This week I’m going to consider NTP’s patents on wireless email. Fresh from its settlement with Research in Motion (makers of the BlackBerry), NTP has sued Palm on Monday over the same patents:
Apparently, the $612.5 million that patent holding firm NTP got out of RIM for its questionable patents wasn’t enough. The company (really, a group of lawyers) has filed a lawsuit against Palm as well. Apparently, the firm is claiming patent violations on the same five patents it used against RIM, as well as two additional ones. However, considering that the US Patent Office has given final rejections to two of the patents in the RIM case and indicated it’s likely to reject the rest, it would seem like NTP doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on. It’s unclear what the other two patents are, though they could be from some new deals NTP has cooked up to get its hands on more patents for the sole purpose of squeezing money out of companies. As for the rejected patents, NTP has indicated that it will appeal the patent rejections–so perhaps they hope to cause enough trouble for Palm while they drag out the process that it’s forced to settle as well.
This is a horrible misuse of the patent system, and is simply taking hundreds of millions of dollars away from what should be a developing market and putting it in the hands of a bunch of greedy lawyers who have done nothing to help move the technology forward in the market place. If you don’t recall, NTP was a holding company that owned some disputed exceptionally broad patents on a concept that was basically “wireless email.” An earlier company had tried to do something with the patents, but failed in the marketplace. RIM came along and successfully innovated in the marketplace (while being a bit of a patent menace itself), and suddenly NTP claimed that no one could do wireless email without paying them for the privilege. The patents were incredibly broad and perfectly obvious and never should have been granted (something the USPTO later would admit in rejecting them). Yet, due to the increasing uncertainty over the lawsuit, and the pressure that put on RIM’s stock, the company was forced to settle, taking money away from R&D efforts and sales and handing it over to the lawyers at NTP so they could turn around and sue more companies that were actually successfully innovating and building products and services people wanted.
Mike’s analysis is exactly right. Here is the original patent. It’s important to emphasize here that there was never any allegation that RIM or Palm ever copied anything from NTP or its anyone else associated with these patents. By all accounts, RIM and Palm developed their products completely independently. But that’s irrelevant in patent law: once one company “invents” something–even something as broad as “Hey, maybe we could transmit emails wirelessly!”–and gets a patent for it, no one else is allowed to build that invention without permission from the patent holder.
That’s clearly absurd in a case like this, where the scope of the patent is so broad as to encompass an entire industry. Yet despite the evident absurdity of these patents, and despite the fact that the patent office is now scrambling to correct its mistakes, NTP is still able to extort hundreds of millions of dollars from other companies. And, as Mike points out, it’s truly perverse that our patent system is transferring hundreds of millions of dollars from innovative companies to a pack of greedy lawyers who have never developed a useful product in their lives.
Techdirt points out an especially serious example of e-voting gone wrong:
In one of the stories we spotted yesterday about e-voting glitches, it was amusing to see (at the very, very bottom) the idea that “no major problems” were reported for e-voting in Florida. Florida and Ohio, of course, are the two places where e-voting stories have raised the most questions, and there had already been a number of reports of e-voting problems in Florida voting last week when their early polls opened. So, it looks like ABC may need to revise that “no major problems” report, as the EFF points us to a report saying that 13% of the electronic responses in Sarasota County included no vote for Congressional Representative. That means that somewhere between 8,000 to 10,000 people who voted for other things, like governor, appear to have not voted for House Representative–and no one seems to have a good explanation. It’s certainly possible that all those people decided to go “none of the above,” but it seems unlikely–especially since similar undervoting was not seen in other counties covered by the same Congressional district. Also, there were complaints all day about the e-voting machines not properly recording votes in that county. So, while people are asking for a recount… there’s nothing to recount since the machines did not record the votes. Amusingly, the EFF also notes that the very same county had a referendum on the ballot about the e-voting machines, and the people overwhelmingly voted to scrap the machines and bring back paper ballots. So what was it the press was just saying about no major glitches with e-voting?
One of the things that makes computers incredibly useful is that automate routine tasks so they can be done without human supervision. That’s fantastic for most tasks, but it’s a disaster when the task at hand is recording votes, because it means that if there’s a programming bug, it will do things the same wrong way with each and every voter. And because the counting process is totally opaque, no one notices until it’s too late.
E-voting machines may streamline the voting process, but that’s actually not a benefit at all. A slow, labor-intensive voting process means there will be more human eyes around to spot mistakes early enough that they can be corrected. But because we delegated the process to a computer, there were no human beings in a position to notice the problem.
Via Luis, here’s a good analysis of the ominous aspect of the Microsoft-Novell deal:
This is not a religious argument about open source, it’s a matter of respect for a community that works together, and the wishes of creators. If I write something and put it under the GPL, then I want it under the GPL where all of us working on it can use it. I don’t want it to be made proprietary, for someone else’s benefit, due to some shady deal and legal technicality. Commercial yes (and encouraged), proprietary no.
In Novell’s world, if I write something and GPL it, Novell will try to convince customers to buy support from Novell instead of from me (the original author) because of some nebulous, unspecified, almost-certainly-bullshit “IP issues” hinted at by Microsoft and legitimized by Novell for the price of $348 million.
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Reader Steve R. points out David Pogue’s scathing review of the Zune:
PlaysForSure bombed. All of them put together stole only market-share crumbs from Apple. The interaction among player, software and store was balky and complex–something of a drawback when the system is called PlaysForSure.
“Yahoo might change the address of its D.R.M. server, and we can’t control that,” said Scott Erickson, a Zune product manager. (Never mind what a D.R.M. server is; the point is that Microsoft blames its partners for the technical glitches.)
Is Microsoft admitting, then, that PlaysForSure was a dud? All Mr. Erickson will say is, “PlaysForSure works for some people, but it’s not as easy as the Zune.”
So now Microsoft is starting over. Never mind all the poor slobs who bought big PlaysForSure music collections. Never mind the PlaysForSure companies who now find themselves competing with their former leader. Their reward for buying into Microsoft’s original vision? A great big “So long, suckas!”
And he doesn’t much care for the WiFi sharing feature:
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PJ, our webmaster, has installed the Akismet comment spam filter, which appears to have largely solved our spam problem. Which is a good thing, because we got about 1000 spam comments in the last 24 hours. Before, a couple hundred per day were getting through. So far today, it’s been catching all of them.
The downside is that it seems to occasionally catch a legitimate comment. I can’t actually blame the software. I mean, commenters like “Jim Harper” sure sound sketchy–it’s no wonder the filters were confused. But if your comment gets caught in the filter, please let me know by emailing tlee -at- showmeinstitute.org and I’ll see if I can fish it out of the spam folder for you.
Also, this is a good time to mention that our web hosting is generously provided by PJ Doland Web Design, which is also responsible for the site design. (The content is entirely our fault) PJ is fanatical about things like standards compliance, clean designs, open source software, and reliability, so please check him out next time you’ve got a web design or web programming project.
CNN has a round-up of voting problems with yesterday’s elections. There seem to be a lot of problems like this:
The New Jersey Republican Committee said Republican voters filed four affidavits saying that they weren’t able to vote for Republican Senate candidate Tom Kean because the Sequoia voting machines they were using were already programmed to vote for Democrat Bob Menendez, according to NJRC Counsel Mark Sheridan. Michelle Schaffer at Sequoia told CNN, “We have been in close communication with the New Jersey attorney general’s office, and we are not aware of any issues that are problematic nor have they raised any to ask us about. “
As tempting as it is, I think it would be a mistake for critics of e-voting to highlight these sorts of problems in their arguments against paperless voting machines. They’re closely analogous to, say, the butterfly ballot debacle from 2000. Human error is inevitable in any election. And it’s a big country, so even if there are dozens of reports of scattered e-voting problems in particular precincts, that probably just reflects the fact that e-voting is new, so both people and the news media are more likely to report e-voting related problems.
What makes e-voting uniquely bad is two things: first, they’re brittle. Paper ballots are not subject to problems like software bugs, power outages, incorrect equipment setup, etc. Under almost any circumstances, it’s still possible for a voter to mark his or her ballot and go on his way. In contrast, with e-voting, the voter’s got to wait around until the machine is fixed, and the poll workers most likely won’t know how to fix it. If the downtime is significant, a lot of voters will get frustrated and leave the polling place. So the system is much less resilient to unexpected problems. We saw several of this kind of problem in Ohio, Indiana, Delaware, and elsewhere.
Secondly, and far more importantly, in precincts without voter-verified paper trails, we can’t be confident that the vote totals represented the actual votes that were cast in each precinct. I
haven’t seen any evidence that foul play of this kind occurred. My guess is that none did. But if an election were stolen by hackers, we wouldn’t necessarily find out about it, because there’s no way to audit the result in precincts without paper trails.
Jim Lippard notes that HBO’s “Hacking the Vote” special is available for viewing on Google Video here. I haven’t had time to watch it yet, but if Diebold hates it, it must have some merit.
On an unrelated note, am I blind, or does Google video still not have an “embed this video” feature? That seems to have been one of the most important factors in YouTube’s rise to prominence, and it can’t possibly be a difficult feature to clone. Why hasn’t Google implemented it yet?
In general, I don’t think elections have a big effect on technology issues, as they don’t tend to break down along partisan lines. One possible exception is network neutrality regulation. It seems that Democratic control of Congress is likely to make it easier for the pro-regulation folks to get their preferred legislation through Congress. On the other hand, the issue probably isn’t at the top of the Democratic agenda, and it’s complicated enough that the Democrats might find it hard to reach a consensus. Personally, I’m still rooting against Congress passing any telecom legislation.
Congress still has the opportunity to come back for a lame duck session, where it might still pass NSA white-washing legislation. I hope the Republicans have enough shame not to do that, but I wouldn’t put it past them. When the new Congress starts, it would be nice if they repealed the gambling bill, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
One race that makes me a little bit sad is Mark Kennedy’s loss in the Minnesota Senate race. Kennedy was a strong supporter of DMCA-reform legislation. I met with one of his staffers back in April, and he struck me as a smart guy genuinely interested in promoting good policies. It would have been nice to have an articulate DMCA critic in the Senate.
Over at my other blog, my friend Amy Phillips has a funny comment about the blurring of nipples on those plastic surgery reality shows:
I watch a lot of plastic surgery, and while they always blur out women’s nipples, they never blur men’s (even when the men in question have boobs bigger than some of the pre-surgery women).
This leads to very weird results in shows about the plastic surgery that transgendered people undergo. When giving breast implants to a M-to-F transgendered person, the nipples are never blurred out at the beginning of the show, but about halfway through the surgery, once the implants are inflated, they pixelate the nipples. Same nipples, but when they sit on a rounder chest, they become indecent.
On F-to-M transgendered people, they blur out the nipples at the beginning of the surgery, but once a sufficient amount of breast tissue has been removed to make the chest look male, out come the nipples. Again, the same nipples that were once obscene become perfectly okay to look at once the chest is flattened out.
This happens without fail, regardless of what gender the patient in question considers her/himself, regardless of what genitalia the patient possesses, and regardless of the person’s legal gender. Context is everything, apparently.
Given that these are usually cable shows, we probably can’t blame the FCC for this one. We just live in a strange country.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.