Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

CLAs aren't new. FSF-copyrighted projects have been using copyright assignment since at least 1985 - in return, the FSF promise that the software will always be distributed under a copyleft-style license. For over a decade, Apache Software Foundation projects have required that contributors sign a CLA that allows them to retain copyright, but grants the ASF the right to relicense the work as it wishes. For the most part, this hasn't been terribly controversial.

Opinions vary on whether the UEFI standards are helping or hurting the migration to Linux. Enterprise users can select a Linux distro certified to work with UEFI standards, but not all Linux distros have keys that allow it to install. Despite the intent of the UEFI standards, the process so far is not universally successful. It should "just work," said the Linux Foundation's Greg Kroah-Hartman.

We've written plenty of times about the importance of the public domain around here, and one of the biggest beneficiaries of the public domain has been Disney, a company which has regularly mined the public domain for the stories it then recreates and copyrights. Of course, somewhat depressingly, Disney also has been one of the most extreme players in keeping anything new out of the public domain, as pointed out by Tom Bell's excellent "mickey mouse curve" showing how Disney has sought to push out the term of copyrights every time Mickey Mouse gets near the public domain. All this despite the fact that Mickey Mouse was almost certainly was an infringing work when it was created, copying multiple sources that were still covered by copyright.

Personal Audio LLC is a patent-holding company that became famous (or infamous, depending on one's point of view) by claiming that it owns things like playlists and podcasts (or "episodic content," in the words of one Personal Audio patent). Its wild claims led the Electronic Frontier Foundation to raise more than $76,000 from donors to fight the patent.

In the summer of 2013, Lavabit was ordered to provide real-time e-mail monitoring of one of its users, widely believed to be Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor-turned-leaker. When Lavabit told the feds that the only way it could hand over communications was through an internal process that would deliver results 60 days after any communication was sent, the authorities returned with a search warrant for Lavabit's SSL keys, which could decrypt the traffic of all of Lavabit's users. Ladar Levison, the CEO of Lavabit, handed over the SSL keys but then shut down his 10-year-old business rather than expose all of Lavabit's users.

Vringo is a tiny company that purchased some patents from Lycos, an old search engine, in 2011 and then used those patents to sue Google. In December 2012, Vringo won $30 million in a jury trial, but that was far less than the hundreds of millions it was seeking.

Today, Vringo got the payout it was looking for: a 1.36 percent running royalty on US-based revenue from AdWords, Google's flagship program.

The choice is not whether to allow the NSA to spy. The choice is between a communications infrastructure that is vulnerable to attack at its core and one that, by default, is intrinsically secure for its users.

One of the many problems with DRM is its blanket nature. As well as locking down the work in question, it often causes all kinds of other, perfectly legal activities to be blocked as well -- something that the copyright industry seems quite untroubled by.

A patent-holding company called Beneficial Innovations has been suing over patents related to online gaming and online advertising since 2006. Media companies have been one of its favorite targets, and it claims its patents are foundational technology for targeted advertising. But it apparently overstepped in 2011 when it filed its last major lawsuit against several major media companies in Marshall, Texas, a popular venue for patent disputes.

It's time for the Federal Communications Commission to correct its past mistakes and get tough on broadband providers, a retired FCC commissioner says.

Last week, net neutrality regulations that made it illegal for US ISPs to block online services or charge content providers for access to their networks were struck down in a court ruling. Netflix is worried, writing in a letter to shareholders yesterday, "In principle, a domestic ISP now can legally impede the video streams that members request from Netflix, degrading the experience we jointly provide."

Would ISPs really do this? It's too early to know just how they will use their newfound regulatory breathing room. But a report today by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) details a couple of incidents from overseas that show how ISPs can make online video deteriorate in quality or simply disappear altogether. If these experiences are indicative of our net neutrality-less future, Netflix has good reason to be worried.

Users of Google's Chrome browser are vulnerable to attacks that allow malicious websites to use a computer microphone to surreptitiously eavesdrop on private conversations for extended periods of time, an expert in speech recognition said.

We wrote earlier about the guy who told the story of being pulled out of a theater in the middle of a movie for wearing Google Glass (turned off), which he wears all the time, because he got prescription lenses installed on the device and uses it as his regular pair of glasses. As we noted, there were some oddities in the original story, including references to the FBI and "The Movie Association," neither of which made sense. Since then, as we noted in our updated post, AMC confirmed that a customer had been detained, and since then the MPAA as well as Homeland Security have weighed in, confirming the basic story. This is insane on multiple levels, which we'll get to in a moment. But first, the quotes.

Rather than viewing copyright policy as a zero sum game where one party "winning" means someone else losing, let's recognize that the only real stakeholder is the public, and any policy should be designed to be best for the public, and that's one where both artists and technologists are better off as well, because new technologies enable artists to better create, promote, distribute, connect and monetize their works, while providing the public with more content, more choices, more ways to support, more ways to share, more ways to express and to communicate. And the end result, as we've seen throughout history, tends to be better for just about everyone -- with the exception of those who stay wedded to obsolete models that are built around being the gatekeeper for areas of friction that no longer apply.

Since Google acquired Nest for $3.2 billion last week, current and prospective smart thermostat or smoke detector owners have been apprehensive about what Google might do with the company. In the last few days, a couple of companies have stepped forward with potential open source alternatives to the service and hardware that Nest offers, sans the new implications of Google ownership.

What do you do if your PC sales are slumping and the newest versions of Windows aren't boosting demand? If you're HP, you put Windows 7 on a few of your new PCs and offer $150 discounts on them to attract new buyers, giving your customers a place to go if they don't want the changes ushered in by Windows 8 but aren't tech-savvy enough to downgrade their own PCs.

Google’s acquisition of Nest for $3.2 billion this week has been heralded as the company’s big move into home automation. Nest has made overtures about customer privacy, but given the size and profitability of its new owner’s advertising and personal data business, the new relationship needs a closer examination.

Certainly, Nest’s products—currently a thermostat and a smoke detector—have potential in their own right, and Google is getting a new slate of devices to sell in the deal. But along with the devices, Google is getting access to new types of data it can put to very good use along with a new set of very interested customers. And like other types of data collection, this has potentially negative consequences for consumers.

Security researchers have published a report that Ars is having a tough time swallowing, despite considerable effort chewing—a botnet of more than 100,000 smart TVs, home networking routers, and other Internet-connected consumer devices that recently took part in sending 750,000 malicious e-mails over a two-week period.

Boston University has won settlements from 25 companies it sued for infringing "a professor’s patented technology for producing blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs)," a university news site reported yesterday. Apple's iPhone 5, iPad, and MacBook Air were listed as infringing the patented technology, along with Amazon's Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle Fire. The Amazon products infringed BU's patent by using LEDs made by Seoul Semiconductor Company in their screens, BU said. Seoul Semiconductor was among the companies that BU won settlements from.

For nearly a decade we've been trying to point out that the entire fight over net neutrality is something of a red herring. The concept of a neutral network is quite important for innovation. I think venture capitalist Fred Wilson does an excellent job talking about how much of a problem innovators might face in the future if we actually lost net neutrality, in that it would massively benefit legacy internet players over innovators: