Stanford Center for Internet and Society

For the past year I’ve tracked the series of Ocean Tomo Patent / IP Auctions. The third in the series occurs April 2007 in Chicago, and I just received the catalog. The catalog is divided into topical sections, including Web-Based Services, Business Methods/Data Systems, and Digital and Home Media.

For several years I’ve been following advances in ‘Music Information Retrieval’ (MIR), mostly through a Music IR list. This heavily academic community presents its own annual conferences and competitions for best ‘recognizers.’ I find their work fascinating.

A friend just informed
me of this conference starting Sunday in Munich. Sorry for the late notice, but
it’s interesting nonetheless.

DLD Conference

DLD (Digital, Life, Design) is Europe's conference for the

The January 2007 issue of Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) has an article entitled “The Patent Holder’s Dilemma: Buy, Sell, or Troll” by Patricia Abril and Robert Plant. This is the professional journal for Computer Science. Articles related to IP are not presented very often, but when so, usually by Pam Samuelson.

AOL provides a reference index to Internet related litigation (http://legal.web.aol.com/decisions/index.html)
and IP issues in particular (http://legal.web.aol.com/decisions/dlip/index.html). 

The New York Times this morning has a wonderful article on the demise of Morse
Code (Morse Code: A Fading Signal by Miguel Helft).  Until a
recent revision to the requirements by the Federal Communications Commission
for an Amateur Radio License, proficiency in Morse Code
was required.

Motivated by the talk of a few weeks ago, I looked at the patent litigation data in my IP Litigation database to see whether the duration of litigation conformed to a ‘long tail’ pattern. The attached chart shows the number of cases that close the indicated months after filing. Of 27,710 cases where both filing and closing dates are available, almost 38% conclude (for whatever reason) within