US Patents: Is the Tide Turning?

Maybe I'm an incorrigible optimist, but these look hopeful signs:

The U.S. Supreme Court made it easier to challenge patents for failing to introduce genuine innovations, siding with Intel Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. and dealing a setback to the drug and biotechnology industries.

...

The decision extends a Supreme Court trend that has put new limits on patent rights. In today's case, the justices heeded arguments from large computer companies and automakers that the lower court test, which centered on the requirement that an invention be "non-obvious," had given too much power to developers of trivial technological improvements.

"Granting patent protection to advances that would occur in the ordinary course without real innovation retards progress," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court.

(Via Slashdot.)

All That (Non-DRM'd) Jazz

It's striking that more and more DRM-free sites are starting to achieve prominence - and, one hopes, profitability. Here's another, AllAboutJazz.com, which has a very clever sample system: you can hear all the track, at high quality, but only in 30 second bursts; cunning. But be warned: once you start listening to this stuff, you may have an irresistible urge to buy something from its online shop.... (Via Boing Boing.)

BBC Trust Blows It

The bad news:

we recognise and share the strength of feeling on platform neutrality. We do not consider it practicable to offer catch-up television over the internet on a platform neutral basis immediately. We consider it preferable to allow the BBC to provide value to a majority of users now rather than to wait until full platform neutrality can be achieved before providing catch-up television. We still require platform neutrality for seven-day catch-up television over the internet within a reasonable timeframe, but we have decided not to specify a deadline for achieving this. To counter-balance this, the Trust will take a more active role in holding the Executive to account on the issue by auditing its progress every six months.

Six-monthly audit, eh? Heavy - that's really going to make a difference.

The good news:

In our consultation, members of the public expressed strong feeling in large numbers that seven-day catch-up television over the internet should be available to consumers who are not using Microsoft software. 81 per cent (5,804) said this was very important and a further 5 per cent (355) said it was important. Such was the strength of feeling that respondents did not appreciate, or did not consider it relevant, that the Trust was proposing that the BBC achieves platform neutrality within a specified period. Any period of excluding other operating systems was apparently considered unacceptable by our public respondents.

OK, we lost, but it looks like a lot of us cared enough to act: that's good, not least for the future.

La vida es una lucha.

Of Modules, Atoms and Packages

I commented before that I thought Rufus Pollock's use of the term "atomisation" in the context of open content didn't quite capture what he was after, so I was pleased to find that he's done some more work on the concept and come up with the following interesting refinements:

Atomization

Atomization denotes the breaking down of a resource such as a piece of software or collection of data into smaller parts (though the word atomic connotes irreducibility it is never clear what the exact irreducible, or optimal, size for a given part is). For example a given software application may be divided up into several components or libraries. Atomization can happen on many levels.

At a very low level when writing software we break thinks down into functions and classes, into different files (modules) and even group together different files. Similarly when creating a dataset in a database we divide things into columns, tables, and groups of inter-related tables.

But such divisions are only visible to the members of that specific project. Anyone else has to get the entire application or entire database to use one particular part of it. Furthermore anyone working on any given part of one of the application or database needs to be aware of, and interact with, anyone else working on it — decentralization is impossible or extremely limited.

Thus, atomization at such a low level is not what we are really concerned with, instead it is with atomization into Packages:

Packaging

By packaging we mean the process by which a resource is made reusable by the addition of an external interface. The package is therefore the logical unit of distribution and reuse and it is only with packaging that the full power of atomization’s “divide and conquer” comes into play — without it there is still tight coupling between different parts of a given set of resources.

Developing packages is a non-trivial exercise precisely because developing good stable interfaces (usually in the form of a code or knowledge API) is hard. One way to manage this need to provide stability but still remain flexible in terms of future development is to employ versioning. By versioning the package and providing ‘releases’ those who reuse the packaged resource can use a specific (and stable) release while development and changes are made in the ‘trunk’ and become available in later releases. This practice of versioning and releasing is already ubiquitous in software development — so ubiquitous it is practically taken for granted — but is almost unknown in the area of knowledge.

Tricky stuff, but I'm sure it will be worth the effort if the end-result is a practical system for modularisation, since this will allow open content to enjoy many of the evident advantages of open code.

The Caravan Moves On

The dogs are barking on C|net again:

focus on one major problem: Will content companies, such as movie, music and book producers, and those who want to provide them with information technology services, be able to attach Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies, a.k.a. Technological Protection Measures (TPM), to programs that are licensed under GPLv3? Since every Linux distribution contains many programs controlled by the Free Software Foundation, this presents no small issue.

Well, since James V. DeLong is "senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation" - Alert! Alert! Weasel word alert! - he would ask that, wouldn't he? I hate to break it to you, James, but DRM is so 2006 (just ask Steve Jobs or EMI): the caravan has moved on.

Google Supports ODF

Well, it already does with its online office suite, but now it lets you search for ODF files and displays converted online:

In addition to HTML files, Google indexes other file types like: PDFs, Microsoft Office files, Shockwave Flash files and more. Google offers you the option to read the HTML (or text) version of the cached file, in case you don't have an application that opens the file.

Google added OpenDocument format to the list of supported documents.

The post has interesting numbers of how many files types are currently found: not many for ODF, currently. It will be interesting to see how things change with time. (Via Bob Sutor.)

Gagging Linus

I seem to recall that Darl McBride, the man behind SCO's suicidal strategy of suing IBM, once received a box of worms as a token of displeasure from someone. I think he would have got rather more than that had this idea gone ahead:

SCO suggested that all parties involved in the litigation be subject to a stipulated gag order. The company then stretched the definition of "involved parties" to include SCO, Columbia Law professor Eben Moglen, OSS advocate Eric Raymond, and Linus Torvalds. "Because of Mr. Torvalds' position in the technology world, his comments about SCO's evidence in this case are given particular weight in industry and popular press," argues the letter from SCO attorney Kevin P. McBride.

Easy Access to IPv6 at Last?

You probably don't realise it, but the Internet is a dinosaur. More specially, the Internet numbering system is palaeolithic, and needs sorting out. Ironically, the solution has been around for years (I first wrote about it nearly a decade ago). It's called IPv6, and instead of the measly 4 billion or so addresses that IPv4 allows (and which are allocated in a particularly arbitrary way), IPv6 will give us

340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456

of them, which should keep us going for a while.

And yet we hear little of IPv6 these days. So I was glad to see that down-under they are doing something on this front with the IPv6 for e-Business initiative. As well as scads of useful IPv6 resources, this site also has links to a highly-practical outcome of the Australian project, the memorably-named "Easy Access Device":

The Easy Access Device (EAD) has been developed with the purpose of providing a small businesses (leas than 50 employees) with a simple, easy to use IPv6 Internet access device. The system is designed as a small unit that would be installed in a small business, and connects directly into a DSL, cable or wireless broadband termination unit (typically a modem). The unit provides the basic network services normally required at a small office network boundary for both IPv6 and IPv4 networks.

Apparently it's a PC box running Ubuntu. Providing a cheap solution is probably as good a way as any of moving on from the poor old IPv4.

Behold the Sculpted Prim

Second Life gets an upgrade: sculpted prims.

Q: What is a sculpted prim?

A: A "sculpted prim" is a prim whose shape is determined by a texture - its "sculpt texture". Sculpted prims can create organic shapes that are not currently possible with Second Life's prim system.

Very cool. (Via C|net.)

Open Source Museum of Open Source Art

You don't normally expect museums to be open source, not least because they are rather keen on preventing visitors from modifying their exhibits. Of course, if the museum and its holdings are purely virtual, then this is less of a problem - you could always undo operations, provided you keep a backup.

And thus was born OSMOSA, the Open Source Museum of Open Source Art, in Second Life; the name comes from the fact the museum can be modified, too. Truth to tell, the idea is rather more interesting than the (virtual) reality, which was rather confused when I visited.

How Not to Get It, Part 4593

There's a wonderful story in the entertainment industry's local rag, Variety:

Young people prefer to download film and music illegally because they don't think that the biz is capable of giving bang for their buck.

An Edelman survey claims that more than a quarter of 18- to 34-year-olds in the U.K. and France would download film and music content illegally due to a lack of trust in the entertainment industry.

While technology companies rated highest in Edelman's report on levels of consumer trust among opinion elites, defined as educated, affluent and media informed, in France and the U.K., media and entertainment companies ranked behind only insurance companies in terms of the public's distrust.

What's interesting about this, is not just how much today's yoof really get what's going on - that they are being conned by the entertainment industry in terms of the products they are being offered (DRM, etc.) - but the spin put on all this by the industry and its servants:

"There is good news for the sector in that people do trust the companies to make entertainment content widely and legally available online," Becker said. "Now entertainment companies need to articulate they're providing value for money. I think we are witnessing that evolution."

Good news? Trust the companies?? Evolution??? Don't tell me: black is white, and up is down, too.

World Intellectual Monopolies Day

This is bad enough:

Each year, WIPO and its Member States celebrate World Intellectual Property Day with activities, events and campaigns. These seek to increase public understanding of what IP really means, and to demonstrate how the IP system fosters not only music, arts and entertainments, but also all the products and technological innovations that help to shape our world.

But these "suggested activities" are positively obscene:

# Mount an essay competition in local schools on simple intellectual property-related themes, such as "How creativity and innovation improve the world".

# Organize a school wide intellectual property day with different awareness building activities for the students (such as invention competition to find the best solution to a common problem, a painting or sketching competition, or presentations by inventors, authors, musicians on their experiences with, or reflections on, the IP system); distribute and exhibit WIPO and materials from the national IP office in schools.

A day celebrating monopolies? While we're at it, why not have a day celebrating passive smoking, or a day celebrating global warming? (Via Michael Geist.)

God Bless Spyware...

...or rather, god bless the Spyware Act currently being pondered in the US. Why, you may ask? How can something as laudable as anti-spyware legislation possibly be relevant to open source? Well, try this for size.

According to the proposals:

it's perfectly OK for basically any vendor you do business with, or maybe thinks you do business with them for that matter, to use any of the deceptive practices the bill prohibits to load spyware on your computer. The company doesn't have to give you notice and it can collect whatever information it thinks necessary to make sure there's no funny business going on. And by the way, another exception provision specifically protects computer manufacturers from any liability for spyware they load on your computer before they send it to you. Of course, the exception for software companies checking to make sure you're an authorized user is the strongest evidence of what this bill is all about. After all, in terms of function, there's not much difference between spyware and DRM.

Of course this stuff only really applies to closed source, because with open source you can (a) find the spyware, and (b) chop it out. Moreover, the concept of an "authorised user" has no meaning - we are all authorised, by definition. Now tell me again why you want to stick with proprietary code....

Nissan Open Sources Its Gizmos

Virtual gizmos, of course:

Nissan will be the first automotive company to provide Second Life residents access to the open-source codes used on the Altima Island contraptions.

(Via Second Life Herald.)

IBM's Virtual Mainframe

It's been an open secret that IBM was working on its own virtual world platform, but details are now beginning to emerge:

IBM said its new "gameframe" system was being designed in collaboration with Hoplon Infotainment, a Brazilian game developer that is interested in creating a software layer it calls a "bitverse" to support virtual online worlds.

There are already massively multiplayer games that support hundreds of thousands of simultaneous players, but the IBM system will add an unparalleled level of realism to visual interactions, Meyerson said.

He argued that in addition to gaming applications, this kind of technology could be used to enhance the performance and scaleability of existing virtual worlds like Second Life, an Internet-based service that crosses the boundary between online entertainment and workplace collaboration.

Mark Wallace has more information.

Walt is D Man

Although I'm not particularly interested in the kind of consumer stuff he mostly writes about, I do have quite a lot of time for Walt Mossberg, the Grand Old Curmudgeon of computer journalism. So I decided to take a look at his new standalone gig, called All Things D (as in digital). What's most impressive about it is not is clean design, or even its content, but the amazingly scrupulous Ethics Statement:

I don't accept any money, free products, or anything else of value, from the companies whose products I cover, or from their public relations or advertising agencies. I also don't accept trips, speaking fees, or product discounts from companies whose products I cover, or from their public relations or advertising agencies. I don't serve as a consultant to any companies, or serve on any corporate boards or advisory boards.

I do occasionally take a free t-shirt from these companies, but my wife hates it when I wear them, as she considers them ugly.

I don't own a single share of stock in any of the companies whose products I cover, or any shares in technology-oriented mutual funds. Because of this, I completely missed the giant run-up in tech stocks a few years back, and looked like an idiot. However, when the tech stocks crashed, I looked like a genius. Neither was true.

D man, indeed.

Adobe Flexes Its Open Source Muscles

As regular readers may have noticed, I'm not a big fan of Flash. But news that Adobe is open-sourcing Flex, its development framework for building Flash and Apollo-based applications, is, I suppose, marginally better than being poked in the eye with a sharp stick:

Adobe is announcing plans to open source Flex under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). This includes not only the source to the ActionScript components from the Flex SDK, which have been available in source code form with the SDK since Flex 2 was released, but also includes the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers, the ActionScript debugger and the core ActionScript libraries from the SDK. The Flex SDK includes all of the components needed to create Flex applications that run in any browser - on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux and on now on the desktop using “Apollo”.

Developers can use the Flex SDK to freely develop and deploy Flex applications using either Adobe Flex Builder or an IDE of their choice.

It looks like my musings have come true rather sooner than I expected.

Wanted for WS-Context: Some Context

Sounds heavy:

OASIS, the international standards consortium, today announced that its members have approved Web Services Context (WS-Context) version 1.0 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. WS-Context defines an open framework for supporting coordinated and transactional compositions of multiple Web services applications.

But I wonder whether anyone will use it.

Quakr, the New Quake?

Well, no, not really: actually, it's much more impressive:

Quakr is a project to build a 3-dimensional world from user contributed photos.

Why OOXML is Like Internet Explorer

So let's get this straight:

What got really interesting was when Yusseri raised the issue of OOXML and why didn't Microsoft just work on ODF in collaboration instead of creating a new, bloated standard. Bill [Hilf]'s answer was quite surprising, as he clarified that the file format (OOXML) was a part of the software and that OOXML and the software (MS Office) are quite inseparable. Ergo, OOXML is an integral and inseparable part of MS Office. That's why they could not adopt ODF as the file format for subsequent versions of MS Office.

Oh, I see. As in Internet Explorer is part of Windows, and quite inseparable - apart from the version of Internet Explorer that came in the Windows Plus! box to add on to the very first version of Windows 95 that was released without Internet Explorer.

All makes sense now.

Two in a Single Stroke

This is cool: further proof not only that patents in general, and software patents in particular are stupid, but that at least some VCs are amoral parasites:

Earlier this year, we wrote about one such fund, Altitude Capital Partners who had quietly invested in Visto, but made it clear that it really only cared about companies who had patents that could be used in lawsuits. John points us to a Forbes article that talks about Altitude and other private equity funds that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars solely to support patent lawsuits. In other words, if you thought things were bad in the past, they're about to get much, much worse. Once again, almost all of these lawsuits aren't about protecting the interests of an inventor at all.

O rose, thou art sick.

EU + IPRED2 = EUdiots

What were they thinking?

The European Parliament today accepted the IP Criminal Measures directive after its first reading in a vote of 374 to 278, and 17 abstentions. It left several unexamined rights in the scope, and threatens to criminalise consumers and incriminate ISPs. Recommendations from an alliance of libraries, consumers and innovators were not followed, although Parliament was clearly divided on several issues.

The battle is lost, but the war is not yet over:

The fight now moves to the Council of the European Union, where it will be considered by representatives of the national governments of all EU Member States. Several states have started to mount resistance to IPRED2 in recent weeks, with the UK and Holland leading the charge. Europeans worried about their right to innovate, and their ability to live under clear, fair criminal laws must now turn to their own national governments to ensure that IPRED2 doesn't set a terrible precedent for copyright law, and the EU legal process. If the Council disagrees with EuroParl's action -- which we believe is in reach -- IPRED2 would be returned for a second reading. We will be tracking these developments and providing opportunities to act at CopyCrime.eu.

End of an Era

Gasp! Eben's moving on:

More than anything else, however, this is a moment to focus on the new. SFLC is a wonderful place to work, for me and I hope for all my colleagues. Great things are happening that haven’t had enough attention, because everyone has been watching GPLv3. The really innovative work is being done by the other lawyers here. They are refining organizational structures, innovating strategies for setting up “project conservancies”–a new type of shared container for multiple free software projects –which gives those projects administrative and legal advantages with minimal overhead. They are counseling young projects making astonishing new free software that’s going to be rocking business’s world three or four years from now. We’re taking risk out of projects everybody is using or is going to want to use. Helping my colleagues do that work, supporting their growth as they support their clients, is the right thing for me to do right now.

Google Does the Decent Thing

A criticism sometimes levelled at users of open source who make changes to the code but do not distribute it is that they don't give it back to the community (which they are generally perfectly to do, under the GNU GPL, say). So it's good to see one of the highest-profile users of free software, Google, giving back code changes of its own free will. Let's hope others follow suit.

Virtual Mouse Brain is Penguin-Powered

One of GNU/Linux's unique properties is its ability to run on dozens of platforms (whereas Windows runs on precisely one, that of Intel's processors). GNU/Linux can power anything from an embedded processor in a tiny industrial device, through mobile phones, PCs, minicomputers, mainframes right up to massively-parallel supercomputers.

One of these, IBM's Blue Gene/L, has recently been used to model part of a mouse brain in near-real-time. Which means that GNU/Linux has just added a platform, albeit as an emulation. (Via Jamais Cascio.)