02.27.11
Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 3:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Apple and Microsoft are unable to catch up with Linux/Android while RIM is excluded by most predictions and Symbian is put to rest by a Micromole, Elop
THE sales of hypePhone are reportedly falling (depends on which data points can be trusted) and the Linux-based Android is already a #1 player in some markets. Apple is starting to sue companies for selling Android (using software patents, which are the lowest form of competition) and breaking some rules too on the face of it. “For years,” says Murdoch’s press, “Apple relished its reputation as a scrappy outsider, fighting to stay alive in a world dominated by Microsoft Corp.’s Windows monopoly. But a quiet recent hire by the Cupertino company suggests it realizes how much that picture has changed.”
“The BBC Hard At Work” is the latest essay from TechBytes’ Gordon, who addresses the problem with the MSBBC’s hype offensives (at taxpayers’ expense):
I totally understand that proper journalism needs money, and that small local news organisations simply can’t afford to employ an army of journalists. They rely on news wire sources upstream like Press Association for their content. I have no issue with that, the BBC screw a LOT of money from every household with a TV license partly on the promise of well funded unbiased journalism. They have no excuses.
Regarding the latest news about the MSBBC (“Ipad 2 will be launched at the BBC”), The Inquirer takes an excellent and hilarious approach. To quote one joke:
So that’s a no, then. We think that there is a greater chance of Steve Jobs embracing open source, or fragmentation as he likes to call it, after all the stories we’ve written about the fruit-themed cappuccino company.
Needless to say, Microsoft’s futile efforts at mobile presence are a complete joke, especially after the bricking of phones [1, 2, 3], which was a fiasco that still gets a lot of attention.
The above headline should never need to be written. A company should never “brick” or render any product that a customer paid for useless. The company should replace the product if this happens accidentally and pay a fine for seriously inconveniencing the customer.
And exactly what mechanism is in the phone that “bricks” it and renders it useless anyway?
Microsoft’s spin is very weak, blaming connectivity. A robust update mechanism is more resilient than this, so the excuse doesn’t pass muster. It may not be valid, either. The platform has a very small number of users, so it’s hard for Microsoft to justify satisfactory QA. Based on the status quo, nothing but patents can stop mobile Linux now. █
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Posted in Europe, Free/Libre Software, Patents at 3:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Bits of patent news (international scope) which software freedom supporters should keep abreast of
PATENTS ARE, in our humble assessment, the most important subject when it comes to Free software*, especially since the Microsoft-Novell deal, which only months after its signing resulted in Microsoft’s extortion of Linux vendors and users. Software patents in Europe continue to be a subject of discussion because the European Parliament is doing foolish things, embellishing them and casting them as “cooperation”:
The European Parliament gave its consent on Tuesday for a common EU patent system to be created using the enhanced cooperation procedure. In December 2010, twelve Member States made a request to launch such a procedure, after it was concluded that not all the Member States could agree on an EU-wide patent system.
Patents are not about cooperation, they are about exclusion, separation, and hostility.
Looking over at the United States, professor Eben Moglen and Microsoft are also mentioned by SCOTUS Blog (via Against Monopoly), which says that the court will “consider standard for secondary patent liability”. To quote: “Other noteworthy filings include one by Tom Hungar at Gibson, Dunn (on behalf of Comcast, Microsoft and several other large IT companies). Hungar’s brief provides an excellent summary of the cases that were codified in Section 271(b), designed to show that the Federal Circuit’s reading of the statute is inconsistent with Congressional intent. Given the importance of the early cases to the Court’s decision in Bilski, this brief is likely to be important to at least some of the Justices. And finally, there is a filing with typical verve from Eben Moglen on behalf of the Software Freedom Law Center, pointing out the risk to independent software developers of a standard that exposes them to liability for patents of which they have no reason to be aware.”
The Microsoft-tied Traul Allen and Intellectual Ventures (IV) are allegedly or reportedly extorting Linux already (HTC and Samsung). John Cook from the Microsoft-boosting TechFlash spoke about the perpetrator of IV and mentioned the strong connection to Microsoft. The title speaks about “penguin poo” and there’s this part too:
On why he sometimes gets labeled a patent troll: “It is threatening to the old order.”
“People say that because they believe it to be true,” Groklaw remarks. It is delusional. To justify greed, the greedy always find some ridiculous justifications, then mass-market the delusion using PR campaigns. There are famous lines that they recycle and use.
Patents are generally a hindrance, not a facilitator of progress. A new case of collusion in patent monopolies helps show what patents can bring us sometimes:
Genentech Inc allegedly colluded with Celltech R&D Ltd to fraudulently extend the life of a disputed patent and reaped more than a $1 billion in royalties, according to a lawsuit by rival drugmaker Human Genome Sciences Inc.
The lawsuit takes aim at what is known as the Cabilly patent that protects a technology that uses recombinant DNA which is critical to the manufacture of many biotech drugs.
“Genentech has engaged in a massive, years-long conspiracy to monopolize and restrain trade in the market and commit fraud,” said the complaint.
If that’s what patents lead to, who needs them if not those who exploit or abuse the system? Many academic (and independent) studies have repeatedly shown that software patents — and sometimes patents as a whole — are economically unsound. █
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* Free software Web sites which do not cover the subject possibly do not understand it.
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Posted in Deception, FUD, Google, Microsoft, Search at 3:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Groklaw accuses Dr. Ben Edelman of being a front for Microsoft as Google carries on stealing Microsoft’s thunder
BEN Edelman — like Richard Edelman — is accused of engaging in Microsoft PR. The former, however, has nothing to do with Edelman the firm, which supports the most vocal anti-Google attack dog (called “Consumer Watchdog”). “I encourage you to go to Bing and search for “maps”. Bing maps is first, then Yahoo, then Google,” Groklaw writes regarding this new article. “The selective attacks on Google are just plain silly at best. Given Edelman’s resume, I think one must consider agendas, just as one would on reading the “independent” studies that say just what Microsoft desires. So I’d redo the headline to read: My Message to Microsoft: Spend More on Products and Less on FUD/PR.”
Groklaw refers to the new article which says:
In mid February, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt expressed pride in Google employee Wael Ghonim’s brave struggle against the autocratic Mubarak regime to establish political transparency in Egypt. “We are very, very proud of what Wael and that group was able to do in Egypt,” Schmidt said in Barcelona. But what Schmidt needs to do now is apply Ghonim’s views about political transparency to Google’s own search business.
[...]
Last November, when the European Commission launched its investigation, the Harvard Business School professor, Benjamin Edelman, published a research paper entitled “Hard-Coding Bias in Google Algorithmic Search Results” which proves that Google has “hard-coded its own links to appear at the top of algorithmic search results.”
[...]
Google’s bias isn’t just limited to finance and health. In a January 2011 paper, “Measuring Bias in Organic Web Search,” written with Harvard Business School doctoral candidate Benjamin Lockwood, Edelman found that Google listed its own map service as the first result when a user queries “maps.” It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that Edelman and Lockwood discovered that 86% of map searches conducted on Google end up with the user clicking on Google Maps.
For those who are too lazy to read Edelman’s CV, it says: “Microsoft adCenter (Harvard Business School Case 908-049) (2008) with Peter Coles”
At Nokia, the anti-Ogg person had also worked for Microsoft before he uttered negative things about Ogg. As for Edelman, his top “Programming Experience” is “Microsoft Visual Basic (14+ years experience)”. Readers can decide what to make of it. Watch what he writes in his blog this month (context and more background information regarding the said incident [1, 2]).
Microsoft is afraid of Google not just because Google advances Linux; Google also goes for the jugular of Microsoft’s #1 cash cow, with news like this in recent days:
Google Pushes Cloud Connect as Office Alternative
Cloud Connect first became available in a test version last November. It’s based on technology the company acquired as part of its purchase of DocVerse, a startup created by two former Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) product managers. Cloud Connect is designed to help users of Word, PowerPoint and Excel move to Google Docs by giving them the same Office interface with the added collaborative features that Docs offers.
Joe Wilcox chose the headline “Google launches its next assault on ‘cumbersome, legacy’ Microsoft Office”
In the race to offer Microsoft Office functionality in the cloud, Google has beaten its rival getting a product out of development beta and into production release. Today Google announced global availability of Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, which went into beta late last year. The technology builds off Google acquisition of DocVerse.
Microsoft has many reasons to be terrified of Google, whose market value nearly exceeds that of Microsoft right now (Apple’s is already way ahead). We also know, based on articles from 2011, that Microsoft pays academics for propaganda. █
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Posted in Microsoft at 3:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Turmoil inside Microsoft becomes more visible after rumours spread and a court’s judgment arrives
Our occasional co-author, G. Forbes, has just shown us evidence of more layoffs at Microsoft, which increasingly moves staff to China (and elsewhere), as we showed a few days ago. Rumours forced Microsoft to confess:
Amid rumors that staff cuts were set to happen at Rare, today, Microsoft has confirmed that a “small number of employees” at UK studio have been notified that their jobs are to be part of a reorganization process.
Microsoft’s more skilled people are fleeing (the major departures are most impossible to ignore) and Microsoft has gone as far as suing those who leave, as we noted in recent weeks [1, 2, 3]. There was a famous example some years ago when someone left for Google and this time it’s about Miszewski, whom Microsoft prevents from getting a job after he quit Microsoft.
Microsoft will never be the same. Alastair Otter, a south African journalist, goes further by comparing Microsoft to a graveyard and explaining why Linux is winning.
Microsoft’s demise has been predicted far too many times but this time the company is facing a challenge it may not be able to overcome
It’s certainly not the first time this has been asked, and there’s a good chance it won’t be the last time: Could 2011 mark the beginning of the end for Microsoft?
For as long as I have been a journalist someone has predicted the demise of Microsoft at the start of every year. I’ve even been tempted on more than one occasion but have generally resisted – but this time, I think, it is different.
For a long time the demise of Microsoft was always tied to the rise of Linux. Could Linux kill off Microsoft’s market dominance? Could Linux become the desktop of the future? Only the most optimistic Linux fan could truly believe that Linux could out-do Windows.
[...]
It’s not all about mobile, you say. Of course it isn’t. Microsoft still dominates on the desktop, that much is true. But for how much longer?
Simply being good at desktop software is not good enough anymore. A rapidly increasing number of users are now accessing the web, doing their banking and playing games on their mobile phones, netbooks and tablet PCs, and not on their desktop PC. How many of those new smartphones and tablet PCs run Windows? Barely any of them. Most are running Android.
All that Microsoft has left now is a pile of patents, which is cannot inflate quickly enough as it runs out of easy targets (Motorola fights back). █
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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In fact, Barrenechea told me about half of SGI’s business comes still comes from the public sector, including the Department of Energy laboratories, intelligence agencies and NSF-funded universities. “It’s a great market for us,” he noted, adding that SGI systems for these types of customers, as well as for large enterprise customers, typically pack between 50 and 100 teraflops per cabinet. SGI Altix systems accounted for 22 of the 500 fastest computers in the world according to November’s Top500 list, and, going forward, SGI also expects to be “squarely in the middle” of the race to exascale computers. The Obama administration is proposing $126 million for exascale research in its congressional budget.
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The possibilities are endless. “Consider what could be done with an API for addressing clusters of mobile sensors,” he writes.
The idea reminds me of Open Sailing’s SwarmOS, which aims to help individuals make decisions based on the collective intelligence reported by “swarms” of users with mobile phones. Adding sensors to that mix is a powerful notion.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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X.Org Server 1.10 RC3 was barely out for 24 hours, but X.Org Server 1.10 was officially released on Friday evening by Keith Packard.
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Applications
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There are powerful forces at work in nature. There are things about life I just don’t understand or comprehend, and one of them is the appeal of Minesweeper.
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Games
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World of Goo, Lugaru and Overture alone each justify the Bundle purchase. As it is, you get these, as well as several other games. Now, Aquaria, Gish and Samorost2 are less fully featured, but still very decent titles. Personally, my taste leans away from them, but you will still find them quite lovely. Moreover, the games all ran well on Linux, with very simple and quick installations, no errors, no problems.
Overall, the first Humble Bundle is a package of good fun and action. It’s definitely worth its money, whatever you may have decided to invest. In fact, if you’ve paid any less than the total sum of their standard prices, you’ve made yourself one hell of a bargain. Next week, we’ll review the second half, with five more games. For the time being, have fun.
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Debian Family
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Historically, the relationships among Debian and the FSF have gone through mixed fortune (and that’s quite an euphemism). On the one hand, Debian is committed to 100% Free Software, is an open project explicitly inspired by “the spirit of GNU”, has been sponsored by FSF in its infancy, and properly calls itself “GNU/Linux” (or even “GNU/kFreeBSD”). On the other hand, Debian is the project who considers the GNU FDL license to be only conditionally free and which is not considered to be an entirely Free system according to FSF.
So much for the history corner.
[...]
Furthermore, I’m more and more convinced that Debian nowadays enjoys a rather privileged position among Free Software vendors.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The greater artwork community reached out to Ubuntu and answered the question above with their illustrations.
Words of inspiration included metaphors like “Entertaining, Simple, Carefree, Steady, Handy, and Quick”.
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I’m sure people are probably fed up of reading these by now. I know there’s several threads on this topic over on the Ubuntu Forums, for example. Nonetheless, what I have experienced so far is this (don’t worry, it’s short):
Crashing. Lots of it, mainly compiz it seems. Yes, I know we’re only on Alpha 2 and yes, I expect alpha releases (of anything) to contain bugs. But still, I don’t even have to have done anything for compiz to crash! Admittedly, it could be my video driver (I have an Nvidia 9800GT) that’s the cause, I just don’t know.
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Phones
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China’s Huawei Technologies Co on Tuesday won a temporary injunction barring Motorola Solutions Inc from disclosing a variety of confidential Huawei information to rival Nokia Siemens Networks.
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Android
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Mobile communications can easily be surveilled. One step you can take to prevent tracking is to install Tor on your phone.
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The Android App Market is flooded with tons of new mobile applications each day. But there can’t be that many developers out there familiar with the Android OS, so where are all of these apps coming from?
People like you. People like me. All of which don’t have the slightest idea on how to program an Android app. So, how do we do it?
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Events
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Yesterday marked the opening of the Southern California Linux Expo, otherwise known as SCALE. SCALE’s venue this year is the Los Angeles Airport Hilton, just a stone’s throw from LAX Airport. SCALE opened strong with lots of technical content, much of it about the “DevOps” movement and how you can bring its benefits to your place of business.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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“We are in the final stages of the Firefox 4 Beta cycle,” reads a blog post from the open source outfit. “The team has fixed more than 7,000 bugs since the first beta release.”
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Business
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The Reed College alum was 29 when he created an open source software tool called Puppet for managing data centers and other big computer networks. His project took off, winning adoption from a community of like-minded enthusiasts who deployed it at Twitter, Google, the New York Stock Exchange and many other organizations.
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BSD
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Dru Lavigne has been contributing to BSD since late 90s and is now the community manager for PC-BSD. At SCALE9x, which continues in LA through this weekend, she spoke about being a community manager and how to decide whether your project is ready to have one.
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Openness/Sharing
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The Internet Archive, in conjunction with 150 libraries, has rolled out a new 80,000 e-book lending collection today on OpenLibrary.org. This means that library patrons with an OpenLibrary account can check out any of these e-books.
The hope is that this effort will help libraries make the move to digital book lending. “As readers go digital, so are our libraries,” says Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive.
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The YouTube cartoon starts with a cartoon judge who looks a bit like Betty Boop and a thuggish looking man in a track suit who says, “Just put the money in the bag.” What follows is a satire of the IT system for California’s courts now predicted to cost $3 billion. While the cartoon has been viewed only 700 times, it is likely the cognoscenti who are watching, those who are in a position to influence the fate of the oft-maligned system.
The title to the vignette suggests why it’s viewership is likely to stay small: “Case Mismanagement: A Chat about CCMS.”
“I need $150 million,” says the thug.
“Why?” the judge questions.
“For my case management system.”
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More than 100 law professors have signed on to a letter released today that proposes congressional hearings and legislation aimed at fashioning “mandatory and enforceable” ethics rules for Supreme Court justices for the first time. The effort, coordinated by the liberal Alliance for Justice, was triggered by “recent media reports,” the letter said, apparently referring to stories of meetings and other potential conflicts of interest involving Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas among others.
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Alibaba.com Ltd., China’s largest e-commerce website, announced the resignation of two of its most senior leaders Monday after an internal investigation found more than 2,000 fraudulent virtual storefronts had been set up with the help of company salespeople.
In a company statement, Alibaba.com said Chief Executive David Wei and Chief Operating Officer Elvis Lee were not involved in the scams but wanted to shoulder responsibility for the “systemic break-down” in Alibaba.com’s “culture of integrity.”
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Google took a big step Thursday night towards dealing with the issue of content farms clogging results, changing its algorithms to weed out low-quality sites. The company said the changes would “noticeably impact” 11.8 percent of all queries, and could affect the rankings for a large number of websites, the company warned.
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Psychiatrist John Barker visited the village the day after the landslide. Barker had a longstanding interest in the paranormal and wondered whether the extreme nature of events in Aberfan might have caused large numbers of people to experience a premonition about the tragedy. To find out, Barker arranged for a newspaper to ask any readers who thought they had foreseen the Aberfan disaster to get in touch. He received 60 letters from across England and Wales, with over half of the respondents claiming that their apparent premonition had come to them during a dream.
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Health/Nutrition
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Conclusions In healthy participants and compared with no exposure, 50-minute cell phone exposure was associated with increased brain glucose metabolism in the region closest to the antenna. This finding is of unknown clinical significance.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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A US man was Thursday sentenced to 25 years in prison on terror charges, including threatening the creators of the animated series “South Park” for portraying the Prophet Mohammed in a bear suit.
Zachary Adam Chesser, 21, who grew up in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, had pleaded guilty in October to providing material support to a terror group and inciting violence against the South Park creators.
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Internet penetration is also pretty low. Only about 4% of the Eritrean population has access to the internet. (In places like Egypt and Tunisia it’s much higher – between 20 and 35%.) So there’s no need for Isaias to close down Twitter or Facebook – but he could if he wanted to, because he controls the monopoly telecoms provider.
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In Libya, several tribal chiefs have lent support to the anti-government movement. France24.com spoke to Hasni Abidi, director of the Study and Research Centre for the Arab and Mediterranean World in Geneva, about the role of tribes in the events.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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An inquiry by a federal watchdog agency found no evidence that scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration manipulated climate data to buttress the evidence in support of global warming, officials said on Thursday.
[...]
Climate change skeptics contended that the correspondence showed that scientists were manipulating or withholding information to advance the theory that the earth is warming as a result of human activity.
In a report dated Feb. 18 and circulated by the Obama administration on Thursday, the inspector general said, “We did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data.”
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Three-quarters of the world’s coral reefs are at risk from overfishing, pollution and climate change, according to a report.
By 2050 virtually all of the world’s coral reefs – from the waters of the Indian Ocean to the Caribbean to Australia – will be in danger, the report warns. The consequences – especially for countries such as the Philippines or Haiti which depend on the reefs for food – will be severe.
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Word has it that China’s weather forecasters expect rain in the next few days, but they are too skittish to make an official prediction. That is understandable, given the stakes. Gripped by its worst drought for 60 years, the world’s biggest wheat producer is desperate for a downpour to avoid a crop failure that would have an impact on food prices around the world.
The challenge is evident from the burst of recent reports in the Chinese media about food, water and the environment.
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In the Gulf, the temperature is rising. The magical spring season should soon bring warm waters teeming with life back to the region’s marshy bayous and sandy shores.
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Finance
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It’s been a good time to be a bankruptcy lawyer. Though it’s been almost three years since the economy began its meltdown, several massive bankruptcies are continuing to generate big fees for attorneys.
Take, for instance, the Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. bankruptcy, which — as widely reported by major news outlets — crossed the $1 billion fee threshold several months ago. Lawyers are earning more in the Lehman bankruptcy because the largest-ever Chapter 11 case involves restructuring $639 billion in assets and $613 billion in debt.
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The family of the top lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission invested with Bernie Madoff and earned more than $1.5 million in ill-gained profits, according to trustee Irving Picard, who has named the lawyer, David M. Becker, as a defendant in a clawback lawsuit, a Daily News investigation has found.
The apparent conflict of interest raises significant questions about the watchdog commission’s failure to stop Madoff and his $65 billion Ponzi scheme, despite repeated red flags and investigations into his operations.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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First, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker spent the day denying he’d ever heard of billionaire David Koch.
Really. A man who gives your political campaign almost $50,000 and you don’t know who he is?
Har-har-hardy-har-har.
Believe it or not, Walker has presidential aspirations but the prank revealed him to be less a leader than a dog willing to don the leash of his masters. In other words, a good Republican.
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The tobacco industry does it, the US Air Force clearly wants to … astroturfing – the use of sophisticated software to drown out real people on web forums – is on the rise. How do we stop it?
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Censorship
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Iranian security forces swept through the homes of opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi and his family, arresting one of his sons and confiscating several documents, his website reported on Tuesday.
A top judiciary official meanwhile warned that those who back the opposition movement will not be tolerated and will be considered as “anti-revolutionary.”
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Privacy
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A Google Inc. camera-equipped snowmobile is setting out to chart Swiss ski slopes on the internet even as the company’s Street View service faces a court challenge over privacy concerns.
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The association says new legislation will give the Government, quangos and local authorities the power to access sensitive medical details without the patient’s permission. It fears that the change will lead to patients withholding information from doctors. The doctor’s union raised its concerns in a letter to Simon Burns, the health minister, on Monday. It is calling for the legislation to be redrafted so that proper safeguards are in place.
Dr Vivienne Nathanson, the head of science and ethics at the BMA, said: “If this legislation is enacted then doctors will not be able to guarantee patient confidentiality. It would undermine the bond of trust between doctors and their patients and could have appalling consequences.
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Civil Rights
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So, not only are these body scanners overly intrusive and potentially dangerous – they also don’t actually do anything to enhance the safety of airline passengers.
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It’s only February, but this year has been a tough one for women’s health and reproductive rights. There’s a new bill on the block that may have reached the apex (I hope) of woman-hating craziness. Georgia State Rep. Bobby Franklin—who last year proposed making rape and domestic violence “victims” into “accusers”—has introduced a 10-page bill that would criminalize miscarriages and make abortion in Georgia completely illegal.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB
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Turn to FidoNet, a networking system that can be used for communication between bulletin board systems. Mail and files can be exchanged via modems using a proprietary protocol. You must meet the technical requirements to join FidoNet.
Check out Daihinia, an app that extends the range of a network of devices that aren’t connected to the larger internet but are connected to each other. Adding a chat client, like Pidgin, to this allows activists to talk to one another.
Look into how you might be able to harness other chat clients as well. On a Mac you can use the “Rendezvous” feature in iChat to communicate with anyone on the network. In Windows use a third party app like Trillian, and Linux has a bunch of 3rd party apps you can use – note that this does require some technical knowledge, which is why it is all the more important to prepare in advance.
Packet radio is a radio communications protocol that lets you create long distance wireless networks between devices like ham radios – if you look into this option before hand, you might be able to create a network using radios.
Get involved with OPENMESH, a new project launched by investor Shervin Pishevar. So far, the forum is working as a place for engineers to offer solutions for building a mesh network in Egypt.
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The new Republican members of both the House and Senate wasted no time following up on promises to undo the Federal Communications Commission’s December vote to apply new “Net neutrality” rules to some broadband Internet access providers.
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DRM
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I received a legal notice from SCEE lawyers requesting me to remove the coolstuff links that graf_chokolo has distributed on grafchokolo.com as well as the links at this blog. What i found interesting in the legal notice is that the lawyers are suing graf_chokolo for 1 million euros. That is quite a number, but graf_chokolo doesn’t seem to care.
He still want to hack the PS3, where he said he cannot sleep knowing that he cannot touch the hypervisor of the PS3. Man, i never see someone like graf, he is an extraordinary genius hacker that Sony wasting it by making a lawsuit against him.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Intellectual property law has long been justified on the belief that external incentives are necessary to get people to produce artistic works and technological innovations that are easily copied. This Essay argues that this foundational premise of the economic theory of intellectual property is wrong. Using recent advances in behavioral economics, psychology, and business-management studies, it is now possible to show that there are natural and intrinsic motivations that will cause technology and the arts to flourish even in the absence of externally supplied rewards, such as copyrights and patents.
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Trademarks
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Xoom Corp. is suing Motorola over the Xoom trademark, claiming it has been using the name to promote its financial services for eight years.
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Copyrights
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SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, where the RIAA appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, despite being awarded $2250 for each download, for a total of $67,500, and where Tenenbaum cross appealed on the ground that the $67,500 was excessive, in view of the actual damages being less than a dollar per download, the parties have filed their respective appellate briefs.
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These have been some eventful weeks in the world of copyright trolling. Thousands of unnamed “John Does” in P2P file sharing lawsuits filed in California, Washington DC, Texas, and West Virginia have been severed, effectively dismissing over 40,000 defendants. The plaintiffs in these cases must now re-file against almost all of the Does individually rather than suing them en mass. These rulings may have a significant impact on the copyright trolls’ business model, which relies on being able to sue thousands of Does at once with a minimum of administrative expense. The cost of filing suit against each Doe may prove prohibitively expensive to plaintiffs’ attorneys who are primarily interested in extracting quick, low-hassle settlements.
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And yet Warner Bros isn’t doing anything differently here than is done by every other studio. Clearly, nothing has changed since Art Buchwald successfully sued Paramount over the 1988 hit Coming to America when the subject of net participation was scrutinized, and a judge called studio accounting methods “unconscionable”.
Grep and Regex – BASH – Linux
Credit: TinyOgg
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