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Tuesday, January 21, 2003 |
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SBC stakes claim on Web frames patent: "Museum Tour, a Milwaukie, Ore.-based seller of educational products, received a letter from SBC last week accusing it of infringing two of its patents." [News.com]
I'm a rare kind of software person. One who thinks that patents are a good thing (although software patents should have a much shorter term). But this kind of thing still tends to rankle me. A patent on frames? SBC's strategy is apparently to start with a company too small to defend itself properly, and use that victory as a precedent in later cases. As comparison, consider the case of Amazon's equally questionable patent on one-click shopping. The first company they sued was Barnes & Noble -- a company with the resources to truly test the legitimacy of the patent in court. Amazon didn't have to make that choice, but they chose to do the ethical thing and use the courts as a tool to determine the validity of the patent, instead of as a tool to beat a helpless innocent into submission. |
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"President George Bush may announce the plan, named Project Prometheus, at his State of the Union address on January 28, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. It would commit the US to the exploration of Mars as a priority and herald the development of a nuclear-powered propulsion system. The first voyage could take place as soon as 2010." [Guardian Unlimited] 10:26:08 PM 
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RIAA wins battle to ID Kazaa user: "This case represents the entertainment industry's latest legal assault on peer-to-peer piracy. If its invocation of the DMCA is upheld on appeal, music industry investigators would have the power to identify hundreds or thousands of music pirates at a time without filing a lawsuit first. That could presage filing lawsuits against individual copyright infringers, a legal club the RIAA has been hesitant to wield so far." [News.com] 10:16:42 PM
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"'Russia's chief demand was to get access to Microsoft's full code, with no omissions,' said Yevgeny Karavayeshnikov, head of the FAPSI state intelligence and surveillance agency," and that's what they got. Says a lot about the pressure MS is under fron Linux, and by adopting this policy they may be able to slow the trend toward Linux use in government applications. (It also demonstrates that MS still has the flexibility to adapt to real-world circumstances -- something a lot of large companies lose.) [Yahoo News] 11:44:29 AM
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I am changing the URL for the spam campaign because the old one, wecanstopspam.org didn't really catch on -- I assume because people don't want to advertise themselves as part of some movement. Reflecting on it over a few weeks, I've realized that I probably wouldn't either if I wasn't a founder! Better to have the URL stress the actual value to the user who has it in his sig. The following explanatory text is now at http://ThisURLEnablesEmailToGetThroughOverzealousSpamFilters:
Use this URL: http://ThisURLEnablesEmailToGetThroughOverzealousSpamFilters in your emails. It will help train statistical spam filters to count spams using that URL as non-spam, thus giving people away to avoid being erroneously filtered out by spam filters. If spammers ever start to use it, which is unlikely, they will including a link to this site, where we will educate people about fighting spam. 9:57:59 AM
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