The January 4, 2012 edition of the New York Times has an editorial by Vinton Cerf entitled "Internet Access Is Not a Human Right." He presents a very lucid discussion in the context of the Internet role in events of the past year. His point is "technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself", sort of obvious, but he articulates a good discussion of human rights and civil rights. Read more » about Vinton Cerf on Internet Access as a Human Right (Not)
Yesterday Bay Area Cleantech startup Solyndra declared bankruptcy. The reasons are basically business related, but some surround an problem I’ve noted regarding Cleantech businesses: scalability from laboratory to market. Most notable is the $535,000,000 loan guarantee by the US Department of Energy provided to Solyndra.
This is a ripe situation for a patent auction. The question would be how much – how close – to the recent mega-scale portfolio transfers such as Nortel. Solyndra a small portfoloio of 11 issued patents and 32 patent applications (there is some overlap). Read more » about Solyndra’s Cleantech Flame-Out and the Attendant Patent Portfolio
$12.5 Billion for a company with a portfolio of 17,000 patents is major news. This news comes on the heels of Google being 0-for-3 in playing big strategic patent squamish, bypassing opportunities for other portfolios such as Palm, Sun (whose Java and MySQL technologies went to Oracle), and the recent Nortel transfer. Read more » about Google's Patent Indigestion
Several services provide real-time tracking and browsing the position of aircraft in flight. By using the aircraft’s registration number (aka the ‘tail number’, like a vehicle license plate) and the transponder code that reports position to Air Traffic Control, it’s easy to find who/where of aircraft movements. Private flights presently have the option to block the reporting of such data. Read more » about Privacy and Optional Tracking Private Aircraft Flights
Here’s an interesting (to me, at least) trade secret case involving restoration of antique aircraft. Brent Taylor purchased the carcass of an F-45, a 1930s era aircraft and wanted to accurately restore it so that it was once again airworthy, and could fly. He sought from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) the ‘Type Certificate” for this aircraft. Type Certificates are the imprimatur issued by the FAA upon review of design specifications and other materials. The FAA claimed that in this instance the Type Certificate files were trade secrets of Fairchild. Read more » about FOIA, Trade Secrets and Restoring Antique Aircraft
Emeritus Stanford Computer Science Professor Gio Wiederhold provides in the January 2011 issue of Communications of the ACM (1) (the monthly journal of the professional society for Computer Scientists) an article titled Follow the Intellectual Property. The theme of his paper is that the offshoring of IP (actually domiciling the IP for sheltering royalty purposes in an off-shore tax haven such as the Cayman Islands) works to the disadvantage of US employees. Profits sheltered are not repatriated, but instead are used to seed and hire other offshore developments for the patent owners. Read more » about Gio Wiederhold Follows the Intellectual Property Money
In reviewing the statistical tea leaves of IP litigation trends for 2010, one aspect that now stands out is the number of cases involving auctioned patents. There are 15 such cases asserting 20 auctioned patents. Some of the highlights of these 15 cases are:
• US 6,526,219 for “Picture-based video indexing system” had a projected auction price of $250,000, but ended up sold for $700,000. InMotion Imagery Technologies, LLC asserted this patent in three cases in the Eastern District of Texas. Read more » about Auctioned Patents Emerge in Litigation in 2010
In an earlier technical life I was in the 'Library Automation' biz, where I designed and built library information systems and public online catalogs, and was a VP of Software Development for a major vendor. Central to these systems are bibliographic records - a standard description of a work, such as author, title and subject (which gets more arcane from there.)
The above case was just filed in the Northern District raising antitrust and unfair competition issues. Read more » about SkyRiver v. OCLC Ohio College Library Center (CA ND 10-3305) - A case that was waiting to happen.
I received a link to a fascinating site (http://www.aturingmachine.com) and video of a working model of a Turing Machine (TM). Turing Machines are named for British mathematician Alan Turing after a 1936 paper where he proposes a computing machine. The machine is a finite state automaton, being a area of study of the fundamental aspects of theoretical Computer Science. Read more » about Turing Machines and Bilski
