Annoying error message when not displaying node title

I have a pane in my checkout screen showing a terms of service node. I hid the title to make it look cleaner. This works fine, but the following error message appears at the top of my checkout screen:

Notice: Undefined property: stdClass::$title in template_preprocess_node() (line 1451 of <snip>/node.module).
Notice: Undefined property: stdClass::$title in node_page_title() (line 2108 of <snip>/node.module).

The attached patch fixes this issue (sets the node title to '' instead of unsetting the node's title, which throws off drupal_render).