07.31.11

Links White Spaces, Police Hacking, Pollution and Censorship

Posted in Site News at 5:22 pm by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Lessons of Tennessee coal ash disaster lost in Washington politics

    An Inspector General’s review done in response to the 2008 coal ash disaster at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston plant in eastern Tennessee has turned up widespread groundwater contamination from coal ash disposal sites at the company’s power plants around the South, with some of the pollution exceeding standards set to protect human health. … some in Congress are trying to scuttle the Environmental Protection Agency’s effort to regulate coal ash as hazardous waste

  • Senator using skewed numbers on oil industry safety record

    the amount of oil spilled in the Gulf of Mexico is likely closer to 471,721 barrels (19.8 million gallons) — or more than two and a half times the figure Landrieu likes to use … her number differs from API’s by just one barrel … the oil spill also resulted in 11 deaths. BOEMRE data for Gulf oil and gas operations from 1956 through 1990 shows more than 420 fatalities.

    The same senator is also fighting EPA pollution controls on coal plants.

  • Feds’ own data raise questions about effort to blame Gulf fishermen for sea turtle death spike

    The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that about 600 turtles washed up dead on Gulf Coast beaches last year and another 400 so far this year — an alarmingly high number compared to the usual 100 or so strandings per year. [NOAA, a division of the Department of Commerce blamed shrimpers and has been under counting] … Kuhns and other Gulf fishers say there’s a more likely suspect for the turtle deaths: BP’s Gulf oil spill. … “This ongoing policy of making natural resource and safety decisions based on the presence or lack of visible oil totally disregards known toxicological science,” she says. “It enables NOAA and others to relieve BP of a large part of its natural resource damage recovery responsibilities to the citizens of the United States of America.”

    With oil killing turtles and dolphins, it’s a good idea to avoid the things they eat and swim in.

  • Using a Civil War-era law to hold BP accountable in the Gulf

    one year after BP shut off the gusher of oil into the Gulf, Congress still has not passed whistleblower provisions for any of the laws that govern offshore drilling (mainly the Outer Continental Shelf Act, the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 and the Endangered Species Act). Additionally, Congress has not passed amendments to the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act that will protect and encourage federal employees to speak up for safety and compliance. … [but] They may be able to achieve whistleblower protection under the strongest whistleblower law in the United States — the False Claims Act (FCA).

  • Landmark TVA pollution settlement will help the South breathe easier

    The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates the deal will prevent as many as 3,000 premature deaths, 2,000 heart attacks and 21,000 asthma attacks each year, saving up to $27 billion in annual health costs.

  • Are Chemicals Making Us Fat?

    Medical science now clearly repudiates such a position and environmental contamination is emerging as a significant contributor to the obesity/diabetes epidemic. … these studies merely confirm hundreds of previous studies regarding the far-reaching health impacts of endocrine-disrupting/obesogen chemicals at blood levels most of us and our children live with right now. Many obesogens appear to increase levels of cholesterol and trigger cancer as well. For the first time in 200 years, children now have a shorter life expectancy than their parents, primarily due to obesity and diabetes. … the obesity epidemic [also] involves family pets, wild animals living in close proximity to humans and animals housed in research centers

  • The idea of drinking 8 glasses a day of water is medically bogus and promoted by water companies. [source article]

    If you drink bottled water that’s high in endocrine disruptors, you may be hurting yourself.

  • Michael Bloomberg got New Yorkers to quit smoking. Can he shut down coal?

  • The trash vortex in the North Pacific is now twice as large as the continental US, may hold 100 million tons of plastic and is growing at an alarming rate.

    the slowly rotating mass of rubbish-laden water poses a risk to human health, too. Hundreds of millions of tiny plastic pellets, or nurdles – the raw materials for the plastic industry – are lost or spilled every year, working their way into the sea. These pollutants act as chemical sponges attracting man-made chemicals such as hydrocarbons and the pesticide DDT. They then enter the food chain. “What goes into the ocean goes into these animals and onto your dinner plate. It’s that simple.”

    See also Plastic found in 9% of North Pacific fish.

  • Phosphate: A Critical Resource
    Misused and Now Running Low

    Most of us, most days, will eat some food grown on fields fertilized by phosphate rock from this mine. And there is no substitute. … It mostly flows down sewers and agricultural drains into rivers and lakes, where it feeds the growth of toxic cyanobacteria and consumes oxygen, creating eutrophication and “dead zones.” … Composting crop residues would be a good way of recycling this valued nutrient back into the soil … we should give top priority to recycling our urine, which contains more than half of all the phosphorus that we excrete.

    Organic farmers have been telling us this for decades.

• Censorship

  • AptiQuant Threatened With A Lawsuit By Loyal Internet Explorer Users.

    Leonard Howard, the CEO of the company said that he has been receiving hate mail from IE users since yesterday. He said, “I just want to make it clear that the report released by my company did not suggest that if you use IE that means you have a low IQ, but what it really says is that if you have a low IQ then there are high chances that you use Internet Explorer.” He further went on to say that the company did not feel threatened at all by the lawsuit threats

    Hate mail and lawsuits seem to follow anyone who says anything critical of Microsoft or Windows. It is too bad that they did not publish the OS data too, but they might have cooked up the whole thing as a publicity stunt with Microsoft to move people off XP.

  • China censored media and blog coverage of a wreck of one of their impressive high speed rail trains.

    No calling into doubt, no development [of further issues], no speculation, and no dissemination [of such things] on personal microblogs!

  • The coal industry and lawmakers threaten to punish the University of Wyoming for a sculpture that links the burning of coal, through global heating, to the infestation that is destroying most of the pine forests.

  • Photographers tortured and jailed in Georgia

• Privacy

  • Software Designer Reports Error in Anthony Trial

    He found both reports were inaccurate (although NetAnalysis came up with the correct result), in part because it appears both types of software had failed to fully decode the entire file, due to its complexity. … Mr. Bradley’s findings were not presented to the jury and the record was never corrected, he said. Prosecutors are required to reveal all information that is exculpatory to the defense.

    It is disturbing but not surprising that prosecutors who could lie to a jury would also rely on non free software [1, 2] to build evidence for a murder trail. IE is also the easiest browser to turn against it’s user, “In some cases (such as Internet Explorer) HstEx / NetAnalysis does not need the full Internet history file, it can recover individual live and deleted records.”

  • Murdoch’s business is associated with cracking people’s computers as well as listening to their phones.

    See also this earlier story about an email nasty and this story about private investigator Jonathan Rees cracking public official’s computers to spy on their banking. A random blogger puts it well:

    our Metropolitan Police Force is undergoing THREE, not one but three, investigations into accusations of corruption … Operation Weeting: deals with the N.O.T.W. phone hacking scandal, Operation Elvedon: deals with payment received by Met from above, Operation Tuleta: deals with accusations of computer crime in association with the phone hacking scandal

    Browser addons will warn or block if you are visiting a Murdoch site. The list includes National Geographic.

• Civil Rights

  • Extreme Alabama immigration law heads to court

    The Alabama law, which would go into effect Sept. 1, essentially turns educators, business owners, landlords and citizens into immigration officers, and punishes anyone caught hiring, housing or even giving a car ride to an undocumented person in the state. Most disturbing to some is that the legislation targets children [who are denied education].

  • On Not Freaking Out With Fear: An Un-American Response to the Oslo Attack

    the Norwegian response to the Oslo attack is so glaringly un-American even though its core premise — a brave refusal to sacrifice liberty and transparency in the name of fear and security — was once the political value Americans boasted of exhibiting most. … Oslo Mayor Fabian Stang, when asked whether greater security measures were needed, sternly rejected that notion: “I don’t think security can solve problems. We need to teach greater respect.”

    See also, We Must – and Will – Meet Terror with More Democracy, Not Less

  • Politicians from Germany, Finland and Estonia are using the Oslo shootings as an excuse for expanded internet surveillance.

  • A flight from Mexico to Spain was turned around by the US because one of the passengers was on a US blacklist.

  • Palestinians are routinely tear gassed and stun bombed as a form of collective punishment for protests. Their olive trees are burned and and wells destroyed with government support.

• Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Congress Goes After WiFi

    Congress is considering a sleazy change in FCC rules to let mobile phone companies buy parts of the TV spectrum, forbidding use for WiFi.

  • Tech Firms Call on Lawmakers to Preserve Unlicensed Spectrum Use

    Their concerns stem from a provision in draft legislation by Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee that critics worry would limit the use of white spaces, the unlicensed spectrum between television channels. The GOP spectrum bill would require the Federal Communications Commission to auction the right to unlicensed spectrum; critics say that could kill the emerging market for the use of white spaces.

  • Super Wi-Fi Has 100km Range, Is Coming to Save the Day

    This new wireless networking standard promises speeds up to 22Mbps to devices as far as 100-kilometers (roughly 62-miles) away from the nearest transmitter. This new band of Wi-Fi on steroids comes through the patch of “white space” frequencies that were previously used to analog television broadcasts.

  • IEEE Sets Standard for ‘White Spaces’

    SuperWiFi could replace existing 3G and 4G mobile broadband services for many users, if it turns out to be cheaper and faster. After all, if companies start selling SuperWiFi access points for use in homes, people can simply stay connected to their own home wireless network even as they go about their business throughout the city.

  • Bell Labs, Rice University test white-space network hardware

  • [FM Radio] White Space Trial Starts in England‎

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • 12 organizations say VP8 infringes patents

    MPEG LA declined to name the companies or patents involved. … Google reiterated its hope to create a royalty-free Web video technology, “… The vast majority of the industry supports free and open development”

  • Copyrights

    • Thousands of scientific papers uploaded to the Pirate Bay [from JSTOR]

      … the copyright to which has long since expired. … a protest directed both at the recent indictment of programmer Aaron Swartz for data theft as well as the scientific publishing model in general. … If I can remove even one dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonous industry which acts to suppress scientific and historic understanding, then whatever personal cost I suffer will be justified .

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07.30.11

Weekend Links 2011/07/30 – Amazing New OLPC and Patent Insanity

Posted in Site News at 9:25 am by Guest Editorial Team

Reader’s Picks

• Richard Stallman warns people to avoid the temptations of the cloud.

  There is a systematic marketing campaign to drive users to entrusting their computing and their data to companies they have absolutely no reason to trust. Its buzzword is “cloud computing,” a term used for so many different computing structures that its only real meaning is: “Do it without thinking about what you’re doing.”

• Vonage to pioneer unlimited global calling plan

  … limitless calls to fixed-line phones in more than 60 countries and to cell phones in 10 countries by their mobile phones and by dialling a special-access number. Vonage is also developing apps for smartphones including Apple’s iPhone and Google Android-based devices that will simplify the process and allow people to dial from their contact list without entering the access number.

  This is somewhat tame next to Skype’s pre-Microsoft efforts, but it is nice to see. Peer to peer services and Open Spectrum would provide the same thing at next to no cost.

• About the #OSCON #Microsoft keynote: It’s a trap!

  See also The same old Microsoft at OSCON

• O’Reilly OSCON Java 2011, Steven G. Harris, “Open Source, Java, and Oracle — Cracking the Code”

  PJ adds, “Oracle doesn’t have an Open Source strategy per se, unlike Sun. They view things from the perspective of lines of business. They are working to improve in communicating with the Open Source community. But the simple truth is, you can’t sue over patents and improve your relationship with the FOSS community at the same time.”

• OLPC outlines future device specs

  solar charging, satellite Internet and external keyboard capabilities … [camera, microphone, usb2] a hybrid e-ink/LCD display capable of rendering full-motion video. The ARM-powered device is slated to run Android, Linux or Chrome, as OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte told IDG News the organization had lost interest in Windows 8. [will sell for less than $100]

  PCs are going the way of pocket calculators as they become increasingly cheap, feature complete communication devices.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • How Cisco’s unmitigated gall derailed on man’s life.

    Cisco is a vicious and lawless company that should be boycotted. The company’s other sins include the destruction of Linksys, GPL violations, cooperating with Communist China to censor and imprison people, and Microsoft partnership.

• Anti-Trust

  • Report: Nortel portfolio buyers facing DOJ scrutiny

    the Justice Department is interviewing the winning companies to see if they plan on filing suits against other handset makers using Google’s Android operating system software. The department could end up placing rules and conditions on the sale based on what it hears.

    It’s good to see the DOJ wakeing up to the anti-trust implications of software patents.

• Privacy

  • Google+’s “Identity” Controversy: No Easy Answers

    Google says that — at this time — they do not consider Google+ to be an appropriate discussion platform for persons in situations where not being anonymous might put them at risk of harm. If you sense that we don’t yet have full “closure” on some of these specific concerns you’d be right — but this is a reflection of the fundamental complexity and sometimes contrary nature of these matters, not an indication of bad faith.

  • There is no such thing as anonymous online tracking

    identification of a user affects not only future tracking, but also retroactively affects the data that’s already been collected. Identification needs to happen only once, ever, per user….
    Here are five concrete ways in which your identity can be attached to data that was initially collected without identifying information.

  • New diabolical cookies “crammed” on users

    The article and links are not browser or OS specific.

  • Microsoft’s Web map exposes phone, PC locations

    Microsoft has collected the locations of millions of laptops, cell phones, and other Wi-Fi devices around the world and makes them available on the Web without taking the privacy precautions that competitors have, CNET has learned. The vast database available through Live.com publishes the precise geographical location, which can point to a street address and sometimes even a corner of a building, of Android phones, Apple devices, and other Wi-Fi enabled gadgets.

    As usual, Microsoft is the worst offender.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • ITC to look into Samsung’s patent claims against Apple and could lock Apple out of the US market

  • HTC is trying to build around Apple patents.

  • Microsoft Back In Bed With SUSE Linux

    In controversial deal extended to the tune of $100 million, Microsoft resells SUSE Linux services and pledges not to sue on patents. … it agreed to extend by four years a controversial deal under which it resells SUSE Linux services to business customers and pledges not to sue those customers, or SUSE, for patent infringement. … [GPLv3] may prohibit payment-for-indemnification deals such as Microsoft’s arrangement with SUSE. … “Software patents fundamentally threaten every programmer’s ability to do their work, and a licensing deal like this gives the patent holder more power to control who can and can’t use a specific technique.”

  • IV Responds to NPR Expose

    ideas have value and inventors who invest time, money and emotional resources into protecting those ideas with patents have a right to recognize a return on their investments

    … and for a small fee the world’s largest patent troll promises to leave you alone.

  • Google Acquires Over 1,000 IBM Patents in July. General Counsel Kent Walker said this of the failed Nortel bids:

    We buy companies all the time — for both people and interesting technologies. This would have been north of $4 billion for none of those things. We were bidding on the right to stop people from innovating.

    The linked article uses the missleading term IP and other propaganda phrases that should be avoided.

  • That Didn’t Take Long: Spotify Sued For Patent Infringement Just Weeks After Entering US Market

    Now, you might claim that perhaps PacketVideo has a legitimate patent claim here. After all, the company has been around for well over a decade and was an early pioneer in streaming efforts. But… the details suggest not so much. … PacketVideo had nothing to do with this patent. The company just bought it a few years back.

    The US is a real basket case thanks to it’s insane laws and court system.

  • Why won’t Intellectual Ventures answer questions about its relationship with Lodsys?

    The original inventor who was awarded the patents now owned by Lodsys is bemused by the attention paid to them. He has also had to suffer a fair deal of unwarranted abuse, since he’s nothing to do with IV or Lodsys.

    The author laughably asks, “do software patents really spur innovation, or hold it back?”

  • An Offer He Couldn’t Refuse: Intellectual Property Analysis of Chris Crawford, Intellectual Vent

    An analysis using the M·CAM DOORS’ software platform was performed on almost one thousand Intellectual Venture’s most commercial (defined by time of issuance and strength of prospective prosecution options) patents. … more than 40% of these patents have potential impairment issues, suggesting weakness in the protection they offer to companies. This “mafia” seems to be using rubber bullets as their ammunition. Not only is the protection that they offer potentially weak, but the patents that IV’s affiliated shell companies have used to threaten others are also frequently found to be weakened by uncited prior art and precedent innovation. In order to illustrate the fragility of these patent war chests, an in-depth analysis was done on the Crawford patents in Oasis’ portfolio. Our analysis of the Oasis patents, specifically the ’354 patent, shows numerous uncited prior art and precedent innovation that are nearly identical to Crawford’s, making us wonder if Crawford used the United States patent system to his advantage, nabbing common knowledge ideas and passing them off as his own, until Intellectual Ventures made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

    We may not ever know the details of the arrangements between extortionists but it’s obvious that software patents should not exist.

  • Appellate Court Says Breast-Cancer Genes Can Be Patented

    The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled that the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which have been linked to hereditary breast and ovarian cancers, can be patented.
    The ruling is a victory for Myriad Genetics, which owns the BRCA patents, and it overturns a district court ruling invalidating the patents.

  • Trademarks

    • SUSE and Microsoft renew Novell deal

      SUSE is also able to offer subscription support to Microsoft’s customers for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and community distributions such as CentOS.

  • Copyrights

    • UK Police and banks enlisted in private disputes.

      It works like this: IFPI submits allegedly infringing websites to the City of London police department’s Economic Crime Directorate. Once the division has “verified the evidence,” it passes the information on to MasterCard, Visa, and now PayPal.

      Copyright violation is not a crime, it is a private offense that should be dealt with through civil courts. Without a judge, this gives big publishers a license to shut down legitimate competitors. The article is filled with propaganda terms to justify the practice.

    • Big publishers would like to extradite UK citizens to the US for punishment under unjust US laws against sharing.

      In May, American law enforcement officials opened up yet another front in this war by seeking the extradition of Richard O’Dwyer. The 23-year-old British college student is currently working on his BS in interactive media and animation. Until last year, he ran a “link site” that helped users find free movies and TV shows, many of them infringing. American officials want to try him on charges of criminal copyright infringement and conspiracy. … O’Dwyer has no obvious connection to the United States. … Erik Barnett, an assistant deputy director for ICE, has told the Guardian that the United States regards any website with a US-controlled domain like .net to be within its jurisdiction.

      People should immediately move their registrations away from US controlled domains.

    • The judge in Jamie Thomas-Rasset’s third trial reduced her judgment for file sharing, calling the jury award “appalling” and unconstitutional.

      Davis has found that the $1.5 million award was unconstitutional; he slashed it to $54,000—$2,250 per song. And even then, the amount was “a higher award than the Court might have chosen to impose in its sole discretion.”

      The music industry promised a fourth trail by escalating it up the federal chain.

    • Copyright maximalists blanketed reporters with propaganda smearing a search engine to bolster a court decision that forced the UK’s largest ISP to censor the search engine

      Since that is what they are paid to do, its PR company keeps sending me FAST’s press releases, which I studiously ignore since they are uniformly ridiculous. … there’s no aggregation whatsoever, just links: Newzbin 2 is a search engine, like Google.

      The Bloomberg article is little more than a big publisher press release and is filled with big publisher nonsense.

    • Ousted EMI boss: pirates are our best customers, suing is bad for business

      Douglas C Merrill, who left his job as Google’s CIO to be EMI’s Chief Operating Officer of New Music and President of Digital Business has given a speech in which he claims that EMI’s own research confirmed that P2P music downloaders were the label’s best customers.

    • Alcatel-Lucent Gets $70 Million in Microsoft Patent Case

      This is for the infamous mp3 patents that kept mp3 playing software out of US based gnu/linux distributions, such as Red Hat, for more than a decade. Microsoft successfully whittled the original $1.5 billion dollar award down to $70 million. It is amazing how Microsoft can threaten and extort gnu/linux users around the world with unnamed patents while saying things like, “we continue to maintain that current law requires a genuine apportionment of damages when the infringement is directed to a small feature of a feature-rich product, and we are reviewing the verdict in that light and considering next steps.”

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07.28.11

The Same Old Microsoft at OSCON

Posted in Microsoft at 7:19 pm by Guest Editorial Team

Microsoft bought a seat at OSCON. There are problems with both what they are telling us and what others might not be able to tell us because of this. A small retrospective is in order.

Microsoft’s keynote speech at OSCON promises more “openness” and change. This is a familiar song and dance because the company has been saying the same things for nearly a decade. We can look back to Steve Ballmer’s “We’ll outsmart Open Source” talk that he gave to a 2002 conference of Microsoft MVPs:

We cannot price at zero, so we need to justify our posture and pricing. Linux isn’t going to go away–our job is to provide a better product in the marketplace. … Linux is not about free software, it is about community. It’s not like Novell, it isn’t going to run out of money … It’s weird! IBM says ‘Hey British Aerospace! Buy Linux…. From SuSE.

Mr. Ballmer laughably blustered about making Windows better at “clusters” than gnu/linux was but the rest is not so funny. Consider what happened to SuSE and Novell which received most of Microsoft’s charm offensive. SuSE became Ballnux, a taxed and Microsoft infested distribution and Novell went down the drain. Steve Ballmer’s nasty little threats about patent “liabilities” blossomed into Microsoft’s full out judicial extortion scheme.

Back in 2002, Lori Moore, vice president of product support services at Microsoft, promised a renewed “shared source” initiative.

“There are many options on the table. There are many ways to be more open, and we are reviewing ideas.”

This became the mostly failed CodePlex effort to distract and deform free software developers [2, 3, 4]. Years later, Steve Ballmer told the world that Microsoft would, “love to see all open source innovation on top of windows.” An astounding amount of effort was wasted porting free software to Microsoft’s jail but this represents a tiny, stale fraction of the free software universe and Windows itself is becoming irrelevant.

As you can see from the text at O’Reilly, “This keynote is sponsored by Microsoft,” the company paid for an audience. Richard Stallman had this to say about last year’s OSCON,

Microsoft typically demands a price for its sponsorship, a price that implies a change in the nature of the event. The price might be, let someone from Microsoft give a speech. … One way or other, Microsoft wants us to stop saying the most important thing to say: “Proprietary software is an injustice and we want to help you escape from it.”

There is no new Microsoft. The recent destruction of Skype, Nokia should be enough to prove the point.

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07.26.11

Site Editorial Team

Posted in Site News at 12:44 am by Guest Editorial Team

Summary: Site’s editorial team is expanded

TECHRIGHTS is growing up and as part of this process of maturity we are beginning to have more authors. In the coming days we will bring you coverage of more topics than before. █

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07.25.11

Rage Against the Masochist

Posted in America, Patents at 5:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Public opinion is quickly shifting against patents after a National Public Radio (NPR) piece and also some highly excessive activities from a shell troll of Nathan Myhrvold (shown above)

WE have just written a summary following the NPR coverage that led to some very strongly-worded comments about Microsoft’s patent troll who is the world’s biggest patent troll. A lot of people were not quite aware of the seriousness of this issue.

Professor Webbink has this theory about what Lodsys is doing with Myhrvold’s acquired patent (that he passes around for other non-practising entities to sue and absorb the bad press):

To really understand why Lodsys is doing what it’s doing, we thought it would be worthwhile to ask a patent lawyer to explain it, so we contacted Patrick Igoe, the lawyer who writes the Apple Patent blog and who has pointed out some real weaknesses in the Lodsys patents.

Why, we wondered, was Lodsys first going after the little people, so to speak, first and now hitting up Rovio and Electronic Arts? Is it like SCO, lots of headline seeking, hoping people will be so scared they’ll just pay them to stop? Is it all just so much “legal” theater, in other words, with analysts popping up and advising the little people to settle with Lodsys? I gather that didn’t work. If Lodsys was following a traditional playbook and hoped to use any licensees as a foundation to next go after the big fish, are they now acknowledging that failure and heading for the deeper pockets, in hopes that will work better?

And why only claim 27 of the ’545 patent, which is what Lodsys is alleging is infringed? What is claim 27, anyhow? How could a game violate it?

The head of the FFII meanwhile discovers that ‘Amazon [is] sued for patent infringement over transactions using “a receipt having payment remittance information.”‘ He also links to this item of news about Lodsys attacking Angry Birds — a subject that even the BBC covers right now:

But here is what I would want to have asked him. Is a system that appears to reward those who acquire patents and hire lawyers and punish those who simply try to make things really going to encourage innovation?

My contact is certainly not doing much innovating right now – he’s too busy worrying about the threat of an expensive lawsuit.

That comes from Rory, who in the past did a lot of Microsoft promotion. Maybe he softened with age. Either way, the news might not be so bad for Brits. After all, it is US-based users who are likely to be prevented access to software and Britain might also see developers leaving the US and come to a haven from patent trolls, a haven such as the UK (provided they don’t sell in the US).

As a direct result of NPR coverage, “Intellectual Ventures: Another American Mafia story” was published by Stefano Maffulli. “Intellectual Ventures is the company behind Lodsys,” he explains, “the company suing independent iPhone app developers for a silly patent violation. Lodsys has no employees, it’s not making any product, it’s not producing any innovation. It sues people that create jobs and deliver products.

“Did you think that patents were introduced to foster innovation? To give an incentive for inventors to bring new products to the society and solve problems? Think again. Companies like Intellectual Ventures are just a problem for startups and innovators. Venture investor Chris Sacca even said to NPR reporters that these trolls remind him of “a mafia-style shakedown, where someone comes in the front door of your building and says, ‘It would be a shame if this place burnt down. I know the neighborhood really well and I can make sure that doesn’t happen.’”. The FSFE raised this issue in Europe many years ago. The US patent system needs to be reformed, now.”

Well, in several recent stories about patent FUD we highlighted the fact that almost nobody in today’s society should want patents. It’s the luxury of very few and it is beneficial to even fewer, maybe less than 1% of the population. In a new post titled “Android & Linux FUD”, someone asks about Oracle’s attack:

Do you think that patent issues and all this money changing hands has nothing to do with Linux? Just follow the money. While most of the legal attention focuses on Dalvik, the Android implementation of the Java virtual machine, the public perception of Linux is also tarnished to anyone who understands that Android is a Linux distribution. I can only imagine what cyanogenmod.com people think about what is going on.

Well, Oracle’s attack is already weakening and the Oracle case might yield nothing at all or only a fraction of what Oracle expected. To quote this new summary:

What If Oracle Loses The Android-Java Court Battle?

[...]

Contrary to the blog-based reports, Oracle has been at the losing end from the very beginning. The major setback was when the court ordered it to cut the number of claims from 132 to 50. Another major setback for Oracle was when USPTO rejected a majority of Oracle’s patent claims.

Oracle again faced a defeat when the judge earlier questioned the damage estimates of Ian Cockburn and asked both parties to name more experts to assess damages. An now the court has rejected Oracle’s 6.1 billion damage estimation. The court has asked Oracle to come up with a figure starting from $100 million.

Maybe the case will end in dismissal or some settlement at a low (and likely undisclosed) price. Who knows, maybe it will even go on for years like the SCO case, depending on Oracle’s stubbornness (or SCOracle’s vindictiveness). Either way, I’m away until August, so no more paten rants for a while. █

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100,000,000 Reasons to Boycott SUSE

Posted in Microsoft, Mono, Novell, SLES/SLED at 4:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Microsoft gives SUSE another soft bribe ($100,000,000) to help serve Microsoft agenda

WHEN Novell signed a deal with Microsoft it was the parent company of SUSE, which was not an independent entity. Unlike a blog called “Boycott SUSE” (yes, one existed), we were just “Boycott Novell”, seeking to expose the management of the company that sold SUSE out. A couple of years later, $100 million were paid to help Novell — “help” in the sense that Microsoft boosted the bribe to Novell/SUSE following the initial deal, as Microsoft was happy with the outcome of making money from GNU/Linux server sales.

In order to eliminate free GNU/Linux and push Microsoft-taxed versions of GNU/Linux instead, Microsoft has just persuaded the Attachmate folks who run SUSE (the new management is from Attachmate) to take some more money ($100 million again) and help against the freedom of GNU/Linux, pushing software patents instead (SUSE helps validate a debt to Microsoft).

Here is the press release and the new banner under which they hide (like MoreInterop, to hide the ugliness of the patent deal).

Rob Weir writes:

Novell/SUSE renews interop agreement with Microsoft, will work together to target RedHat http://prn.to/pn8tAB http://bit.ly/r5zs1D

The problem with IBM is that it continues to support SUSE with all that Microsoft tax, especially in mainframes. Try to pressure Sutor, Weir et al. to withdraw support for SUSE. It’s just a Trojan horse, also for Mono. █

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Links 25/7/2011: Calculate Linux 11.6.1, CentOS 6.0 LiveCD

Posted in News Roundup at 3:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Mainstream Press is Turning Against Software Patents

Posted in America, Asia, Europe, Patents at 5:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: The consensus is being shifted as the alleged benefits of patent systems come under question in the US, India, and elsewhere

The fight over many issues is typically fought out in the media, where public opinion can be shaped using words like “piracy”. Over the years we have seen many conformist views in the media when it comes to patents, but the consensus is now leaning towards the opposite, except in the corporate press (not the same as the mainstream, despite overlap). According to this one site, “Software patents come home to roost” now that India-based companies are trolling companies in the US, using the USPTO against its clients (showing how the USPTO harms the very same nation it is based in while India’s patent office holds back on such foolish ideas):

Most people have heard of online trolls, people who take joy in being rude and sometimes even abusive. You might not have heard of patent trolls, but they are wreaking havoc in the software business, and some developers are threatening to quit the US unless patent laws are reformed.

Patent trolls are companies that collect patents and aggressively pursue anyone they think has infringed them. Often, patent trolls have no intention of developing the technology outlined in the patents. Instead, they act opportunistically to maximise the income from their patent portfolio.

Mumbai-based Kootol Software Ltd has given notice to over 32 companies whom it claims has infringed on its US patent for “messaging, publication and real time searching technology”. Amongst the accused are giants Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon and IBM, as well as social media sites Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Foursquare.

“Software Patent Trolls In India” is another new headline that we found today. The article/blog post says:

Patent trolls are people or organisation that acquires a patent with the primary objective of non use of the same. Their main objective is to get maximum commercial benefit through licensing mechanism. They also intend to sue others for patent infringement and derive monetary benefits through compensation for the alleged patent infringement.

Software developers in US are frequently targeted by such patent trolls through cease and desist orders by alleging patent infringement. So bad has become the situation that software developers in US have threatened to leave US unless they are duly protected from such trolls.

So what is the position regarding the same in India. Patent Trolls and their Regulations in India is well founded says Praveen Dalal, managing partner of New Delhi based IP and ICT law firm Perry4Law. Indian Patents Act 1970 “Prohibits” Unfair Trade Practices of Hoarding a Patent by not using the same and hindering its availability to general public, informs Dalal

Pranesh Prakash argues: “Non-practising entities shouldn’t be entitled to sue for patent infringement.”

Moreover, it would make sense to prohibit lawsuit against another company in another country. This would help prevent many of Apple’s lawsuits against Linux/Android. They all use coercive means like economic sanctions.

Over in New Zealand we find this new article which says about a very recent broadcast:

Also on The Court Report this week, if you create something original, shouldn’t you be able to patent it? The obvious answer is yes … yet in New Zealand computer software is not eligible for patent. For an industry that seems rife with illegal copying and downloading, that may beggar belief. Certainly large software developers want to see this changed; they’re lobbying hard to see their work patented. But there is a less obvious side to this argument … because equally there’s a large group of developers who believe in free and open access to software. How can you grant a patent to something that’s little more than a collection of zeroes and ones?

If any of our reader has a link/file to the video, please share. We have heard from people who were involved in this debate, but publishing a copy would be useful (and compliant with fair use doctrine).

Over here in the EU (see wiki for background), this is this claim about the legality of a system that would potentially bring software patents into the whole of Europe in one fell swoop:

Under close scrutiny, it appears that the legal basis of the regulation on the unitary patent is at best questionable. At worst, such doubts could very well mean that the regulation is simply illegal. In a situation where the enhanced cooperation procedure is already undergoing two appeals before the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the future of the unitary patent cannot afford such strong legal uncertainty. Hopefully, some amendments to the proposed regulation could help the unitary patent to partly overcome this hindrance.

The site is actually on the bad side on this debate — that which helps large corporations outside of Europe without bringing benefits to Europe itself. Will democracy survive or will it be toppled by political abuse? █

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