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 several other database products and combining them into a single user-friendly package. This is somewhat akin to a car company patenting the idea of a car that has anti-lock brakes, an onboard navigation system, and remote keyless entry. The patent could have glossy color pictures of the vehicle and describe in great detail how seamlessly the features work together, but it still wouldn’t be an invention worthy of patent protection. Combining several previously-known features into one product isn’t innovative, even if the new product allows you to do things the old one didn’t.
I suspect that this is a rare case where the only realistic chance of reform is for Congress to get involved. The Supreme Court has too much on its plate (and is likely too wedded to stare decisis) to untangle the mess the Federal Circuit has made of the patent system.
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 media the term “socialist” is a positive.
-There’s the question of whether anyone who accepts copyright must therefore be a socialist.
-And then the question of whether markets in general, since they seem pretty good at giving people access to things, are “socialist.”
I’ll stop here.
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 digital music players. The installer app failed, and an hour into the ordeal, I found myself asking my office goldfish, “Has it really come to this? Am I really about to manually create and install a .dll file?”
But there it was, right on the Zune’s tech support page. Is this really what parents want to be doing at 4 a.m. on Christmas morning?
That might not be Zune’s fault. After about a year of operation, it’s almost as if a Windows machine develops some sort of antibodies that prevent it from recognizing new hardware. But what’s Microsoft’s excuse for everything else?
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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 DRMd DVDs or CDs onto other devices like PCs or iPods. Derek Slater has a round-up of reaction from around the web.
Notable among the exemptions is one for locked cell phones. Wireless carriers will subsidize your phone purchase, but the phone you get is locked so you can only use it on one network. This exemption will now allow consumers to take their locked phones to a competing network who I’m sure will be happy to unlock it for them. On the surface this is great for consumers, but I also wonder what impact it will have on carriers’ willingness to subsidize phones. On the margin, at least, their incentive has shrunk. If that’s the case (and allow me to be a geek for a moment) then it might help Apple’s assuredly forthcoming iPhone better compete since many believe that it will be sold unlocked and without attachment to any carrier.
I seem to have been unclear in my previous post about software firms as intermediaries. Don Marti objects:
Software developers have to eat, and the GPL is not just about “join us now and share the software”. Homo economicus writes GPL software, too.
Besides acting as a “codification” of science-like norms on information sharing, the GPL is also about making the code itself a commodity in order to drive up the value of the services–support and maintenance programming–that are complements to it. Think of it as a bar: the code is just dry, salty free pretzels without the cold beer of maintenance and support. When a developer decides to release software under the GPL, he or she is typically making an economically rational decision to invest in himself or herself.
I know people who spent several years of their lives, when they could afford it, as “starving hackers” contributing to GPL software, and who are now “Senior Architect” types at various big IT companies, paid the big bucks to support and continue development of software they invested a lot of time in, and that they’re uniquely qualified, technically and social-network-wise, to continue supporting. The incentive that the GPL provides for creating software value is a powerful alternative to the “will work for options” model.
I entirely agree. When I said that the GPL community is non-commercial, I didn’t in any sense mean that it’s anti-commercial. Certainly, many people participate in the Linux community because they expect it to pay off for them down the road, and that’s certainly not frowned on within the community.
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In a comment responding to my previous post, engima_foundary makes an excellent observation:
In a nutshell, I consider a Free Software company as a thin membrane, with their clients on one side and the developers and Free Software on the other. They mediate between the two wowrlds, and the value they bring to their clients consists of two things: (1) Service – which is their responsiveness to their costomers & (2) their reputation and integrity.
Well, guess what-they just assinated their own integrity. So all they have left is service, and that means they are at a disadvantage to their competitors.
I think this is an excellent description of what a free software company does. Fundamentally, they create value by serving as an intermediary between two distinct communities that operate on somewhat different norms. On the one hand, you’ve got the free software community, which is organized on fundamentally non-commercial principles. The coin of the realm is code, not money. You gain a good reputation in that community by writing great code and making it available for others to build on, and by respecting the communities strong norms of reciprocity.
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I’ve just finished reading a new report by a research firm called Ramp Rate about Net neutrality and the online gaming market. Now I’m accustomed to Net neutrality supporters employing gloom-and-doom, Chicken Little-esque rhetoric in support of government regulation of broadband networks, but I was shocked to see the same rhetoric laid on so thick in a study by industry consultants.
The sky-is-falling rhetoric kicks off with the very title of their piece: “Every Time You Vote against Net Neutrality, Your ISP Kills a Night Elf.” The authors go on to paint a picture of the coming apocalypse if we do not adopt Net neutrality regs right away:
“What will be murdered with no fallback or replacement is the nascent market of interactive entertainment–particularly online gaming. Companies like Blizzard Entertainment, Electronic Arts, Sony Online Entertainment, and countless others, have built a business on the fundamental assumption of relatively low latency bandwidth being available to large numbers of consumers. … Killing off these blossoming networks, with their own economies (potentially taxable when converted into real-world cash), would result in drastic, irreparable harm to consumers, technology developers, the economy and tax revenue–and even the ISPs themselves.”
Murdered? Killed off? Oh my, who knew the end was so near?! Of course, the end is not upon us and the online gaming market is not about to be “murdered” because of a lack of Net neutrality regulation. In fact, just the opposite could be the case as I will explain below the fold.
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Communications Daily (subscription) reported Monday that Clear Channel’s upcoming sale of 448 stations will likely be structured in big blocks of licenses–with only about a dozen transactions in all. One reason, according to Comm Daily, is the FCC approval process. With big batches, the article reports, quoting a broadcast property appraiser: “They are not going to want to be involved in 400+ transactions. It would become a nightmare in terms of documentation.”
One consequence of this is that minority owners and small businesses would find it harder to buy acquire licenses, at least in the initial round. In other words, the FCC ownership rules–justified as a way to increase diversity in media–may actually be hindering minority ownership.
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