Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

So it goes in America. No one's immune from the threat of patent litigation, not even 18-year high school students in possession of an award-winning science project in one of the most prestigious science fairs around.

The IP Commission Report on the "theft" of American IP is the gift that keeps on taking. We've already discussed the commission's suggestion that infringers' computers be loaded up with spyware and malware and the apparent "fact" that China has singlehandendly destroyed every IP-reliant industry in America. Hidden towards the bottom of the report is (yet another) terrible proposal, guided by the heavy hand of self-interest. It plainly spells out the commission's priorities: American IP above all else, even the health and well-being of other nations.

Last year, Cisco took its case against the Microsoft-Cisco merger to court in Europe. While it didn't oppose the merger, the networking giant wanted EU regulators to impose rules about "standards-based interoperability." In a blog post, Cisco VP Marthin De Beer said the very future of video communications was at risk.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA—Although Google's keynote at the I/O conference this week focused heavily on the APIs and behind-the-scenes development of the Android operating system, it looks like there's a lot more in store. This idea was especially apparent in a panel discussion today involving eleven members of the Android development team. The team sat for a forty-minute question and answer session, and while they dodged most inquiries about forthcoming features for Android, they did offer a bit of insight into what the future of Android might look like, what developers could do to help further the platform, and what they’ve learned from their journey thus far.

By default the Linux kernel uses the "ondemand" CPU frequency governor for achieving maximum clock frequency when system load is high and a lower clock frequency when the system is idle. However, it turns out that for at least modern Intel CPUs, this is likely no longer the case. This default kernel choice may lead to poor battery life and performance for modern Linux systems.

The Linux Mint project yesterday unveiled version 15 of the increasingly popular desktop operating system, with upgrades to the MATE and Cinnamon desktop environments as well as new applications for managing software and drivers. Code-named "Olivia," Linux Mint 15 is based on the most recent version of Ubuntu and will be supported until January 2014. Linux Mint 15 is in the Release Candidate stage, with a final release coming later.

In 2011, Alcatel-Lucent had American e-commerce on the ropes. The French telecom had sued eight big retailers and Intuit, saying that their e-commerce operations infringed Alcatel patents; one by one, they were folding. Kmart, QVC, Lands' End, and Intuit paid up at various stages of the litigation. Just before trial began, Zappos, Sears, and Amazon also settled. That left two companies holding the bag: Overstock.com, and Newegg, a company whose top lawyer had vowed not to ever settle with patent trolls.

For more than two years, the Linux operating system has contained a high-severity vulnerability that gives untrusted users with restricted accounts nearly unfettered "root" access over machines, including servers running in shared Web hosting facilities and other sensitive environments. Surprisingly, most users remain wide open even now, more than a month after maintainers of the open-source OS quietly released an update that patched the gaping hole.

Over the course of the past year a case about four financial software patents has taken on great significance. In 2007, Alice Corp accused CLS Bank of infringing its patents on a type of computerized trading platform that used "shadow accounts." In the years since then, the Supreme Court has significantly tightened up the rules about what is patentable. In 2011, Alice's patents were thrown out by a federal judge, who ruled they didn't cover patentable subject matter.

We got a not-quite-hands-on test drive of a 12.10-based version of Ubuntu's mobile operating system back at CES, but the OS images were recently updated to Ubuntu 13.04 when Raring Ringtail was introduced at the end of last month. Though Ubuntu Touch won't be available at retail before the end of this year at the earliest, we figured now is an opportune time to check in and see how things are going.

We've pointed out over and over and over again that patents are not a proxy for innovation. In fact, there's little to connect the two at all, except potentially for how patents can hinder and hold back the pace of innovation. A new study really helps to drive home how little patents have to do with innovation. Pointed out to us by James Bessen, the study looks at "R&D 100 Awards" from the academic journal, Research & Development from 1977 to 2004. As you might expect, the R&D 100 Awards are given out each year by the journal in an attempt to name the top 100 innovations of the year. If patents were instrumental in driving innovation, you'd certainly expect most of these innovations to be patented.

Security researchers have uncovered an ongoing and widespread attack that causes sites running three of the Internet's most popular Web servers to push potent malware exploits on visitors.

We've talked a lot about the tax on innovation that patent trolls create, which is well-known inside startup circles but often misunderstood by the broader public, thanks to the pro-innovation rhetoric of high-profile trolls like Intellectual Ventures. The conversation is getting more attention lately, especially with the recent news of Senator Schumer's patent reform bill which specifically aims to fight the patent troll problem, and this interview with an anonymous developer from a tech startup offers some perspective from someone who is directly affected by the issue.

What's worse, as economist Dean Baker points out, is that anyone at all is surprised that this happens. After all, when our own government policy is to hand those drugmakers incredibly powerful monopolies on life-saving pharmaceuticals, we've actually created the incentives ourselves for such activity to take place:

For those who don’t know what DRM is, it’s a copy protection or access control to digital content that’s applied to ebooks. Many publishers and retailers use it and it’s a complex and controversial issue for copyright holders and consumers with passionate arguments for and against.

The public comments sent to the FTC and DOJ on patent trolls are fascinating. I'd like to show you one outstanding submission, by Barnes & Noble [PDF], who has been sued by trolls, or politely Patent Assertion Entities, or PAEs, over 25 times in the last five years (and received an additional 20+ claims that didn't result in litigation) which meant it has spent tens of millions defending against the avalanche in those five years. They have yet to lose, so they ask what is the point of a company having to endure constant claims that are without merit? Nobody pays them back in full to make them whole, even when they were totally innocent.

Its submission begins: "The patent system is broken,"

Here are two words that have no business hanging out together: "used MP3s." If you know anything about how computers work, that concept is intellectually offensive. Same goes for "ebook lending", "digital rental" and a host of other terms that have emerged from the content industries' desperate scramble to do the impossible: adapt without changing. These concepts are all completely imaginary, and yet we treat them as if they are real, and have serious discussions about every last detail of how they function — like a debate about the best mutant superpower, but with multimillion dollar lawsuits. Copyright necessitates that we all pretend we don't know any better. It makes us act stupid.

Today we have a new entrant that may provide the best bang for the buck for many types of users. It's called the BeagleBone Black and it's the latest in the line of "Beagle" devices that first appeared in 2008, courtesy of Texas Instruments. On sale now for $45, BeagleBone Black sports a 1GHz Sitara AM335x ARM Cortex-A8 processor from Texas Instruments, up from the 720MHz processor used in the previous $90 BeagleBone released in 2011.

Prenda has been seeking dismissal of pending lawsuits around the country in an effort to contain the fallout. In one North Georgia case, Prenda had already obtained a default judgment after the defendant, Rajesh Patel, failed to respond to Prenda's lawsuit. Yet the law firm is now seeking to dismiss the case without Patel paying a dime. But Patel has said that before dismissing the case, the judge should investigate Prenda's misconduct and force Prenda to pay Patel's legal bills. In a strident response filed on Saturday, Prenda lawyer Jacques Nazaire accused Patel's lawyer Blair Chintella of engaging in an ideological witch hunt with the support of the dastardly Electronic Frontier Foundation.

A crowd of well over 100 gathered near the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Friday, despite rising winds and the looming threat of a thunderstorm. We were all there to play (and to watch) Pong, but not on an arcade cabinet—the version we'd be playing would be played out on the programmable LED lights lining the side of Philadelphia's Cira Centre, a 29-story office building across the Schuylkill River from the museum. The lights, normally used to display static images or simple looping patterns, had been transformed into a fully interactive game of Pong by Drexel computer science professor (and Co-Founder and Co-Director of Drexel's game design program) Frank Lee and his team in just a few short months. It's being billed by the event organizers as the "world's largest video game."