03.12.13
Posted in Patents at 3:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Cutting off the source of the disease…
Summary: A call for effective strategy in the fight for peaceful programming; identifying a common distraction which is patent trolls and FRAND tolls
It was several moths ago that we wrote about Rackspace in relation to patent trolls. Here is something we found in the press;
Open cloud company Rackspace has appointed an open source industry guru to its VP of intellectual property position.
Open source and ‘intellectual property’ in the same sentence? Is it patents or is it copyrights that they allude to? The truth is, many are not targeting the problem at its core. Here is a VC promoting tje SHIELD act as though it’s the solution. As he puts it in his blog:
And now a return to a favorite topic here at AVC – patents, patent trolls, and the urgent need for patent reform here in the US.
One of my favorite ideas for sensible patent reform is “loser pays” for the legal costs of the other side.
The reality is that patent trolling is a low cost form of shakedown and that there isn’t much economic cost on the troll to deter this behavior. If challenged in court, patent trolls win less than 25% of the time. And yet so few of these shakedowns ever go to court because the cases get settled for economic reasons (settlement cost are less than expected defense costs). And these settlements fund the trolls to keep shaking companies down. If the target company can recover their legal costs by defending themselves and winning, then the math over the settlement changes and more cases will be litigated, thus increasing the costs for the trolls.
The core problem is not trolls but their weapon of choice. Disarming them is the answer. The problem is not just trolls but also cartels, which are sometimes trolls or consortia backed by practicing companies. MPEG-LA is just one example and as this new piece puts it:
STANDARD-ESSENTIAL PATENTS IN CONTEXT: JUST A SMALL PIECE OF THE SMARTPHONE WAR PUZZLE
The crux of the debate centers on how much flexibility SEP holders have to negotiate licensing terms for their patents that are promised to be licensed under “(fair) reasonable and non-discriminatory” terms (FRAND or RAND). Specifically, the debate focuses on this question: when is it appropriate to enjoin infringing products from the market if licensing negotiations break down? Historically, FRAND commitments have been relatively ambiguous, giving those holding SEPs broad (but not unlimited) flexibility to negotiate “reasonable” bilateral deals. Currently, there is a movement afoot to give SEP holders less negotiating flexibility. This will have both positive and negative consequences.
FRAND, like trolls, has been another mechanism for utilizing software patents to harm innovation in small companies by rendering them incapable of entering the market. What we really ought to strive for is not suppression of symptoms but of root causes. Jeff Jaffe from Novell, who is now the W3C's CEO, celebrates the MPEG-VP8 marriage, but it’s a victory for FRAND and software patents, it’s not a win at a political level over policy reform. █
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03.11.13
Posted in News Roundup at 12:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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The now available systemd 198 is the first to include the kernel-install command-line program. The command allows kernels to be installed while complying with the new Boot Loader Specification that is defined at Freedesktop.org. The specification defines a way for multiple distributions to safely reside on a dual- or triple-boot system.
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While there are many interesting features to the Linux 3.9 kernel, there is some functionality you will not find yet within the mainline Linux kernel.
Among the most pressing functionality that comes to mind that hasn’t been merged include:
VIA Kernel Mode-Setting – For those unfortunate souls still using VIA hardware, there is still no mainline DRM/KMS driver, even after it’s been in development for years. There’s still work ongoing, but nothing that was merged for the Linux 3.9 kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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Performance improvements in terms of software rendering as well as fixes for touch devices and hybrid graphics systems are among the major new features of X.org’s just released X Server 1.14. The new X Server also includes modifications that affect the pointer barriers. GNOME 3.8 will use these pointer barriers to establish from what distance and at what speed a user has moved the mouse pointer to the bottom screen edge; if the values are big, GNOME will display the notification panel straight away instead of waiting for a second.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Continuing its adventures into Linux, Valve has released a penguin-friendly edition of another of its games, bringing the total to five. Could it be Left 4 Dead? Portal 2? HL2: Episode Two? Gosh, even Episode 3? Er, no, it’s Counter-Strike: Condition Zero. Still, that’s nice, isn’t it?
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In addition to this, the Linux and Mac gaming community will also be in for a hellish treat this spring when Painkiller Hell & Damnation launches on these platforms. Players using the Linux and Mac platforms will finally be able to join the Painkiller PC gaming community and fully immerse themselves in Daniel Garner’s purgatory.
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Bloom: Memories is a beautiful artistic take on the action-adventure / RPG genre that carries players through an epic journey following the theme of the “purest love”; that between a mother and her child.
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Dungeon Fray is a fast paced roguelike game for Windows and Linux. The game features three playable classes, randomly generated levels, turn based combat and unlockable achievements and perks.
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Ever since the advent of Steam for Linux, performance issues have miffed gamers; especially those who are using Ubuntu’s Unity and are forced to use Compiz as their display compositor. Those issues have been combated in several ways. Nvidia and AMD have been ‘stepping up to the plate’ so to speak with increased performance from their drivers, and developers have been working towards more granular performance enhancements geared towards playing well with Xorg. Step one for most users is to simply unset Compiz for fullscreen applications, KWin for KDE users. The former is the most affected, and that was the catalyst behind Michael Bethencourt’s FSGamer.
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Shadowrun Returns brings back one of our most original & cherished game settings as a 2D turn-based RPG with an emphasis on storytelling and tactical combat. Pre-Order today and join us in the dark underworld of Shadowrun’s dystopian cyberpunk reality where Man meets Magic meets Machine.
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When Mike Mika’s daughter was sad to learn she couldn’t play as a girl character in classic Donkey Kong, her father decided a little hacking was in order. Mika modified the ROM of the game so that the damsel/white-knight roles in the game were switched. Now Pauline (Nintendo’s precursor to the better known Princess Peach) runs, jumps, and dodges rolling barrels to save the dulcet Mario at the top of the screen, according to a Saturday post on reddit.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Let me preface this by saying I use KDE on a daily basis, and have for a very long time. There’s a persistent misconception about KDE being this slow and bloated monstrosity of a desktop and, admittedly, at one time it was true. It’s certainly not anymore, but sometimes the ghosts of the past intrude on the present and just won’t be quiet. So let’s see where this ghost came from and put it to rest.
How did this misconception start? Back in late 2005 KDE reached a pinnacle with the release of KDE 3.5, what many believed to be their finest desktop. It had all the KDE hallmarks, infinite configurability, deep integration and most memorable, it was the cheetah amongst big cats. It was super fast. I used it at the time, as well as occasionally using Gnome 2, and KDE was noticeably faster on my hardware. Unfairly or not, this milestone 3.5 release would become the yardstick that later KDE’s would be measured against.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Dubbed Trans-Siberia Express, the second and last Beta release of the upcoming GNOME Documents 3.8 package, the main document viewer of the GNOME desktop environment, has been released a few days ago, March 4, for testing.
GNOME Documents 3.8 Beta 2 comes with a translatable “Getting Started with Documents” tutorial in PDF format, the search dropdown button now uses a linked style, the search dropdown now uses a revealer animation, and the page switch widgets are now insensitive for single-page documents.
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New Releases
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With this second release of “Benz”(a code name that will follow the KDE SC 4.10 series), the Chakra-Project team is very happy to announce a new feature that has been on the wishlist for quite some time. Tribe (the installer) has a netinstaller feature implemented, giving the user the option for a regular offline install, or install fully updated packages, starting with a minimal functional KDE desktop, and adding groups of packages to that minimal install as desired.
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The Porteus Community is excited to announce that Porteus 2.0 Final is now available for immediate download!
This is the first stable release of our Standard and Xfce Editions based on Slackware 14.0.
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Screenshots
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Red Hat Family
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Java is one of the most important technologies (and also one of the reason’s Oracle bought Sun) yet it has a complex relationship with Oracle. It’s also turning out to be one of the most insecure technologies, considering the flood of java vulnerabilities found and exploited recently.
Red Hat has played an instrumental role in Java for Linux users by starting IcedTea project whose “initial goal was to make the Java OpenJDK usable without requiring any other software that is not free software and hence make it possible to add OpenJDK to Fedora and other Linux distributions that insist on free software.”
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Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering started its life as a mostly proprietary product built on technology acquired from Makara in 2010.
In April of 2012, Red Hat made OpenShift available as open source under the OpenShift Origin effort. Simply making a project open source, however, doesn’t make it a true open source community with contribution and collaboration.
Red Hat is now moving to further enable an open source collaborative development model for OpenShift, making it easier for non-Red Hat people to contribute and participate in the platform’s evolution. To that end, Red Hat is now moving to a new model for contribution, using a public continuous integration (CI) environment and hosting a community day at the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Portland.
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Fedora
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For those who haven’t been keeping up with all of the awesome code Ralph Bean has been churning out lately, be sure to checkout fedmsg.com. Hop on #fedora-fedmsg on Freenode or load up busmon to see it in action. Not all of the Fedora Infrastructure services currently fire off fedmsgs, but we’re getting very close.
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Debian Family
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I’m not a big advocate for one Linux distribution over another. Or maybe I’m fooling myself. I pretty much run Debian GNU/Linux (as it’s officially known) on just about anything.
I say I’m not a “big advocate”/fanboy because I’m always open to something new. I flirt with Fedora. And Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Lubuntu. Also Crunchbang. I like what I see in Fuduntu. I think Stella fills a real need.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical has announced quite a few things over the past couple of days, weeks and months. Many of the announcements have been quite exciting in a good way (Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet) and some of them seem to be a little shocking… that have some in the Ubuntu Community feeling betrayed, ignored or worse.
Just to review, I’ve not really been an Ubuntu fan. I’m a Red Hat and Fedora fanboi. I’ve often been critical of Canonical although not really of the volunteer community that supports Ubuntu. You know the same old stuff about how Canonical doesn’t work with upstream, they don’t contribute back much, most of the work that is outwardly visible is on their proprietary stuff… they seem to get way more credit than they deserve… and they still, so far as I know, haven’t figured out a way to be profitable… which I think is very important for something so many people depend on. You’ve heard all of that before many times from many people. Nothing new here.
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Recently there has been some fire flowing about Canonical in the community. These concerns started off as sporadic at first and then we saw a small blog avalanche (blogalanche, if you will) as a number of folks piled onto the ride.
I feel somewhat trapped in the middle of all of this. On one hand I work at Canonical and I believe Canonical are acting in the honorable interests of Ubuntu in helping to build a competitive and forward-looking Free Software platform, but I also feel a sense of personal responsibility when I see unhappy members of our community who are concerned with different aspects of how Canonical engages. Essentially, I sympathize with both sides of this debate; both have the best interests at heart for Ubuntu.
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Charles Profitt, in his recent post Ubuntu: Time to Take the Shot, talks about a meeting that the Community Council had with Mark on Tuesday. This followed a weekend of me doing everything in my power to step back from the recent announcements and discussions from Canonical that made my Thursday and Friday very difficult.
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That should be obvious to anybody who’s been following the development of Ubuntu, but for those who have not, here’s the deal: Ubuntu is not a community distribution.
The sooner you get that, the better, especially if you’ve been under the illusion that Mark Shuttleworth cares very much about your own idea of what a community distribution should be.
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Ubuntu — possibly the most popular distribution of the open source Linux operating system — is striking out on its own. Canonical, the commercial company that oversees Ubuntu, has made a habit of building new Linux components from scratch, moving away from tools built and used by the larger open source community. That’s rubbing many Linux developers and users the wrong way, and now Canonical may have finally alienated these hard-core open sourcers.
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It’s no secret that Linux and open-source projects have fights over the direction of a project, but it’s unusual for Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, to public fuss with programmers via his blog.
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The CeBIT 2013 event takes place these days, between March 5 and 9, in Hannover, Germany, and Canonical is there to enchant visitors with technical details about Ubuntu Cloud Stack and Ubuntu Landscape Systems Management.
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I am concerned with the current status of Ubuntu, not because of the tension on the community or the new software being put out. I am concerned because I feel my time and contributions might go to waste and fall on deaf ears. As leader of a LoCo, how do I know if the work I am putting in is even going to matter in two months when 13.04 comes out? Is my work still relevant because it has nothing to do with a cell phone, nothing to do with a display server, and nothing that in any way is a direct profit source for the Canonical.
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Another item discussed on the first day of the virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit is about the roadmap for the Ubuntu SDK.
Perhaps most interesting from the hour-long session for the broad community was what they’re looking at for their main tool to the Ubuntu SDK: Qt Creator. Ubuntu developers are looking at the open-source cross-platform Qt Creator, which is also part of the Qt SDK, as the integrated development environment for the Ubuntu SDK.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint has four desktop environments that you can choose from. There is KDE, Xfce, Cinnamon and Mate. The two most common choices by users are Cinnamon and Mate. Technically, you can download any of the desktop environments and change them later. If you decide to go with Mate and later on want to install Cinnamon, the change is going to be easy.
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In 2012, the embedded Linux market lost a valued resource when LinuxDevices.com became a collateral casualty of QuinStreet’s acquisition of a group of websites from Ziff Davis Enterprise. Unfortunately the new owner has no interest in supporting the site, so LinuxDevices has lain dormant for over a year.
As the year wore on, a growing number of individuals and companies urged me (as the site’s founder) to do something to get LinuxDevices back on its feet, or to launch a new site to fill the void.
Thanks to this encouragement, and recognizing that embedded Linux is not simply alive and well, but has been growing exponentially as the OS-of-choice for smartphones and numerous other embedded applications, I decided to launch a successor site.
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In 2012, the embedded Linux market lost a valued resource when LinuxDevices.com became a collateral casualty of QuinStreet’s acquisition of a group of websites from Ziff Davis Enterprise. Unfortunately the new owner had no interest in supporting the site, so LinuxDevices has lain dormant ever since the acquisition.
As the year wore on, a growing number of individuals and companies urged me (as the site’s founder) to do something to get LinuxDevices back on its feet, or to launch a new site to fill the void.
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March Networks has released a new family of high-performance network video recorders (NVRs), which feature an embedded Linux operating system. The 8000 Series NVRs are aimed at video surveillance, license plate recognition, access control, ATM, and other applications requiring secure, reliable, high-definition video monitoring and storage.
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Phones
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As promised in December 2012, Jolla, the company behind the SailfishOS, has released an Alpha SDK of the operating system targeted at developers. The SDK is currently supported only on Linux systems (Fedora 18 and Ubuntu 12.10), but a PC and Mac-compatible version is in the works.
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Ballnux
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Samsung’s Galaxy S4 will be unveiled in March and when it appears expect to see several improvements over the highly successful Galaxy S3.
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Android
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We first told you about the MG back in September of 2012, when it was in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign attempting to raise a staggering $950,000. Perhaps they were inspired by the historic success of the OUYA just a few weeks prior, hoping to repeat that system’s incredible funding level on the same $950,000 goal. Unfortunately, the MG fell far short of its lofty goals, failing before it even reached $50,000.
But owing to the professionalism of the team behind it, and community interest in a low-cost vanilla Android Ice Cream Sandwich handheld gaming system, the MG beat the odds and was able to launch on-time.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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In case you’ve followed us during the past couple of months or so, you might be aware of the fact that we’re quite excited about the Ubuntu Touch OS, and about the smartphones and tablets that are supposed to be powered by Canonical’s operating system. The platform seems very promising, the gesture-based navigation is quite interesting and who could argue that the flexibility of the OS is a bad thing?
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Mellanox Technologies pledged it will support open source software for its Ethernet switches over the next several months. The chip and system provider hopes to gain an edge over larger competitors that are only partially embracing a trend to open software for Ethernet.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS/Big Data
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Big Data is suddenly hot, winning Harvard Business Review’s recent “sexiest job of the 21st century” sweepstakes. It’s been slow to penetrate the world of human resources, however – but all that is changing fast, says Beth Axelrod, Senior Vice President of Human Resources for e-commerce giant eBay Inc., and co-author of The War for Talent. “There’s a lot of value to be created and added through data analytics,” she says, “whether it’s doing a better job spotting talent outside to attract to the company, or doing predictive analysis of who is likely to leave and what are the factors, so you can intervene before that point is reached to try to change the trajectory. There’s a ton of opportunity there.”
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Technology vendors have backed a community-developed software platform as the critical piece to bring big data to the masses.
EMC and Intel have joined IBM and Red Hat in releasing their own flavours of an open-source software that manages how hardware in data centres accesses and processes information. The Hadoop open-source software by the Apache Software Foundation was released in October. It helps extract business insights from huge amounts of unstructured data, a trend commonly referred to as big data.
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Databases
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Industry analysis suggests that Google handles as many as two million pieces of data every minute.
Combine this “fact” with the challenge of managing a transactional workload with big data complexity riddled right through its centre and you can see why data analysis and both macro- and micro-level data management is a pertinent issue today.
The open source community submits that it may have a route to new agility in this space through building functionality on top of MariaDB to keep it from downtime by replicating copies of the database on servers, which are located in different parts of the world.
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MariaDB now has a high-availability option ready for production use; the developers at MariaDB and Codership have released MariaDB Galera Cluster 5.5.29 as a Stable GA (generally available) version. The release gives MariaDB users access to a scaling solution for the SQL database with synchronous multi-master replication and guaranteed data consistency. Clusters built with the technology should prove automatically resilient with no risk of losing nodes with unique datasets on them.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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CMS
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Pelican is a Python-powered static website generator which comes with a rather decent feature set. It allows you to write your blog entries in reStructuredText, Markdown, or AsciiDoc using any editor that you desire.
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Drupal’s creator, Dries Buytaert, on Drupal 8 and the open source project’s future in the enterprise
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Business
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Funding
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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The government should not have an “open source first policy,” Homeland Security Department Chief Information Officer Richard Spires said Wednesday, but added officials should look to open source technology whenever possible.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open source software is based on the philosophy of access — allowing people to get to the resources that they need to build things that are useful to them and their way of life. So anyone who is capable of doing so, can make a life for himself or herself without having to rely upon expensive software made by mighty big corporations. Proprietary software is essentially closed — its makers sell it to you and subject you to rules of their own making. They make it seem as if you owe them thanks and as if they are doing you a favour by allowing you use of their system.
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Open Data
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Although occasionally infuriating around roundabouts and new developments, we have placed an inordinate amount of faith in Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites as they exist for in-car and/or smartphone usage.
So why would we need an open source alternative?
Well the GPS system was created and is still predominantly run by the US Department of Defense (they mean Defence) with a history that dates back as far as the early 1970s.
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Open Access/Content
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We know there are going to be books about Aaron Swartz.
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Cornyn, a former Texas attorney general, clearly disagreed and suggested that stacking up a large number of felony charges in the case seemed intended at coercing Swartz to plead guilty rather than take the matter before a jury.
“I would suggest to you if you’re an individual American citizen and you’re looking at criminal charges being brought by the United States government with all of the vast resources available to the government, it strikes me as disproportionate and one that is basically being used inappropriately to try to bully someone into pleading guilty to something that strikes me as rather minor,” the Texas senator said.
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“Does it strike you as odd,” Cornyn asked, “that the government would indict someone for crimes that would carry penalties of up to 35 years in prison and million dollar fines and then offer him a three or four month prison sentence?”
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Open Hardware
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After the open source software movement in the IT sector, the new wave is that of open source hardware, wherein the information about the hardware can easily be discerned and it can be further customised.
Beth E Kolko, head, Design for Digital Inclusion Lab, University of Washington, who is in Kerala to promote the movement, said that though at a nascent stage the Open Source hardware movement could go a long way by opening up the space for innovation and could impact the lives of millions.
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Programming
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Hardware
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Forget tablets and economic woes. “Good enough” computer performance might be the real reason for lackluster PC sales.
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Health/Nutrition
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I am afraid this is a personal medical story, but I think it makes a very damning point about the state of the NHS. There is no sensible way to tell it without giving an uncomfortable (I suspect for both of us) level of medical detail about myself.
I had two collapses very early in the New Year, one with loss of consciousness of over ten minutes. On the second occasion we called 999, and the response was superb – a paramedic in less than five minutes and and ambulance in less than ten.
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Security
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Three days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress approved the Authorization for Use of Military Force. It was enacted with good intentions — to give President George W. Bush the authority to invade Afghanistan and go after Al Qaeda and the Taliban rulers who sheltered and aided the terrorists who had attacked the United States.
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The progressive ‘empathy gap’, a strain of liberal authoritarianism, and a distortion of Holder’s letter are invoked to defend Obama
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A LOT of what we do is make-believe.
I’ve had to screen small children and explain to their parents I had no choice but to “check” them. I would only place my hands on their arms and bottom half of their legs, and the entire “pat-down” lasted 10 seconds. This goes completely against TSA procedure.
Because the cameras are recording our every move, we have to do something. If someone isn’t checked or even screened properly, the entire terminal would shut down, as this constitutes a security breach.
But since most TSA supervisors are too daft to actually supervise, bending the rules is easy to do.
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A hundred flickering candles and mountains of flowers block the entrance to Varna’s city hall, surrounding a picture of a smiling young man with long hair who has become a symbol of anti-corruption protests that have swept Bulgaria.
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Chalmers Johnson called the CIA the president’s private army. Imperial Rome had its praetorian guard. It served and protected emperors.
CIA rogues work the same way. They do lots more than that. Extrajudicial killing is prioritized. Much that goes on is secret. Unaccountability keeps Congress and ordinary people uninformed.
Johnson said US presidents have “untrammeled control of the CIA.” It’s “probably (their) single most extraordinary power.”
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The recent controversy surrounding the film Zero Dark Thirty only proves the debate surrounding torture isn’t over. There are some who continue to make the false claim that torture worked, and seek to reinstate the practice.
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They don’t target citizens in the United States. They kill them overseas as collateral damage.
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Drones are clearly a big part of the future.
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An RAF base in Britain is being used by America in its controversial drone warfare campaign, it was claimed last night.
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The administration’s outrageous response to the most serious Constitutional question of all — when a government can kill its own citizens — is clear evidence of an executive branch out of control.
Many of the drafters of the Constitution envisioned the presidency as an office with very limited powers, but even the most dedicated proponents of a strong presidency at the time would be shocked to see the concentration of power in the modern presidency.
Today the presidency is viewed as the center of the federal government, with each successive administration expanding the power of the executive at the expense of Congress and the people.
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Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman on Sunday said it was “very odd” that Republicans who supported waterboarding would join Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) anti-drone filibuster.
Paul began his 13-hour filibuster on Wednesday morning to demand whether the Obama administration believed it could kill a U.S. citizen with a drone strike within the country.
“It was a very weird way to start the debate,” Krugman remarked on ABC News’ This Week. “I mean, specifically about drones and on American soil? Does that mean it is OK to kill me with a drone while I’m visiting Paris or it’s OK to kill me in the United States as long as it’s by a sniper but not a drone? It was a very peculiar way to phrase the question.”
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The recent increase in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), commonly known as drones, has been observed in conflict areas such as Yemen and in Pakistan and, more surprisingly, in civilian settings like the United States. Whereas its use as weapon for extrajudicial killings – i.e. the processes of sentencing people to death and implementing those decisions without any court decision – poses a myriad of ethical and legal issues, use of drones by the private sector, and police and border patrol agents, has ignited a discussion on the frontiers of legality, revealing a process where ethical, philosophical, legal and political debates have not accompanied the speed of technological progress.
This article focuses on recent developments in the use of drones, and exposes some of the contentious issues surrounding the debate. Departing from public available data, and placing itself within theoretical debates in the domain of international relations theories, this article points to avenues for further inquiry on the use of drones.
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A federal judge said it would not be futile for a former Oxbow executive to amend claims that his billionaire boss William Koch imprisoned him on a sprawling Colorado ranch.
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Cablegate
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I asked that question in the headline last week after Bradley Manning in his lengthy statement at his hearing revealed for the first time that he had called the NYT public editor before contacting WikiLeaks–left a message and did not get his call returned. So tonight, Bill Keller, who was the top editor of the paper at that time–and later published hundreds of stories based on Manning material (while also bashing Julian Assange)–takes up that question in a column.
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IMAGINE if American citizens never learned about the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Imagine not knowing about the brutal treatment of terror suspects at United States government “black sites.” Or about the drone program that is expanding under President Obama, or the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping of Americans.
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Finance
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Morgan Stanley (MS) lagged behind peers in a key measure of capital strength used by U.S. regulators to stress- test their resiliency in a severe recession.
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Goldman Sachs yesterday lost its bid to keep a shareholder proposal to split the chairman and CEO roles off its proxy statement.
Yesterday, the Securities and Exchange Commission informed the bank that it couldn’t block the proposal from being included among a list of proposals at its next annual shareholder meeting.
[...]
Lloyd Blankfein currently holds both titles at the gold-plated investment bank, which argues that it benefits from having a unified voice at the head of the firm.
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The Masters of Mankind want us to become the “stupid nation,” in the interests of their short-term gain — damn the consequences.
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His death came more than two years after Wells Fargo mistakenly mixed up his Hermosa Beach address with that of a neighbor in the same condo complex. The bank’s typo led Wells Fargo to demand that Delassus pay $13,361.90 — two years of late property taxes the bank said it had paid on his behalf in order to keep his Wells Fargo mortgage afloat.
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The Greater Manchester Poverty Commission states that 600,000 people are in “extreme poverty” in the Greater Manchester region. The region is the largest urban conurbation in the north of the UK, with a population of nearly 2.7 million.
That poverty is so entrenched in a region covering two cities and eight towns is a devastating indictment of the cumulative effects of central and local government policies over the last three decades carried out by the three parties of big business, Labour, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Censorship
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When China and other nations block the websites of U.S. companies but the United States doesn’t respond in kind there’s a strong argument that creates an unfair trade barrier, said Andrew McLaughlin, former White House deputy chief technology officer.
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Privacy
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Officials from justice departments across the EU have been asked to explore to what extent the pseudonymisation of personal data can be used to “calibrate” businesses’ obligations to data protection.
Pseudonymisation (such as assigning fake names to people), as opposed to anonymisation (complete stripping of identity), allows the same individual to be assigned the same pseudonym across various data sets.
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A southwestern Ohio judge yesterday ordered a halt to a speeding-ticket blitz in a village that installed traffic cameras, saying it’s “a scam” against motorists.
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Its co-founder and webmaster, a feisty 77-year-old architect, doesn’t hesitate when asked why.
“I’m a fierce opponent of government secrets of all kinds,” says John Young. “The scale is tipped so far the other way that I’m willing to stick my neck out and say there should be none.”
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Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose), Ted Poe (R-TX) and Suzan DelBene (D-WA) today introduced bipartisan legislation modernizing the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA. Consumers and businesses are increasingly using cloud computing and location-based services, but the law has failed to keep pace with technology – leading to weak and convoluted privacy protections from government access to user data. The bill, H.R. 983, the Online Communications and Geolocation Protection Act, would strengthen the privacy of Internet users and wireless subscribers from overbroad government surveillance by requiring the government to get a warrant based on probable cause before intercepting or forcing the disclosure of electronics communications and geolocation data.
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For years, conventional wisdom about privacy has been that shoppers—especially younger shoppers—have been consistently sharing more information online to the general public, a trend that would likely continue as privacy desensitization progressed. But a report released Tuesday (March 5) from Carnegie Mellon University found the opposite when it tracked 5,076 Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) users from 2005 through 2011, one of the most extensive studies of social media privacy yet.
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Civil Rights
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Police in America are particularly excited about what predictive policing…
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The software is called Pred-Pol, short for “predictive policing.” It was developed by a professor at UCLA in cooperation with the Los Angeles Police Department and based on the same kind of computer modeling that helps scientists predict aftershocks following earthquakes.
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One of the country’s leading human rights barristers is to resign her membership of the Liberal Democrats to express her outrage over the coalition government’s backing for secret courts.
Dinah Rose QC successfully represented the British-resident Guantánamo detainee, Binyam Mohamed, in his battle to establish that British intelligence services were complicit in his “cruel and inhuman” treatment by the United States.
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Two of the former Drug Enforcement Agency officials who came out this week urging the federal government to nullify new state pot laws in Washington and Colorado are facing criticism for simultaneously running a company that may profit from keeping marijuana illegal.
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Here’s a surprise ruling. For many years we’ve written about how troubling it is that Homeland Security agents are able to search the contents of electronic devices, such as computers and phones at the border, without any reason. The 4th Amendment only allows reasonable searches, usually with a warrant. But the general argument has long been that, when you’re at the border, you’re not in the country and the 4th Amendment doesn’t apply. This rule has been stretched at times, including the ability to take your computer and devices into the country and search it there, while still considering it a “border search,” for which the lower standards apply. Just about a month ago, we noted that Homeland Security saw no reason to change this policy.
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As some DIW readers know, last summer, I received several subpoenas from Duke, demanding among other things my confidential communications with hundreds of people relating to the “lacrosse incident” or discussing in any way President Brodhead’s “job performance.” The targeted correspondents consisted of all members of the 2006 lacrosse team, including the three falsely accused players who had long ago settled with Duke; all lawyers who were involved in the civil suit; all Duke faculty members; all Duke administrators or other employees; and all Duke alumni.
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A Los Angeles Superior Court judge has ruled that Ovitz has failed to show that he’s entitled to summary judgment over Busch’s claims that Ovitz instigated a series of acts against her a decade ago, including the wiretapping of the journalist’s phone, a note on her windshield that read “Stop” with a dead fish and a rose, a hacked computer, an attack while she was driving her car and more.
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DRM
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One day after the White House called on Congress to make cell phone unlocking legal, a Minnesota senator today announced plans for legislation that would allow the practice.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, said she will introduce a bill this week that would allow for cell phone unlocking.
“Consumers should be free to choose the phone and service that best fits their needs and their budgets,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “I will continue to work to advance commonsense measures to protect consumers and promote competition.”
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In recent years we have seen more and more attempts to separate us from the core computing functions on our personal computing devices. The iPhone is stock full of them and that is the fundamental reason I will never use one. The same is true of the iPad. So iOS users jailbreak their phones. The evasion iPhone jailbreak is on 23 million phones now.
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On January 26 this year, the Librarian of Congress declared that unlocking a cell phone to make it available on other carriers was illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Most of us are aware of the basics of U.S. copyright law, including the categories of copyrightable and non-copyrightable works. Some materials are explicitly exempted from copyright in this country, a key example being U.S. Federal documents. (Although if that sounds to you like a clearly distinguishable category, you should ask your local government documents librarian to fill you in on the complexities of defining “U.S. Federal document.”) Another exempted category is that of facts and compilations of facts that have no creative component. This was determined in the famous Supreme Court ruling of Feist v. Rural Telephone, in which the Court interpreted the constitutional wording of “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” as implying some level of creativity.
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A New Zealand appellate court rules that the U.S. won’t have to turn over documents and that the coming extradition hearing will consider only a “limited weighing of evidence.”
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The man behind the petition to re-legalize unlocking of cellphones now has a broader target: The Digital Millenium Copyright Act itself.
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Posted in America, Patents at 8:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Smartphones a key area where patents clearly harm innovation and oppress customers
Summary: The USPTO is urged to limit the scope of patents while China follows the USPTO doctrine by broadening scope to realms of the absurd
THE institutional core which facilitates a lot of distortion by the likes of Microsoft and Apple is the USPTO, an indirectly corporate-run body which distributes monopolies on different sections of the industry. IBM’s cronyism inside the USPTO may be ending, but the institutional corruption is guaranteed to live on. As we have shown in recent weeks, USPTO discussions are rigged by design. They are tailored for corporate interests and many issues or views are totally off the table and outside the panel.
Groklaw has brainstormed and come up with 4 suggestions for the USPTO to be talking about. These are summarised as follows:
Suggested topic 1:
Is computer software properly patentable subject matter?
]…[
Suggested topic 2:
Are software patents helping or hurting the US innovation and hence the economy?
[...]
Suggested topic 3:
How can software developers help the USPTO understand how computers actually work, so issued patents match technical realities, avoiding patents on functions that are obvious to those skilled in the art, as well as avoiding duplication of prior art?
[...]
Suggested topic 4:
What is an abstract idea in software and how do expressions of ideas differ from applications of ideas?
The USPTO has been expanding the scope of patents as means of pretending that innovation is on the rise. There is a need for constant growth or inflation in terms of USPTO business, just as the arms industry seeks areas of expansion by artificially creating some conflicts. The abundance of patents is a side effect of subsidies from those who play a numbers game, seeking to artificially saturate the market for vanity purposes and national agenda, not just protectionism. Based on this post from Patentology, China too is now following the same trajectory as the US, just as it did in the Olympics (training and sponsoring people to acquire medals for national pride). The outcome is something like this:
A Chinese government scheme providing financial incentives for small and medium sized enterprises, public institutions or scientific research institutions appears to be resulting in abuse of the Australian patent system, and the ‘dumping’ of numerous low-quality innovation patents on the Australian Register.
These ‘junk’ patents are not being examined or certified. They therefore represent no more than potential enforceable rights. Even so, they generate costs to companies operating legitimately in Australia, which may need to obtain advice on the likely scope and validity of these patents in order to avoid possible infringement. In extreme cases, the existence of junk patents could result in an Australian business choosing not to take the risk of bringing a new product to market, even though the Chinese owner of a patent is not itself offering any products or services in this country.
We must come to universally recognise that patents are nothing more than government-granted monopolies which sometimes the government itself incentivises for selfish purposes that in no way benefit the public. It’s partly a PR exercise. The solution is to limit the scope of patenting, restoring a sane threshold and constraining patents based on economic grounds, not idealogical ones. In much of the world software patents are not legal, but those who go down the slippery slope of patent maximalism strive to change that. █
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Posted in Patents at 6:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Dodging the main issue, which is monopolies on maths
Summary: Patent trolls and patent “quality” increasingly targeted rather than the debate about software patenting
There has been a lot of patent resentment recently, all directed at patent trolls and software patents, the trolls’ weapon of choice. There is
this new post from someone whose work is being attacked by a patent troll. It bothers me personally also because it is similar to an Android app I developed; to think that patent trolls can extort such apps is enough to convince myself and other developers that patent trolls and software patents harm everyone in almost every way.
A new style of trolling emerges following general apathy and tolerance towards patent trolls. This one report speaks of a troll scam which uses extortion, but unlike patent trolls, these ones go to prison:
An organization calling itself the “Internet Copyright Law Enforcement Agency” (ICLEA) recently sent out a batch of copyright infringement notices. One letter reproduced online states that “if this matter is not settled by Friday, March 1, 2013 then you may face serious potential criminal and/or civil charges filed against you. If you are arrested for felony criminal copyright infringement you will be fingerprinted, photographed, and held in jail until you are arraigned in court.” Recipients have been asked to pay various amounts, such as $395 or $495.
Needless to say, this is a scam. Under US law, only the government can indict defendants or throw them in jail. And the scammers seem to have realized that they made a big mistake, as their website now states, “Effective immediately, the Internet Copyright Law Enforcement Agency has ceased operations. Please disregard any notices you received from us, and please do not send us any payments.”
But as a screenshot captured by Fight Copyright Trolls shows, that’s not what the website used to say. Previously, the ICLEA claimed to be “an international organization that helps to enforce copyright laws on the Internet worldwide by informing potential copyright law violators regarding the serious criminal and/or civil liability they may face, and providing them with an opportunity to help them comply with copyright laws.”
I don’t believe that patent trolls should be sent to prison, just bankrupted. “A small company is suing us for patent infringement” says a Dilbert cartoon which can be found here. It sure seems like this whole trolling phenomenon has grown deep into public conscience. Here is a new high-profile trolling case, which CBS reported on as follows:
Maz Encryption Technologies, a Delaware company made up of two former employees of Maz Technologies, filed suits last week against Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Lenovo, and Research In Motion (now BlackBerry).
There is a case fought by Function Media, L.L.C. against Google Inc. and lawyers who cover if say: “Function Media sued Google for infringement of three related patents: 6,446,045; 7,240,025; and 7,249,059. The patents involve a system for facilitating advertising on multiple advertising outlets (such as different websites) with different formatting requirements. The district court granted summary judgment that the sole independent claim of the ’045 patent was indefinite and a jury subsequently found that the asserted claims of the ’025 and ’059 patents invalid and not infringed. The district court granted JMOL of validity of four claims but the noninfringement verdict stood. FM appealed several issues including the indefiniteness ruling and raised a challenge based on O2 Micro.”
Here is another interesting article from the same site: “In a 9-0 decision, the Supreme Court has limited the scope of “arising under” jurisdiction for patent cases and held that the Minton’s patent litigation malpractice case does not arise under the patent laws and therefore is not amenable to exclusive federal jurisdiction.”
In a relatively arrogant and rude site of patent lawyers we find someone willing to accuse of faith-based insistence those who actually have academic studies and developers’ voices on their side. Watch this opening paragraph:
Rarely a week goes by these days without the publication of one academic study or another that addresses the “problem” of software patents in the US, often in tandem with a dissection of the cruelties inflicted by “patent trolls”. The conclusions of these studies are almost always variations on the same theme: “Something has to be done because the current regime is stifling economic growth, as companies are afraid to innovate because they may be sued for patent infringement.” These studies are always very precise about the specific problem within the system that they address, but they never seem to provide any evidence that innovation is, in fact, being affected by patents. That just seems to be taken as an article of faith.
The software patenting proponents, or in other words patent lawyers, latch onto Rader, a SCOTUS-glorified lawyer, for advocacy of this whole patent mess. The WatchTroll says “the patent system is far to important to allow bad actors and those with an anti-patent agenda to manipulate the mass-media, public and policy makers into believing that patents are inherently evil and deserving of the blame. Patents are objectively good by any fair and factual assessment of history. We just need to get the message out.”
It’s not about good or bad, it’s about within or outside scope. All software patents, for instance, are bad because they apply to abstract ideas. Meanwhile, the “head of litigation and intellectual property at Twitter” (i.e. a lawyer) promotes something which is not the solution but a hack of some kind, as we covered before. He says: “Even if the company or a future buyer of the patent wants to renege on the promises of the IPA, the inventors can hold them accountable and grant licenses to others. Suppose a company sells the patents to someone who decides to sue others offensively (in violation of the IPA); the inventors then have the ability to grant a license to the person or entity being sued. The license would thus protect the people being sued if the suit violated the promises in the IPA.”
A simpler solution would be to just eliminate software patents. The SHIELD act is an example of addressing the issue in another dodgy way, which IDG promotes as follows:
I’ve said before, and often repeated, that software patents are evil. Ask almost any experienced software product engineer — especially in an open source project — and they’ll tell you software patents are a bug, not a feature. The worst problem they face is patent trolls appearing from nowhere and enaging in a legal shakedown. Even President Obama says, “They don’t actually produce anything themselves. They are essentially trying to leverage and hijack somebody else’s idea and see if they can extort some money out of them.”
But if you take away software patents, then a lot of trolls would go extinct. The SHIELD act is just a hack which assumes the defendant can afford a long trial. Here is what one writer says to provide background:
Last year, the first bill that could take a bite out of the business model of so-called “patent trolls” was introduced. Not much happened with it, but today a reworked bill has been introduced by the same sponsors: Reps. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) and Peter DeFazio (D-OR). The bill is called the SHIELD Act of 2013, which stands for “Saving High-Tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes
Here is a criticism of SHIELD:
Evidently at least one Congressman feels that the AIA does not go far enough to combat patent “troll” lawsuits. Congressman Defazio of Oregon is sponsoring yet another bill entitled “Saving High-Tech Innovators From Egregious Legal Disputes Act.” The bill, like its 2012 predecessor, proposes that the costs (including attorney fees) of certain types of patent lawsuits should be recoverable from the Patentee once the court finds the patent invalid, or not infringed. The 2012 version of the bill was limited to software type inventions and mandated payment for only frivolous suits.
If they can classify something as “software type”, why grant a patent on it in the first place?
These cases would usually be dismissed provided there is prior art, so why are such patents granted in the first place? Well, it is hard to exhaustively study all software in existence, whereas for hardware it is much simpler because few players can manufacture cutting-edge hardware.
Here’s a new article about how to locate prior art and something in the news about frivolous patent cases:
The law firm of Pearl Cohen Zedek Latzer and two of its partners have been hit with more than $200,000 in sanctions for filing a frivolous patent case, opposing an earlier sanctions ruling and, according to a federal judge in Manhattan, wasting the court’s time.
On Feb. 21, Southern District Judge Colleen McMahon (See Profile) ordered the legal team for plaintiff Source Vagabond Systems Ltd. to pay $200,054 in sanctions to defendant Hydrapak Inc.
Those lawsuits show that patent trolling, or the turning of patents into a business model, are a true issues as courts can recognise. In order to properly set up a deterrent they need to find out where those patents come from in the first place. We rarely if ever hear about trolling with hardware patents; statistically speaking, trolling is mostly a symptom of software patenting. █
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Posted in Apple, Asia, Patents, Samsung at 6:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Apple continues to find that patent wars against Linux/Android are getting it nowhere
Apple’s hype machine is losing its momentum as technically superior devices come out and outsell Apple’s best-selling products. Those devices have Linux in them.
Apple has been impeding development of some of the world’s technically best phones, the Galaxy S series. “Apple and Samsung,” writes Pamela Jones, “at the judge’s request, have filed their joint status report [PDF] on the theme of whether the judge should stay Apple v. Samsung II until after the appeals court rules on Apple’s appeal of Apple v. Samsung I. It’s a joint report, filed together, but they agree on nothing. Samsung says they should wait; Apple says they shouldn’t. Apple says that the two cases are distinct, with Apple II involving none of the same patents and “virtually none” of the same Samsung products.”
I happen to know some Apple fans who turned into Galaxy S fans. I met one of them yesterday. Even some prominent Apple people, such as Woz and Guy Kawasaki, seem to be walking away from the “i” hype.
Apple may be under some patent attacks, but the scale of the attacks which come from Apple is much greater. Samsung, responding to Apple’s aggression, tried to block Apple in Japan:
Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) failed in a bid to block sales of Apple Inc. (AAPL) iPads and iPhones in Japan, the latest step in a global patent spat between the world’s two largest smartphone makers.
The Tokyo District Court rejected the request as Samsung hadn’t negotiated “sincerely” with Apple over licensing data- sending patents, Judge Ichiro Otaka said in a ruling today. The court also ruled that Samsung doesn’t have the right to seek damages from Apple.
According to another recent report, “touchscreen gesture patents that Apple has accused Samsung of infringing on are not eligible to be patented in the first place, according to Samsung’s Australian barrister Richard Cobden.”
This case or set of cases between Apple and Samsung may help determine how quickly Android grows. In a new paper from Lemley et al. it is being claimed that trial length in patent cases has no effect on the outcome, which may be good news for several defendants in Linux-related cases. Here are some more findings:
We conduct a comprehensive study of all patent trials over the past eleven years. We find that juries are more favorable to patentees than judges, that (to our surprise) the length of a trial has no effect on its outcome, and that there are surprisingly modest differences between patentee win rates in favored jurisdictions like Delaware and the Eastern District of Texas.
Apple is desperate to carry on with this battle that Steve Jobs advocated for whereas the current CEO, based on reports, actually opposed. It has been a long time since Apple started this clueless patent war and Apple is barely getting anywhere with it. Apple is just getting distracted and it slows down. The US press, CBS for example, keeps posing Apple propaganda in the form of biased, flawwd statistics. The authors, some of whom used to serve the Microsoft press, fail to stall Linux growth. The latest of the Galaxy S series, the S4, is to be officially announced this week. █
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03.10.13
Posted in IRC Logs at 12:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
IRC Proceedings: March 3rd, 2013
IRC Proceedings: March 4th, 2013
IRC Proceedings: March 5th, 2013
IRC Proceedings: March 6th, 2013
IRC Proceedings: March 7th, 2013
IRC Proceedings: March 8th, 2013
IRC Proceedings: March 9th, 2013
Enter the IRC channels now
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents, RAND at 11:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Rules of imperialism
Summary: Microsoft continues to distort the market by sending trolls, lawyers and politicians to impede Google’s business
Patent trolls using standards bodies to assault businesses with real products is what some people fear more than the occasional troll lawsuit. The cost of products depends heavily on innovation coming about in peaceful environments without patent tolls and filing of patents. Some companies feel like it’s fair to change the way the industry operates naturally and they fund entities that achieve this. Patent pools are one type of cartel which offers peace to members and extortion for the rest. MPEG cartel members are willing to get aggressive, too and they have just taken a shot at VP8:
In recent years, MPEG LA has been accused of inhibiting the innovation that it was designed to foster. Notably, the company’s practice of charging high licensing fees for patents that are near or past expiration has led critics to assert that the firm has placed profit above its core mission of cheap and accessible licensing of digital video patents. Technology market players have also alleged that MPEG LA has violated the terms of its original agreement with DOJ by failing to invite oversight of its licensing practices by independent experts, and neglecting to adhere to FRAND guidelines. A firm that was once a model (at least in theory) of the potential benefits from collaboration has morphed into one of the industry’s most notorious and most harmful players….
Notice the role of FRAND there. MPEG-LA is a patent troll in disguise (led by the troll Larry Horn) and it extorts WebM. Microsoft booster Peter Bright, who was spreading FUD against WebM for a while, whitewashes an extortion by Horn while Pamela Jones shows how close Horn is to Microsoft:
Cf. Mr. Horn’s involvement on behalf of Microsoft and once again against Motorola/Google in Microsoft v. Motorola in Seattle.
The news is not VP8 getting devoured but WebM getting extorted. Here is one report on the matter:
With the clearing of the patent issues that have cast a shadow over VP8′s acceptability to open standards organisations as a open, royalty-free video codec, it is likely that its next major stop is becoming an MPEG standard. According to Rob Glidden, video patent analyst, Google proposed VP8 as the codec for MPEG’s IVC in January. IVC is the name of one of the tracks that the ISO/IEC MPEG working group was exploring in its search for a royalty-free codec for web video and other uses. It had been looking at technologies where the patents were expiring.
What we see here is a law-bending move designed to derail patents-free standards. It is similar to what happened in the OOXML saga, where ISO too got used as a Trojan horse for patent-encumbered so-called standards. It is a vicious and corrupt battle where clueless politicians are often just used as tools for corporate profits and power. Not too long ago we saw Microsoft Facebook lobbying politicians to incite them against Google. Microsoft has far more lobbyists than everyone else in Europe (in the technology sector) and 17 lobbyists of Microsoft are identified in this article, lumping some of them together:
The biggest makers of Spyware are not Hackers… They are Companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft that make billions selling your personal likes, dislikes and opinions to an enormous glut of advertisers and social programmers. They would rather fight piracy on their collective own than have the Government regulate their blatant invasion of the public’s privacy.
Microsoft, the hypocrite, has for a long time been trying to use “privacy” against Google and it is using lawmakers to selfishly render their competition “illegal” again in Massachusetts. See this new report (the “think about the children!” strategy):
Microsoft is after Google again with a school privacy bill that could wipe out Google’s cloud-computing services for students.
Microsoft is backing a bill that targets Google’s Apps for Education, saying that these cloud-computing services are collecting data from schoolchildren for the purpose of creating better advertising or other commercial means.
“We believe that student data should not be used for commercial purposes; that cloud-service providers should be transparent in how they use student data; and that service providers should obtain clear consent for the way they use data,” said Mike Houlihan, a Microsoft spokesman. “We expect that students, parents and educators will judge any proposed legislation on its merits.”
The bill was unveiled in January, and is currently being considered by Massachusetts’s lawmakers. Microsoft has been very direct with the fact that it is behind this bill, and that Google is the target.
This is classic Microsoft, using lawmakers to help where Microsoft is losing. It is one form of corruption among several similar ones. █
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Posted in Europe, Free/Libre Software, Microsoft, Patents, RAND at 10:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Under many people’s noses, and with help from an army of lobbyists, Microsoft and its allies exclude their main competitors, through legislation
The FRAND debate has got lawyers dedicated to the matter [1, 2, 3] and there is a great deal of deception in the pipeline, promoting software patents through FRAND even in Europe. As Pamela Jones notes in her reply to the EU Commission’s page:
Note that, sadly, the Guidelines recognize patent licensing of software as legitimate (p. 5, plus first sentence, above, from the draft), although they seem to exempt non-practicing entities (p. 41, 133(c)) from the benefits of this acceptance. Another detail, on page 69, is: “Where the pool has a dominant position on the market, royalties and other licensing terms should be FRAND and licences should be non-exclusive.” I gather they are adopting Google’s suggestion that de facto standards should be licensed as FRAND. Someone needs to explain to them, though, that FRAND excludes the GPL, the license on Linux. The purpose of all this is supposed to be to encourage competition, after all. Instructions on how to email or mail the Commission with comments are on the linked page.
Incidentally, Jones explains why the EU fine [1, 2, 3] for Microsoft abuses is inadequate:
What about the fact that in effect Microsoft has been able to “buy” noncompliance? By that I mean, the browser screen was supposed to be made available for 5 years. It wasn’t made available for 14 months. Is the browser screen going to be kept in effect 14 months longer than the original cutoff date, to make up for that breach? According to this New York Times article, the date is still 2014. If so, Microsoft makes out like a bandit, once again. I’ve written to the EU Commission asking them about this issue, and I’ll post any reply I receive.
[...]
At least the EU Commission is doing something, which is more than the US is doing. But Microsoft… how can anyone still be naive about Microsoft? Why would any agency believe what they say without checking, setting up a system where nobody had to check up on them for two years, given the track record? And they can’t say nobody warned them.
[...]
And may I add, no agency should believe what they say about their competitors without checking, either. Take it from the US, where we watched Microsoft’s fancy dancing to delay obedience to the US compliance requirements after the US v. Microsoft case. The EU Commission itself has some experience with having to fine Microsoft to ensure compliance before, too. Now we have been watching Microsoft on an anti-Google FUD campaign, in the media and to regulators, along with its running dogs, all of whom complain about Google in chorus. I have concluded, personally, that Microsoft just doesn’t want to be the only tech company punished for anticompetitive behavior.
Right now Microsoft is using software patents (even in Europe) to extort its competition. Will the Commission recognise this? This is anti-competitive. █
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- 2016: The Year EPO Staff Went on Strike, Possibly “Biggest Ever Strike in the History of the EPO.”
A look back at a key event inside the EPO, which marked somewhat of a breaking point for Team Battistelli
- Open EPO Letter Bemoans Battistelli's Antisocial Autocracy Disguised/Camouflaged Under the Misleading Term “Social Democracy”
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
- EPO's Central Staff Committee Complains About Battistelli's Bodyguards Fetish and Corruption of the Media
Even the EPO's Central Staff Committee (not SUEPO) understands that Battistelli brings waste and disgrace to the Office
- Translation of French Texts About Battistelli and His Awful Perception of Omnipotence
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
- 2016 in Review and Plans for 2017
A look back and a quick look at the road ahead, as 2016 comes to an end
- Links 31/12/2016: Firefox 52 Improves Privacy, Tizen Comes to Middle East
Links for the day
- Korea's Challenge of Abusive Patents, China's Race to the Bottom, and the United States' Gradual Improvement
An outline of recent stories about patents, where patent quality is key, reflecting upon the population's interests rather than the interests of few very powerful corporations
- German Justice Minister Heiko Maas, Who Flagrantly Ignores Serious EPO Abuses, Helps Battistelli's Agenda ('Reform') With the UPC
The role played by Heiko Maas in the UPC, which would harm businesses and people all across Europe, is becoming clearer and hence his motivation/desire to keep Team Battistelli in tact, in spite of endless abuses on German soil
- Links 30/12/2016: KDE for FreeBSD, Automotive Grade Linux UCB 3.0
Links for the day
- Software Patents Continue to Collapse, But IBM, Watchtroll and David Kappos Continue to Deny and Antagonise It
The latest facts and figures about software patents, compared to the spinmeisters' creed which they profit from (because they are in the litigation business)
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