Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

As I'm sure you were carefully anticipating, on Tuesday, April 7th, the US Patent and Trademark Office issued patent 9,000,000. As you of course are already aware, over the past few decades, the USPTO has been rapidly ramping up the number of patents it approves. That's why, even though patents only have a lifetime of 20 years from the date of application, 1/3 of all issued patents are still in force today. Think about that.

As you know, last year the Supreme Court made a very important ruling in the Alice v. CLS Bank case, in which it basically said that merely doing something on a general purpose computer didn't automatically make it patentable... Soon after the Alice ruling, it issued some "Preliminary Examination Instructions." However, it then issued the so-called 2014 Interim Guidance on Subject Matter Eligibility and sought public comment through March 16 of this year.

Over the past few years we've followed the saga of TrueCrypt. The popular and widely used full disk encryption system got some attention soon after the initial Snowden leaks when people started realizing that no one really knew who was behind TrueCrypt, and that the software had not been fully audited. Cryptographer Matthew Green decided to lead an effort to audit TrueCrypt.

It's been a unique experience for me as a Techdirt writer, one who does not delve into the net neutrality debates and posts very often, to watch the effect the wider coverage about net neutrality has had on the general public. Without being scientific about it, there are certain markers for story penetration I notice and have noticed specifically when it comes to net neutrality. For instance, a couple of months ago, my father called me up with a simple question: "What should my position be on net neutrality?" The question itself isn't generally useful, but the simple fact that a grandfather is even asking about it means something...

With either an ISP lawsuit or a 2016 party shift the only way to kill our new net neutrality rules, neutrality opponents have some time to kill. As such, they're in desperate need of somewhere to direct their impotent rage at the foul idea of a healthier Internet free from gatekeeper control. Step one of this catharsis has been to publicly shame the FCC for daring to stand up to broadband ISPs in a series of increasingly absurd and often entirely nonsensical public "fact finding" hearings. Step two is to push forth a series of editorials that tries to rewrite the history of the net neutrality debate -- with Netflix as the villainous, Machiavellian centerpiece.

Google Play has moved to preemptive takedowns, unprompted by studio complaints. This isn't a good thing. It may protect Google (but only slightly, considering the studios' ongoing antipathy towards the tech company) but it does nothing for developers whose sales it takes a portion of.

In the wake of the Snowden leaks, more and more tech companies are providing their users with transparency reports that detail (to the extent they're allowed) government requests for user data. Amazon -- home to vast amounts of cloud storage -- isn't one of them.

Patent trolls -- sometimes known more politely as "Non-Practising Entities" (NPEs) -- probably have few fans among Techdirt readers, but there are some who try to justify their activities. Here's how the argument usually goes:

Fresh off his patent win against a company called AGIS, Life360 CEO Chris Hulls has published an op-ed advising other companies on how to respond to similar patent threats.

The first of Hulls' three suggestions is to "go nuclear," by which he means, refuse to play by the rules. Trolls and their law firms "hate being called out," he writes. "They expect that you’ll listen to your lawyers, stay quiet, and pay them to go away.

In May 2014, Life360 CEO Chris Hulls received an aggressive patent demand letter. The letter, from lawyers representing a company called Advanced Ground Information Systems (AGIS), told him he needed to pay for a "royalty-bearing license" to its four patents, or Life360 and its customers would have to "cease and desist" from infringement.

In other words: pay up, or shut down your company. The letter demanded a response within three days.

Dell hasn’t done any customization to the "Developer Edition" laptop on the hardware side. This is a standard M3800, same as you could order with Windows on it. The specs are identical. To actually order one, you visit Dell’s store page for the M3800 and tick the "Ubuntu Linux 14.04 SP1" option in the operating system box (an option which actually subtracts $101.50 from the laptop’s price, thanks to not needing to pay for a Windows license). You can do (almost) any of the same customizations to the Developer Edition as you can to the vanilla Windows model, with the one major exception being that the Web store interface won’t let you add a second storage device.

Patent-holding giant Intellectual Ventures (IV) began enforcing some of its massive stash of patents with lawsuits in 2010. But its first case, against Motorola Mobility, ended in a mistrial last year when a jury couldn't agree on the outcome.

Now that case is teed up again with a different set of patents.

Microsoft has long maintained that Android device makers must pay royalties for use of its patents. Most Android device-makers pay a royalty to Microsoft for each phone, and estimates of the Redmond company's patent-licensing revenue ranges up to $2 billion per year.

Chromebooks are cheap. They work best that way. It’s rare to find one north of $400, and the sweet spot is between $200 and $300. While they've got shortcomings, the cost is reasonable for what you get. In some cases, the limitations are even desirable.

Only one Chromebook has truly gone against that grain—the Chromebook Pixel. It was the polar opposite of every other device bearing the name. The Pixel was high-quality hardware where others are low-rent, but even though it cost five times what you could pay for a regular Chromebook it didn't really do much more. It's a laptop as nice as it is niche.

Virtualization software maker VMware is facing a lawsuit alleging that it has been violating the GPLv2 free software license for years with its use of Linux and other source code in ESXi.

Linux kernel developer Christoph Hellwig filed the suit in the district court of Hamburg, Germany with funding from the nonprofit Software Freedom Conservancy, which works to "promote, improve, develop, and defend" free and open source software. The case centers on "a combined work that VMware allegedly created by combining their own code ('vmkernel') with portions of Linux's code, which was licensed only under GPLv2," the group said in an FAQ describing the lawsuit.

At the heart of ESXi (now called vSphere) is VMware’s proprietary kernel, called VMkernel, which interfaces between ESXi’s virtual machines and the physical hardware it’s installed on. Hellwig alleges that VMkernel is a derivative work of the Linux kernel, including his contributions (which are found in Linux’s SCSI subsystem and radix tree implementation), and that VMware must therefore provide the VMkernel source code to its customers according to the terms of the GNU GPL version 2. VMware apparently disagrees.

This case is interesting because it relates to one of the most contentious issues in interpreting the GPL: whether loadable kernel modules (LKMs) are derivative works of the Linux kernel...

Graphics card powerhouse Nvidia hasn't been having very much fun lately. First, the company took an Internet wide beating from gamers after selling a 4 GB graphics card (the GTX 970) that wasn't really a 4 GB graphics card, resulting in the $300+ purchase choking on high-end resolutions (or when using, say, Oculus Rift)...

Perhaps a bigger deal was Nvidia's December decision to roll out mobile graphics card drivers that prevented paying customers from overclocking the cards they own. The ability for consumers to do as they see fit with their own hardware, Nvidia claimed at the time, was a bug in the company's driver software that needed to be removed for the safety of the consumer,,,

For decades after Linux's early '90s debut, even the hardest of hardcore boosters for the open source operating system had to admit that it couldn't really compete in one important area of software: gaming. "Back in around 2010 you only had two choices for gaming on Linux," Che Dean, editor of Linux gaming news site Rootgamer recalls. "Play the few open source titles, Super Tux Kart and so on, or use WINE to play your Windows titles."

Stross is welcome in these pages for that inclusion alone, but in the past we've also featured his declaration that Microsoft Word is ”a tyrant of the imagination” . And that was just for starters. He went on to call it “a petty, unimaginative, inconsistent dictator that is ill-suited to any creative writer's use.”

Stross yesterday returned to that theme in a series of Tweets that started with this one featuring his cat.

This week is Fair Use Week, according to the Association of Research Libraries, and that's as good a time as any to remind everyone that it's wrong to refer to fair as merely a "limitation or exception" to copyright law -- or merely a defense to infringement. It is a right that is protected by the First Amendment.