Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Brazil, India and Italy recently joined the Open Document Format parade, according to today’s press release from the ODF Alliance. Brazil will recommend ODF as the government’s preferred format, India decided to use ODF at its tax office, and Italy will recognize ODF as national standard. Is this good or bad news for technology liberators [...]
A transcript of the KSR v. Teleflex oral argument is available here. It sure sounds like the justices are not happy with the status quo: MR. GOLDSTEIN: Justice Scalia, I this it would be surprising for this experienced Court and all of the patent bar–remember, every single major patent bar association in the country has [...]
Doug Lay points out this summary of today’s oral arguments in the KSR v. Teleflex case. ZDNet’s Anne Broache has another good summary. It sounds like the argument went well for the forces of sanity: During hour-long oral arguments in a case that’s closely watched by the business community, Chief Justice John Roberts suggested that [...]
Why didn’t the Baby Bells compete with one another when Congress ended their exclusive franchises in 1996? Each possessed the necessary expertise and vast resources. The FCC was most eager to help. Did the Baby Bells conspire to carve up their territories in order to maintain their respective monopolies? In Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, [...]
Ed Felten has a clever post on the strange intersection of Second Life and copyright law: Alice designs a spiffy new hot air balloon that everyone covets. Bob uses CopyBot to make his own replica of the balloon, which he starts riding around the skies. Alice discovers this and sends a takedown notice to Second [...]
Techdirt notes that the Supreme Court has turned down Microsoft’s appeal of their loss to Guatemalan inventor Carlos Armando Amado. And they were kind enough to link to my write-up of the Amado patent. As I said back in June: So it seems that Mr. Amado’s “invention” consisted in taking a bunch of features from [...]
Just for fun, a little piece on copyright as socialism. So how many meta-levels can we think about this at? -There’s the whole question of the origin of the word “socialist,” I vaguely recollect that, like “liberal,” it used to be used by free marketers. -There’s the discordance of recognizing that in some country’s mainstream [...]
Another scathing Zune review, this one in the Chicao Sun-Times: “Avoid,” is my general message. The Zune is a square wheel, a product that’s so absurd and so obviously immune to success that it evokes something akin to a sense of pity. The setup process stands among the very worst experiences I’ve ever had with [...]
I can’t believe Tim Lee hasn’t posted about this already, but the Copyright Office has released its list of new exemptions to the DMCA. All around they’re pretty good considering how stingy the Copyright Office has been with exemptions in the past. Missing, of course, is an exemption that would allow folks to format-shift their [...]
May 16, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
