Into Tech

a href=”http://stuckinthecube.blogspot.com”ReallyEvilCanine/a writes in to let us know that Ocean Tomo, the a href=”http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070507/013659.shtml”patent auctioning/a company has worked out an agreement to a href=”http://www.gcn.com/online/vol1_no1/47153-1.html” target=”_new”auction off a package of 25 NASA patents/a covering things like signal processing, GPS for spacecraft and sensor technologies. Ocean Tomo ialways/i presents itself as somehow creating value from patents, but always seems to ignore how its version of creating value often means significant value ilost/i to actual innovators. In this case, there’s an even bigger question: didn’t taxpayers pay for those patents by funding NASA? So why is some company now going to benefit from them, while locking the public out? In effect, the public is paying twice (at potentially inflated prices) for these inventions. Yet, you won’t hear that from Ocean Tomo or the press reports about this auction, which note:
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“Creating a market for patented technology funded by NASA benefits both the government and the commercial sector that will take advantage of it.”
/i/blockquote
That leaves out the taxpayers who funded this in the first place iand/i is simply incorrect. It iharms/i the commercial sector by making them pay again for something. If NASA wanted to benefit the commercial sector, it could have placed those patents in the public domain, so that the commercial sector could compete to do something useful with them, thereby spurring on competition and more innovation.
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We’ve seen all sorts of cases of companies abusing trademark law over the years, but this latest one may be the most questionable — and tragically, it may actually work. It involves a site, a href=”http://www.blockshopper.com/welcome/”Blockshopper/a that’s basically a blog tracking publicly available info on real estate sales in certain neighborhoods around the country. It recently had two posts about associates at the big law firm, Jones Day, buying property in Chicago, listing out the details, including the fact that the lawyers worked at Jones Day with their photos. Jones Day a href=”http://www.abajournal.com/weekly/law_firm_sues_over_website_posting_attorney_home_purchase_info” target=”_new”has sued the website for trademark infringement/a. This seems highly questionable on a number of fronts.
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a href=”http://www.citizen.org/litigation”Paul Alan Levy/a from Public Citizen describes a href=”http://pubcit.typepad.com/clpblog/2008/09/trademark-abuse.html”what an incredible abuse of trademark law this is/a:
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According to Jones Day, linking to its web site dilutes its trademark and creates a likelihood of confusion. But that is preposterous. The link is in connection with a comment on Jones Day; when a trademark is used to comment on the trademark holder, the use reinforces the association with the trademark holder, rather than blurring it, and besides use for commentary is expressly protected as fair use under the Lanham Act as amended in 2006. Moreover, nobody could visit the BlockShopper web site and think that it is sponsored by or affiliated with Jones Day, even if they follow the links from BlockShopper’s mention of Jones Day associates to Jones Day’s own web site. That is what web sites do – they link to other web sites (that’s what makes it a “World Wide Web”).
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Indeed, throughout the first paragraph above, I used Jones Day’s name (because I am writing about that firm) and linked to Jones Day’s web site and elsewhere. Is Public Citizen equally liable for trademark infringement and dilution? If Jones Day is right here, it is hard to see how the Web could survive.
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As Levy notes, based on Jones Day’s argument, anyone who writes about the law firm may be liable for trademark infringement, but that’s ridiculous. Tragically, it sounds like the judge in the case is ignoring all of this. The judge not only a href=”http://www.chicagoiplitigation.com/2008/09/articles/legal-news/blockshopper-stipulates-to-temporary-restraining-order/”agreed to a temporary restraining order/a against BlockShopper, but also told the site’s owner:
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“Do you know, young man, how much money it’s going to cost you to defend yourselves against Jones Day?”
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Apparently, actually being on the right side of the law is meaningless.
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And before people bring up questions of copyright or privacy, Jones Day isn’t suing over either of those — and this is all publicly available information, so it’s difficult to see what the privacy claim is. Right now, it just looks like a case of a big law firm bullying the owner of a website because he’s done something the firm doesn’t like — and the judge is helping the firm out.
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With the government gearing up to potentially go after Google for antitrust violations, we’re seeing all sorts of press coverage of stories about how Google may be abusing its position, from supposedly hurting companies to potentially having too much insight into your web surfing activities. And, no one’s gloating over this turn of events more than some of the broadband providers, who often find themselves at odds with Google over issues such as net neutrality, patent reform and other issues. Yet, as some new research is suggesting, it’s odd that there’s so much of a spotlight focused on Google, when those same ISPs are a much bigger privacy threat. They have a lot more visibility into our online activities, a lot more control over what users do, and (unlike Google) it’s a lot more difficult to route around them. Plus, many have shown that they have no problems selling your private data — sometimes without letting you know. So, why is all the attention focused on Google? If it’s abusing our privacy, then it’s easy to switch to a competitor. Broadband ISPs, on the other hand, have a lot more control and visibility — and a much tighter grip on customers, usually with fewer competitive options. Yet, the government rolls over backwards to let these ISPs do what they want, while it prepares an antitrust lawsuit against Google?

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It all started a few days ago when a scanned page from a forthcoming Woolworths catalogue showed cheaper Xbox 360s and now, in uncharacteristic fashion, Microsoft has confirmed that European Xbox 360 price cuts are imminent.

From September 19, the Arcade unit drops to £129.99, the Premium version with 60GB hard disk drive drops to £169 and the top of the line Elite with 120GB HDD costs £229.

As we pointed out yesterday, that makes the Arcade and Premium Xbox 360s cheaper than the Wii. Let’s hope Nintendo takes note. Overall, gamers can expect to save £30 on each console if they hold off until the end of the week.

480i, 720p, 1080i and 1080p what does it all mean?
Standard TV from the days of black and white to the present color images we watch every day on television are made up of a series of still images displayed at 60 frames a second in the US and 50 frames a second in Europe. These [...]

For many years, we’ve covered case after case after case after case after case after case after case of people being blamed, arrested or even jailed for pointing out a security flaw. It should come as no surprise that many security researchers claim that it’s just not worth it to research security vulnerabilities, since the risk is just too high.

It doesn’t seem like those on the other side are getting the message just yet. Slashdot points us to the latest example, where a student at Carleton University has been arrested and charged with computer hacking after discovering a vulnerability and writing up a 16-paged paper to tell university officials about the vulnerability. A criminal doesn’t write up a huge paper telling officials how to fix their problems. This just scares off people from telling universities that their systems are insecure. Remember, a few years back in Ohio there was a similar situation, with the whistleblower blamed — and then the school didn’t bother fixing the vulnerability, leading to more info being leaked.

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We’ve seen a few different lawsuits involving ticket reselling website Stubhub (owned by eBay). Last year, you may remember, a court forced Stubhub to hand over the identity of sellers of New England Patriots’ tickets, despite the fact that Stubhub’s terms of service protect users’ privacy. One of the big questions brought up by various lawsuits is whether or not Stubhub is guilty of violating various anti-scalping laws. It seems like it would be clear that Stubhub, as the platform provider, is not liable and is protected by Section 230 of the CDA. And, in fact, that’s what a court has just found, dismissing a complaint against Stubhub. However, as Eric Goldman notes at that link, this seems to contradict with at least one other ruling against Stubhub — meaning that this is hardly settled law, and we should expect to see a bunch more lawsuits along these lines pop up before this gets worked out.

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For years, one of our pet peeves was the use of “up to” in telco marketing — as in, “you get speeds up to 10 Mbps!” The “up to” lets providers basically make up whatever they want, as any speed below that number is still technically covered. However, in the last few years, some have started pushing back — even questioning whether the use of “up to” marketing was false advertising. That’s why it’s nice to see that AT&T, for one, appears to be moving away from the practice. Broadband Reports notes that AT&T’s new terms of service seems to show the range of speeds, rather than using “up to.” That seems a lot more accurate and reasonable.

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DirecTV vs. Dish Network and Satellite TV vs. Cable TV
With so many satellite TV providers competing for your business, how do you know who to choose from? Let’s take a look at two of the more popular satellite TV service providers, DirecTV and Dish Network for an apple to apples comparison.
Dish Network
Dish Network Satellite is [...]

More than three years ago, when Chinese search engine Baidu first filed to go public, we noted that it’s huge advantage over Google in China appeared to stem from its very popular music download search engine — and we wondered if going public would force that to go away, potentially damaging the company’s bottom line significantly. In fact, we were surprised that it appeared that the investors in the site hadn’t done much due diligence to understand what was going on. The recording industry wasted little time in suing Baidu. While Baidu won the first case on a technicality and quickly sued again.

At first, this did seem like a typical situation seen with other online search engines, such as The Pirate Bay or even Google, where it’s not really clear how Baidu could stop the searches for unauthorized music. However, a new investigative report by The Register found evidence that suggests Baidu is actually a lot more involved in the music download business than it lets on. Specifically, the search results mostly link to a mysterious network of sites that are only reachable via Baidu searches. You can’t just go to the sites directly. The sites themselves have a long (and potentially growing) list of random domain names such that the songs constantly move around, and any time Baidu receives a “takedown” it can claim it complied, while the music almost immediately shows back up on the next domain in the list. Also, Baidu almost never links to other, legitimate, download sites — preferring to point people to these sites that are unreachable outside of Baidu instead.

All in all, it certainly sounds like Baidu is a lot more involved in providing the actual downloads than it would as just a search engine.

That said, The Register’s report includes a variety of unsupported statements about how this has “destroyed” economic activity in the music business. As we’ve seen, the music business has actually adapted to the expectation that the music itself is free in China. I recognize that it’s popular for the RIAA and IFPI to make claims about how downloading is destroying the music industry, but you would think that the Register would know better.

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