One of the things that I was desperately hoping would happen when Chief Justice Roberts was sworn in was that the Supreme Court would start taking cases dealing with technology law which have traditionally made the United States the laughing stock of the international community. This has actually come to pass!
The Supreme Court has ruled regarding the ‘obviousness’ test in Patent applications. (Basically, the idea is that you can’t patent something that is obvious; only something that is innovative can be patented.) Of course, there are many famous examples of things that received a patent, but also seemed unbelievably obvious. A great example of this is the Amazon.com One Click Patent. In the case the Supreme Court ruled on today, the patent was concerning a gas pedal and a sensor as if simply adding a sensor to a gas pedal was innovative.
One can only hope that this spells good news for all those who are concerned with Patent reform in the United States.
The Colts selections are in! It appears that they are pleased with the results. As a fan though, I have to admit that I’m a bit puzzled. I went into the draft thinking the two spots we needed to fill first were at corner and linebacker because of the loss of Jason David and Cato June. However, we ended up drafting a wide receiver and an offensive lineman first.
I suppose I can understand getting a wide receiver if you think he’s the best player out there, but I don’t understand trading two picks to get into the second round and grab an offensive lineman. A friend of mine explained to me that Tarik Glenn is an Unrestricted Free Agent after this year, which explains the need a little bit more to me, but I am still a bit confused because the move seemed extreme to me. I guess I can’t complain. I mean, we did just win the Superbowl and all. 
I’ve been pretty busy with end of the semester stuff, but I would be remiss if I didn’t post about the Colts trip to the White House. Let’s hope this becomes an annual thing. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to the upcoming NFL Draft this weekend!
As mentioned on Slashdot, the Technician Online has a story about a number of lawsuits filed by the RIAA against NCSU to obtain the names of several people accused of downloading music illegally. There is also an opinion piece posted on the same topic. Now, there are a lot of other issues at work here, but I am glad to see that North Carolina State is taking this stance.
I am not a big fan of the RIAA, but I don’t think that people should pick a legal stance simply to be in opposition of the RIAA, which seems to be the primary reason that most posters on Slashdot like it. I really like NCSU’s stance simply from the standpoint that they are protecting the privacy of their students. If NCSU were simply and ISP taking this stance to protect it’s customer’s that would be even better. It’s common to see ISPs and telephone companies cave and simply provide internet usage and phone records without requiring a court order because they don’t really lose anything tangible by providing those records. Mostly, the damage that could occur is the invasion of privacy of their customers, which doesn’t directly hurt an ISP.
I had a conversation with a friend recently about Gentoo Linux. Although I haven’t posted much about Gentoo Linux or my history with it, I will say that I have been using Gentoo for about six years now. It was my main development environment most of that time. Currently, I consider myself to be a Mac OS X user and a fan of Gentoo.
As a fan of Gentoo, I am quite distressed about their current direction. Distrowatch recently had a very good summary of the current issues, but doesn’t really place emphasis on the fact that this is a problem that has been around for a while now. It has been relatively common knowledge amongst Linux folk since at the least August of 2006 when this article was published. Personally, I think the first signs that there were issues was the website redesign that went no where.
There are several reasons for these problems, but the primary one is, in my opinion, people like Ciaran McCreesh. He is absolutely the Terrel Owens of the Gentoo Linux team, only less talented. Although he has contributed code and some actually good ideas to the Gentoo projects that he’s worked on, he is by far a net negative contributer. To put it lightly, he rubs people the wrong way. At best, he is polarizing, meaning that people either love him or hate him. However, from what I’ve seen most people just get pissed off at him. He’s been petulant and annoying almost from the very beginning. Almost every topic he posted on in the forums ended up like this one. Recent events seem to indicate that he’s still at it.
Compound people issues with a general lack of direction and a comparatively new hot thing in Ubuntu and you end up with the decline of a once great distribution. Being a developer on a Linux distribution is like most development jobs – primarily maintenance or mundane implementation. There are a lot of very un-sexy jobs that just need to be done efficiently and with high quality. The people who actually do these jobs tend to also be the people that don’t put up with the kind of idiotic crap that has been plaguing Gentoo for some time now.
Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, recently posted about copyrights on his blog. He makes a really great analogy about borrowing property and shows how it’s not truly a “victimless” crime, but I think the really interesting thing here is to see someone who personally owns a very valuable library of copyrighted material speaking in a very down to earth fashion about them.
It’s very easy to think about patents, copyright and trademarks in the very broad corporate sense because those are the cases that are most often reported in the news. I’m sure that as the creator of a hugely popular comic strip, Scott Adams would probably fall into this category as well, but his post comes off as a lot more relaxed than that. As a journeyman reader of his blog, most of his posts come off as very down to earth and direct. It’s good to see a glimpse of the more human side of this issue once in a while.
There was a post on Slashdot recently about the Verizon vs. Vonage debate. A lot of the comments are bashing the intellectual property system in this country as only backing the huge conglomerate corporations interest. It makes for somewhat interesting reading, but the usual Slashdot rules apply. Of course, in the end, it’s a bunch of non-lawyers talking about legal issues. (Just like this post here!)
I do wonder though how much of a chicken and an egg issue this is. Once you come up with a really killer idea, you tend to become a huge conglomerate corporation really fast. Plus, it’s not worth the legal fees to sue smaller businesses that don’t have the assets to be collectible anyhow. Maybe all these huge intellectual property lawsuits seem like giant corporations talking about incomprehensibly large amounts of money, but perhaps they also started out as one guy drawing a comic.
There’s an interesting legal case involving some students and an anti-cheating service that was reported by the Washington Post. Basically these students wrote some papers, sent them to an anti-cheating service online, asked the service not to include the papers in their database, and found the papers included anyhow. They are suing from the standpoint that the anti-cheating service has violated their copyrights.
There are two opposing issues. First, students should have rights to the things they create as a part of the learning process. Second, schools should have a right to check that a student’s work is original. Decades ago, this was pretty straightforward since students could really only cheat locally. However, with the advent of the computer age, students can now copy virtually anything from anywhere. That’s why anti-cheating services exist.
So here’s the thing that worries me about this: What happens if these students win? Schools are still going to want to be able to check for cheaters. It is in the best interest of the school to not graduate people who didn’t actually learn what they were supposed to learn. In order to check for cheaters, these schools are going to have to use services like this online anti-cheating. If students own the copyright to their work, then schools will have to require that students assign their rights to the school to have the freedom to submit them to anti-cheating services.
This happens in business all the time. Authors are hired to write specific books. Engineers are hired to solve specific problems. These works are owned by the company they work for and not the author or inventor because of their employment agreements. It also has been happening at the University level for a while. (e.g. North Carolina State University)
It feels like a pretty slippery slope to me. What happens when the next Stephen King finds that his alma mater is suing him for copyright violation on a story that evolved from a short story he wrote back when he was a student in a creative writing class? I would think that at the public school level students should not have to sign away their rights to the things they create. Things change a bit at the University level because you are not required by the government to get a University degree and there are many, many successful people who never attended college.
Anyhow, I know I’m not a lawyer, but this sort of problem is worth keeping an eye on.
I recently read Jennifer Granick’s latest column on Wired about the interesting legal case between Oracle and SAP. Basically, an Oracle customer wanted to switch to SAP and gave SAP their passwords to log into some Oracle systems. Now Oracle is claiming that SAP has broken some computer crime statues for accessing a computer illegally.
Granick’s column looks at this from the perspective of anti-competitive practices. While I agree that this has some implications in that area, my first thought about this case was that it was an information property issue. If I was a customer and I gave my information to a company, I would say that I still own that information and should be able to ask the company to remove it or authorize other people to access it.
This sort of thing crops up all the time in online privacy issues. Of course, I am not a lawyer and Granick is a very good one, but I thought it was an interesting issue that seems like it could be solved based on the simple question of who has more rights: the owner of the information or the owner of the place where the information is stored?