"intellectual property" entries

Developer Week in Review: Oracle's big bet fails to pay off

Google dodges a bullet, a new Perl in town, and GCC loses an OS.

Oracle fails to convince a jury that Google owes them big bucks, the annual refresh of Perl has arrived, and FreeBSD says goodbye to an increasingly restrictive GCC license.

Fair use: A narrow, subjective, complicated safe haven for free speech

Attorney Miles Feldman on the ins and outs of fair use.

Litigation and intellectual property attorney Miles Feldman addresses issues of fair use, including the deciding factors courts consider, research tools to determine the status of works, and Creative Commons licensing.

Jury to Eolas: Nobody owns the interactive web

A decision to strike down patents to the "Interactive Web" is an important victory for the networked commons.

A Texas jury has struck down a company's claim to ownership of the interactive web. Eolas, which has been suing technology companies for more than a decade, now faces the prospect of losing the patents.

The week the web changed Washington

Collective action halted SOPA and PIPA. Now we're in unexplored territory.

Collective action channeled through the Internet halted the progress of SOPA and PIPA this week. The promise of these communication tools has come of age, and they'll be sorely needed to face the challenges of the 21st century.

Intellectual Property Strategy: a book, a panel, and a movement

The speakers, who included household names of the free culture movement such as Lawrence Lessig and Eric von Hippel, emphasized the culture shift that is breaking the seemingly iron grip of current policies that favor wealthy companies with portfolios of patents and copyrights. But I think even these speakers failed to convey how huge a sea change in underway.

Intellectual property gone mad

Sweeping patent changes aren't likely, but small solutions may curb patent trolls.

Patent trolling could undermine app ecosystems, but who can mount a legitimate challenge? Here's four potential solutions.

Should the patent office open its internal guidelines to the public?

Anyone following policy issues around technological innovation has noticed the power and scope of patents expanding over time. To understand the forces contributing to this, I recommend a thoughtful, readable summary–and highlight the role played by internal documents at the patent office.

At the eG8, 20th century ideas clashed with the 21st century economy

The eG8 shows online innovation and freedom of expression still need strong defenders.

While the first eG8 Forum in Paris featured hundreds of business and digital luminaries, some of the policies discussed should be of serious concern to entrepreneurs, activists, media and citizens around the world.

Software patents, prior art, and revelations of the Peer to Patent review

Besides the greater openness that Peer to Patent promotes in
evaluating individual patent applications, it is creating a new
transparency and understanding of the functioning of the patent system
as a whole. Problems with prior art disproportionately affect
software.

Four short links: 4 February 2011

Four short links: 4 February 2011

Intellectual Property, Javascript Charting, Open Source Advice, and Java-based Machine Learning

  1. Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property (MIT Press) — with essays by knowledgeable folks such as Yochai Benkler, Larry Lessig, and Jo Walsh. Available as open access (free) ebook as well as paper. I love it that we can download these proper intellectuals’ intellectual property. (via BoingBoing)
  2. AwesomeChartJS — Apache-licensed Javascript library for charting. (via Hacker News)
  3. Be Open from Day One — advice from Karl Fogel (author of the excellent Producing Open Source Software, which O’Reilly publishes) for projects that think they may some day be open source: f you’re running a government software project and you plan to make it open source eventually, then just make it open source from the beginning. Waiting will only create more work. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
  4. MALLET — open source (CPL-licensed) Java-based package for statistical natural language processing, document classification, clustering, topic modeling, information extraction, and other machine learning applications to text.