June 21st 2008
The Christian Science Monitor reports that as blogging has become more popular, so has the oppression of bloggers by governments. Bloggers seem particularly susceptible to political imprisonment: The vigilante tone of many citizen journalists sends them down a prickly path with government censors; and they are often one-man operations, meaning there’s no editors or company […]
June 20th 2008
The USPTO faces a backlog of over one million patent applications. To keep up, patent examiners have less than 20 hours per application to determine if a 20-year monopoly should be issued, which can determine the future of entire industries or the direction of basic research. Over the last year, the USPTO has cooperated with […]
June 18th 2008
The US-China Economic and Security Commission held hearings today on access to information and media control in China. There’s more than a little scepticism about promises of openness being more talk than action. IP blogging hero Ron Coleman also came right out today and essentially called China’s recent IP reform announcements a PR effort, which […]
June 18th 2008
Bain Capital has bought a 53 million stake in the social networking site LinkedIn. This would bring the total valuation for LinkedIn to just above $1 billion. Bain invests in and sell companies, so its involvement is an additional sign that LinkedIn may be headed toward a sale. So, why now? And does this raise potential privacy concerns?
June 18th 2008
Last year I wrote a brief analysis of why sports venues benefit by restricting ticket resale. It is hard to think of any other instance, perhaps other than land ownership, where the resale of your asset can be restricted or outright denied. Further, anything which makes honest people hide from police as if they were […]
June 10th 2008
Do you ever wonder who owns the rights on blog comments? Would a blogger need to seek permission to republish your comment elsewhere? Can you take comments back? Amend them? Publish comments they inspire?
June 9th 2008
North Oaks, Minnesota, population 4,500, has sent Google Maps a big message: “Go away, and don’t come back.” You see, in North Oaks the roads are privately owned by the residents. So when the Googlemobile toured North Oaks and photographed people’s homes from the street, it was technically trespassing. That’s what the North Oaks City Council […]
June 3rd 2008
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is considering blocking Facebook, the popular social networking site used in April to mobilize 80,000 supporters to protest rising food prices. As described in earlier postings, Facebook has been used around the world to coordinated even larger protests. Blogger Kareem el-Beheiri, who covered and promoted the protest was imprisioned for 73 . See […]
June 3rd 2008
Its kind of the opposite of, “do unto others”. When Universal Music lost an infringement case to Bridgeport Music, it did an unexpected thing. It apparently made a successful case that punitive damages tacked on to statutory damages are unconstitutional. As a plaintiff, Universal has argued in other cases for very high fines. It is, […]
May 30th 2008
If a group of kids can control hundreds of millions of machines for sending spam, shouldn’t security experts with billions of dollars from the NSA, MI6, or CSEC be tempted to do the same? Why wait to try to catch data to going over the wires when botnet programs could let agents review the data […]
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