US Patent Reform Slouches Towards Bethlehem

But at last it seems to be happening:

This case involved a guy who was trying to patent the concept of "mandatory arbitration involving legal documents." The USPTO denied the patent. After a failed appeal, the guy went to court, and CAFC is also saying that his concept does not deserve patent protection, with this being the key quote: "The routine addition of modern electronics to an otherwise unpatentable invention typically creates a prima facie case of obviousness." In other words, simply taking a common process and automating it on a computer should be considered obvious -- and thus, not patentable. This doesn't rule out business model or software patents by any means -- but it at least suggests that the courts are beginning to recognize that the patent system has gone out of control. The court also specifically addresses its own earlier State Street decision, suggesting that people had been misinterpreting it to mean any business model was patentable -- when the USPTO and the courts should still be applying the same tests to see if the business models are patentable. It then notes that a business model on its own shouldn't be patentable unless it's tied to some sort of product, and then states: "It is thus clear that the present statute does not allow patents to be issued on particular business systems -- such as a particular type of arbitration -- that depend entirely on the use of mental processes."

DRM is *Really* Dead

As I said, but don't take my word for it, just ask Microsoft:

The Zune Marketplace online store has been restocked and redesigned to make it even easier for people to find what they are looking for. The Zune software has also been completely redesigned with a new look and feel and lots of helpful new features. In addition to offering more than 3 million songs, the updated version of Zune Marketplace will launch with thousands of music videos for sale and over 1,000 of the top audio and video podcasts available for free. Consumers will also be able to choose from a selection of more than 1 million digital rights management (DRM)-free MP3s, which can be played with Zune or any other digital media player.

(Via Boing Boing.)

How Europe Can Save the World

One of the things I've always admired about Richard Stallman is his belief that if you do the Right Thing, eventually you'll win everyone over. That's seems to be happening in software, but I've always been slightly sceptical that it might work elsewhere. I was wrong, it seems:

The European Union's drive to set standards has many causes—and a protectionist impulse within some governments (eg, France's) may be one. But though the EU is a big market, with almost half a billion consumers, neither size, nor zeal, nor sneaky protectionism explains why it is usurping America's role as a source of global standards.

...

If you manufacture globally, it is simpler to be bound by the toughest regulatory system in your supply chain. Self-regulation is also a harder sell when it comes to global trade, which involves trusting a long line of unknown participants from far-flung places (talk to parents who buy Chinese-made toys).

..

Obey EU rules or watch your markets “evaporating”, a computer industry lobbyist tells Mr Schapiro. “We've been hit by a tsunami,” says a big wheel from General Motors. American multinationals that spend money adjusting to European rules may lose their taste for lighter domestic regulations that may serve only to offer a competitive advantage to rivals that do not export. Mr Schapiro is a campaigner for tougher regulation of American business. Yet you do not have to share his taste for banning chemicals to agree with his prediction that American industry will want stricter standards to create a level playing-field at home.

What this says is that tough regulations in the EU plus globalisation work to spread high standards for business throughout the world. So how about the following?

If the EU brought in laws that imposed an environmental impact tax on every item sold in the EU - determined by working out the cost/damage to the environment caused by that single item, and calculated by the EU - then the above logic would imply that companies around the world, including the US and China, would have very strong incentives to minimise environmental damage.

Moreover, as the above quotation points out, global companies would also start pushing for such legislation to be enacted in their home markets in order to create a level playing-field with their local competitors. The greenness would flow from Europe across the world, without the need for a post-Kyoto treaty or anything similar.

C'mon Europe, time to save the world. (Via PlexNex.)

Plugging into the Enernet

The current system of highly-centralised power production is extremely vulnerable - be it to man-made or natural disasters - and a more decentralised approach, based on local generation of power, has many benefits. He's someone who has the right credentials to explore this line of thought: Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet:

There is a lot to be learned from building the Internet over the last four decades, and we should make that analogy and apply those lessons. The “Enernet” is what we are all building to meet the world’s need for cheap and clean energy. It will not happen overnight, and it will be hard to predict how the various technology will play out over time. For example, the Internet was built to network mainframe computers and now it connects mostly cell phones and PCs. That was a big surprise.

Also look at the lessons of standardized interfaces. For the Internet, it took some years to figure that out. Some of them didn’t emerge, like the web, until 1989. For the Enernet we can look to the methods of standardization and how we choose to organize this thing. Fuels, biofuels themselves, are a standard.

Well, maybe, but biofuels are not a panacea - not least because it's clear that done badly they can actually exacerbate environmental problems rather than ameliorating them.

wikiHow Shows How

Although the fashinable wiki turns up all over the place, it's rare to come across really good uses of the idea. One fine example is wikiHow:

wikiHow is a collaborative writing project aiming to build the world's largest how-to manual. Our mission is to provide free and useful instructions to help people solve the problems of everyday life. As of this minute, wikiHow contains 25,548 articles. New articles are created every day and the existing articles are gradually improved by volunteer contributors. In time we envision this huge how to manual providing free, unbiased, accurate instructions on almost every topic imaginable. Please join us by contributing a new page or editing a page that someone else started.

As this points out, wikiHow has now passed 25,000 articles - a small number compared to Wikipedia's millions, but nonetheless a good start. (Via Creative Commons.)

Rice's Digital University Press

I've written before about Rice University's Connexions platform and programme, which aims to make courseware freely available for all kinds of interesting re-use. But there's another side to Rice's re-invention of academic publishing:

Rice University has re-launched its university press as an all-digital operation. Using the open-source e-publishing platform Connexions, Rice University Press is returning from a decade-long hiatus to explore models of peer-reviewed scholarship for the 21st century. The technology offers authors a way to use multimedia — audio files, live hyperlinks or moving images — to craft dynamic scholarly arguments, and to publish on-demand original works in fields of study that are increasingly constrained by print publishing.

Rice's digital press operates just as a traditional press, up to a point. Manuscripts will be solicited, reviewed, edited and resubmitted for final approval by an editorial board of prominent scholars. But rather than waiting for months for a printer to make a bound book, Rice University Press's digital files will instead be run through Connexions for automatic formatting, indexing and population with high-resolution images, audio and video and Web links.

Users of Rice University Press titles are able to view the content online for free or, thanks to Connexions' partnership with on-demand printer QOOP, order printed books in every style from softbound black-and-white on inexpensive paper to leather-bound, full-color hardbacks on high-gloss paper.

Perhaps the best place to find out about why and how Rice is doing this is an interview with Charles Henry, publisher at Rice University Press (you might need to register to access this article, but it's free). (Via Open Access News.)

The Art of the Fork

I noted yesterday how useful the fork can be. But forking well is not easy. Here's an interesting example of how not to do it.

IBM recently made its Lotus Symphony office suite freely available (though not as free software so far as I can tell). That's good(-ish), since it supports ODF, and helps boost that standard. Less good is the fact that it is based on a fork of OpenOffice.org - or, more precisely, an old fork:

I grabbed the attention of a community software engineer, who had a quick peek under the bonnet and soon discovered this was a very old version 1.x release of OpenOffice.org, with a new user interface and a rebranding exercise to make it look like an IBM product. My colleague had a happy ten minutes testing which Easter eggs the IBM thought police had found, and which ones they hadn’t.

Forking code is all very well, but as Lotus Symphony shows, getting left behind by the main trunk is always a danger. (Via Kaj Kandler.)

It's Up to Us

Radiohead has a new album that you can download - and choose how much you pay. Alternatively, it has a CD version, two vinyl records, an enhanced CD, artwork, photos and lyrics, all supplied in a hardback book and slipcase for £40. Oh, and you get the download thrown in for free.

In other words, as I've said many times before, the digital is the marketing for the analogue, which is where you make your money (since it's currently hard to make perfect copies of analogue goods).

This is the future - it's just unevenly distributed. Let's hope people support this move and that the future spreads.

We 'Umbly Petition...

One of the novel options for companies introduced by open source is to release moribund apps in the hope that they might come to life again as free software. The two prime examples of this are Netscape Navigator, which begat Mozilla, which begat Firefox (somewhat painfully, it has to be said), and Blender, which begat, well, Blender.

Now those open sourcers are at it again, egging on the company MainConcept to turn over its unwanted MainActor video editing software to The People. Here's a petition for the same:

we, Open Source enthusiasts and non-linear editors, ask that MainConcept release most source code (if not all) of MainActor as Open Source so that the community can continue to support and improve it.

And who knew there was a self-styled group of "non-linear editors"? (Via PenguinWay.)

KompoZer: Recomposing Nvu

One of the critical apps in any software ecosystem is a web authoring system. Until recently, the main free software offering was Nvu, but things had gone rather quiet on this front. With the launch of KompoZer, "Nvu's unofficial bug-fix release", we find out why:

Why call it «KompoZer» instead of «Nvu»? Because « Nvu and the Nvu logo are trademarks of Linspire Inc. » As Linspire stopped the development of Nvu, there is no legal way to correct any bug in Nvu.

God bless forks. Let's hope this time the project receives enough support from the community to join the open source pantheon of serious apps. (Via Linux.com.)

That's the Way to Do It

Government won't make public data freely available? Simple: just stick it up online.

No Free FT, No Comment

FT.com, the Internet version of the Financial Times, is instituting a new model for free and paid content on its website. Starting tomorrow, users will be able to access content on FT.com for free up to a total of 30 views per month. After 30 days, they will need to purchase a subscription in order to access more content.

I'm not quite sure whether these 30 views apply to all content or just the old premium content. In either case, I predict that eventually the FT will realise that it needs to make all of its content free if it wants to get the most benefit from it, not least in terms of linkage.

OpenOffice.org Extends Itself

One of the great strengths of open source is its extensibility. This might be at the code level, or through self-standing extensions, as with Firefox. So it's really good news - if long overdue - that OpenOffice.org is doing something similar with a formal repository.

Spreading the Open Access Gospel

Now this is what I call commitment to the OA cause.

Why Patents May Kill You One Day

Time and time again, it's the pharmaceutical industry and their focus on what can they patent (rather than what can be done to improve healthcare) that gets in the way of real improvements that could save lives. The focus on what can be patented, and the games played to extend patents (at great costs) means that money that should be going towards much more useful areas of healthcare get diverted into less useful, but artificially profitable, endeavors. That's what happens when you set up artificial monopolies.

So, tell me again why you are in favour of patents?

From Extremadura, with Love, to Vietnam

Here's an interesting demonstration of the importance of flagship projects for the open source world:

Una delegación del Gobierno de Vietnam, que se encuentra durante estos días en Extremadura, ha visitado ayer lunes el Nuevo Centro del Conocimiento (NCC) de La Antigua, en Mérida, con el objetivo de conocer la metodología de trabajo que desarrolla el Plan de Alfabetización Tecnológica y Software Libre de Extremadura (PAT).

[A delegation from the Vietnamese Government, which is currently in Extremadura, visited the Nuevo Centro del Conocimiento (NCC) of La Antigua, in Merida, last Monday, with the aim of getting to know the methodology that the Technological Literacy and Free Software Scheme of Extremadura (PAT) is developing.]

Nothing like seeing how free software works at first hand for convincing people. (Via Erwin Tenhumberg, who also links to a story about Vietnam taking the plunge elsewhere with 20,000 OpenOffice.org seats.)

How Gross is That?

I remember well during the fun days of dotcom 1.0 when Bill Gross came up with wacky idea after wacky idea, most of which happily bombed. So I wasn't entirely surprised to see him come out with stuff like this:

We started making only Internet companies because we felt this was an incredible new medium that had unbelievably high gross margins. If you could make a Web site, you could sell something online and you could make margins of 90 percent or higher. When we looked back at the ones that were most and least successful, we realized it had nothing to do with their margins. It had to do with how protectable the idea was. Was there a core intellectual property with which you could differentiate yourself and earn sustainable margins? Because you can make good margins online, but if you can't sustain them, it doesn't mean anything.

So that led us to take another look at all businesses - even companies that make physical products. We had shied away from making anything with atoms; we were all caught up in doing only things with bits. But you can make things with atoms and still have a huge amount of intellectual property in them, where you can earn good margins and protectable margins.

That sounds, well, just gross, really, with its sad little obsession about intellectual monopolies. But reading further on I came across this:

I feel that the biggest disruption that will happen in this century is distributed energy generation. In the past, there was an economy of scale, so you had to build a 1-gigawatt nuclear or coal plant somewhere, and you had to do it far away from people because no one wanted it in their backyard. That was possible because of copper. Only copper could keep that plant far enough away that we wouldn't see it or smell it, and copper could bring those electrons magically into our house. But there's a huge loss by the time the power gets to us - with copper, it's up to 15 percent.

When you can build distributed energy generation on your roof with 10 feet instead of hundreds of miles of copper, you can avoid those huge losses. If you can get lower-cost solar, which we're working on very hard, and if you have the subsidies, all of a sudden it makes sense to have your own power plant on your own roof. Having your own power plant on your roof is just an unbelievable concept that wasn't even possible in the 20th century. It is going to be possible - and necessary - this century if we're going to solve the climate problem.

Spot on. Let's hope this is one Gross idea that succeeds.

One OpenCD Close, Another OpenDisc Opens

One of the great things about free software is that you can create bundles of it to give away. One of the best of these was OpenCD. This, apparently, is no more:

As of today I’m stepping down from TheOpenCD development, of which for the last eighteen months I’ve been the sole developer and general caretaker for the project. It’s not all bad news though - I’m leaving the project to pursue my own open source disc, which I believe will resolve the issues I’ve experienced in my time at the helm1. I’ve been working in the background on the new project, OpenDisc, and it’s now up and running so if you’d like to check it out, visit www.theopendisc.com. Why jump ship on what seems like a perfectly good project?

As this indicates, it's not so much a goodbye as a hello. It's worth reading the whole post, which provides some fascinating insights into the realities of putting together such collections. (Via LWN.net.)

Brad the Impaler Goes for Google's Jugular

Nice little analysis, there, Brad:

The future of the Internet will be decided by developments in online advertising. Online advertising is rapidly emerging as the fuel that powers the Internet and drives our digital economy. Online advertising is already a $27 billion market. This is projected to double, to $54 billion, in the next four years alone. That is roughly equal to the size of America’s radio and television industries combined.

These changes are not only of tremendous economic importance, but have serious societal implications as well. Online ads will increasingly provide the economic foundation for a free press and for political life more broadly.

Update: Oh, and here's Google's own pitch - which, to my ears, sounds strangely like something that Microsoft could have written....

In Praise of Clotheslines

Nice:

Today, however, such clotheslines are considered blight. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal (September 18, 2007, p.1) reports on how neighborhood associations are cracking down on residents who dare to use the sun to dry their clothes. A typical quote came from a neighbor of one of the offenders. “This bombards the senses,” said one Joan Grundeman, an interior designer in Bend, Oregon. “It can’t possibly increase property values and make people think this is a nice neighborhood.”

At least some people have their priorities straight. Better to bombard Iran and Iraq and keep the laundry out of sight where it belongs.

Hooray for Harvard's OA Heft

This is exactly what leading academic institutions should all be doing:

The Faculty Council, the 18-member governing body of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), advanced a measure yesterday that would make articles written by Harvard professors in scholarly journals available online at no cost.

The proposal would create a system of “open access” whereby the authors could make their work available either on a personal or university Web site for free, according to Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature Judith L. Ryan, who serves on the council.

It would be interesting to see the publishers try to refuse to carry any of these freely-available articles in their journals; at least production costs would be reduced.... (Via Open Access News.)

WIPO Takes Baby Steps Towards the Light

I've noted before that WIPO needs to change to reflect the new realities of sharing content, and not just the sclerotic view of the old intellectual monopolies. There's been a few encouraging signs that WIPO is beginning to understand this, and here's another:

The World Intellectual Property Organization wants to educate you about copyright. Well, not so much you as your 9 to 14-year old children, who are the targets of a new 72-page workbook (PDF) filled with "colorful examples" of copyright law in action. The most surprising thing about the booklet? The fact that it devotes eight pages to coverage of the public domain and other limitations on copyright.

Googling Google

Great title: "The Googlization of Everything." And open, too. (Via Open Access News.)

The Beginning of the End for the OEM Tax?

I wrote recently about the call to unbundle operating systems from PCs, but without much hope it would ever be heeded. Maybe I was too pessimistic:

The ruling by a French court according to which the manufacturer Acer has to refund the purchase price of the preinstalled software that the notebook buyer in question does not use to the notebook buyer, has been welcomed by proponents of the sale of PCs and notebooks without preinstalled software. In the case that has now been made public the court ruled (PDF file) that Acer, over and above the sum of 30 euros it had previously agreed to pay, was obliged to refund the plaintiff the complete sum he had paid for the software he had subsequently returned.

The total of 311.85 euros of the overall purchase price of the notebook of 599 euros that Acer was forced to pay back was made up of 135.20 euros for Windows XP Home, 60 euros for Microsoft Works, 40.99 euros for PowerDVD, 38.66 euros for Norton Antivirus and 37 euros for NTI CD Maker. On top of that Acer had to pay a further 650 euros in, among other things, legal costs.

Not so Much OOo as Oops!

Not from the world of OpenOffice.org, but amusing and relevant:

My favorite example of a "bad document" is one that I saw when I was in my first professional job working in the IT department of a large German furniture manufacturer. Someone from a sales department called me and said that his document breaks completely as soon as he changes two words to a bold face. I could not believe it and thus went upstairs in order to take a look at the issue myself. I also changed the two words to bold and, he was right, the whole document fell apart. For a few seconds I was wondering what was going on. Then I switched on the "view nonprinting characters" feature. There was the problem. The whole document, yes, the whole document, was just one single line of text. Everything including line breaks and tables were implemented using spaces. Thus, for sure, once one part of the document was modified, everything else fell apart.