23 May 2002

Patents and Royalty Income on Software Can you patent technology and avoid Irish tax? Yep. I watched lawsuits unfold in the Y2K arena a few years ago, when an Irish company secured a Irish patent on encapsulation software. They didn't get a patent in any other company, but they got slapped with lawsuits for patent infringement by an American company. It's happening to SmartForce now.  Irish companies can avoid paying tax on royalties. So if a business process is a patented process, it could be generating royalty income. In Ireland, royalty income is most commonly enjoyed by entertainers. And software developers.

Blogging During Conferences Will we blog the September 2002 SEISS conference in Kilkenny? The ETCON 2002 conference demonstrated that weblogs are having a powerful impact on conferences. I'm on a planning committee that thinks we should have blogs report on the conference in real time. They would link their content to posts on boards.ie and inject links into threads on the Open, IIA-WST and IIA-EBS lists. We would aggregate comments into a conference news blog, make this blog page the default page on internet terminals scattered throughout the conference. We would also inject weblog commentary into conference discussions.

Radio UserLand Confused on Date My personal Radio UserLand Web server has lost its date. So many of my posts are scrambled. There has to be a way for Radio UserLand to work with ejits like me, who have to occasionally boot up with an incorrect date.

Creative Commons Creative Commons has opened with plans to provide a free set of tools to enable creators to share aspects of their copyrighted works with the public or to dedicate them entirely to the public domain. Stanford Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig is the first Creative Commons Chairman. He described the new project this way when he spoke at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference: Our tools will make it easier for people to make some or all of their rights available to the public for free. If, for example, an artist wants to make her music available for non-commercial use, or with just attribution, our tools will help her express those intentions in a machine-readable form. Computers will then be able to identify and understand the terms of the license, making it easier for people to search for and share creative works. Sent from Radio TransNote while in The Ignis, KK to TS. ref: 125.