It remains to be seen how this will fit in with ICANN's plans to open up the TLD system, which would let people register nearly any TLD they wanted (assuming they fork over the requisite amount of cash, of course). Throwing the system open would certainly seem to be setting the stage for a huge number of disputes, as companies fight over who should get to own something like .apple. By allowing .religion TLDs, ICANN could be setting things up for holy cyberwars -- but if it's going to open things up, should it be playing censor, or determining who the rightful "owner" of each religion's TLD should be?