Broadband access through cable
Broadband is defined as a mode of data transmission, where multiple data packets are sent simultaneously to increase the effective rate of transmission.Intelligent use of your TV cable has lead to the emergence of cable broadband. This technology works by making use of the unused bandwidth in your CAT V cable. As [...]
Having the right LNB for the right Satellite dish is extremely important. There are two kinds of LNBS in the market. One is called a Circular LNB and the other is called Linear LNB. Please be aware that a circular feed LNB will not recognize a satellite that needs a linear feed LNB. So, when [...]
Broadband access through cable
Broadband is defined as a mode of data transmission, where multiple data packets are sent simultaneously to increase the effective rate of transmission.Intelligent use of your TV cable has lead to the emergence of cable broadband. This technology works by making use of the unused bandwidth in your CAT V cable. As [...]
pspan class=”mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image” style=”display: inline;”img alt=”toshiba nb100.jpg” src=”http://uk.gizmodo.com/toshiba%20nb100.jpg” width=”500″ height=”499″ class=”mt-image-none” style=”" //spanbr clear=”all”br / Toshiba knows a thing or three about making great laptops which is why its entrance into the growing netbook arena has be hotly anticipated. /p pIt might be a little late to the party but the company has finally announced its first netbook, the NB100. Pushing the quality, rather than the cost angle, the NB100 can, according to Tosh, em”be used as either for primary or secondary computing purposes, with a strong feature-set and high build-quality build making it an impressively versatile product.”/em/p pPowered by the Intel Atom chip, it comes with either Linux Ubuntu 8.04 or Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition. It has an 8.9in widescreen TruBrite display [1024x600] which uses LED backlighting to conserve power. By the way, Tosh rates battery life at an unusually precise 3hrs 47 minutes. /pimg width=’1′ height=’1′ src=’http://feeds.uk.gizmodo.com/c/552/f/9581/s/1ec497a/mf.gif’ border=’0′/div class=’mf-viral’table border=’0′trtd valign=’middle’a href=”http://res.feedsportal.com/viral/sendemail2.html?title=http://uk.gizmodo.com/2008/09/19/toshiba_joins_netbook_party_wi.htmllink=Toshiba Joins Netbook Party With The ‘Quality’ NB100″ target=”_blank”img src=”http://rss.feedsportal.com/images/emailthis2.gif” border=”0″ //a/tdtd valign=’middle’a href=”http://res.feedsportal.com/viral/bookmark.cfm?title=http://uk.gizmodo.com/2008/09/19/toshiba_joins_netbook_party_wi.htmllink=Toshiba Joins Netbook Party With The ‘Quality’ NB100″ target=”_blank”img src=”http://rss.feedsportal.com/images/bookmark.gif” border=”0″ //a/td/tr/table/divbr/br/a href=”http://da.feedsportal.com/r/19345414922/f/9581/c/552/s/32262522/a2.htm”img src=”http://da.feedsportal.com/r/19345414922/f/9581/c/552/s/32262522/a2.img” border=”0″//a
By this point, it should be rather clear what we think of a href=”http://www.techdirt.com/search.php?site=#038;q=Myhrvold”Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures/a project. It’s perhaps the biggest threat to innovation around, as Myhrvold is collecting a ton of patents (now up to 20,000 apparently) and pressuring companies to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to get blanket licenses to avoid getting sued. It’s a scam to shift money away from actual innovators and into the pockets of lawyers and speculators. For some reason, though, Myhrvold has a knack for getting press. His latest is a a href=”http://www.emailthis.clickability.com/et/emailThis?clickMap=viewThis#038;etMailToID=275993933″ target=”_new”profile in the Wall Street Journal/a that covers much the same ground as previous profiles in places like a href=”http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060626/1011256.shtml”Business Week and Fortune/a.
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So what is new in this one? Well, less than a year after a href=”http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071112/191128.shtml”raising a $1 billion patent hoarding fund/a, he’s out raising a inew/i b$2.5 billion fund/b. So it seems like he’s good at getting press and raising money — but not so much actually making money at this point (well, Myhrvold personally is doing fine, since the piece notes that he gets a 2% management fee, just like a VC). And that’s where the saber rattling comes in. The article notes that Cisco and Verizon have paid up between $200 and $400 million as licensees — though, to make it more confusing some of that is invested back into the fund for equity. Thus, it’s not really clear as to how much is being used specifically to license patents. The article also highlights that some of Myhrvold’s earlier investors are going to start wondering when the fund is actually going to bring in some real revenue.
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Another oddity is the vast amount of secrecy surrounding Intellectual Ventures. Anyone who sells a patent to the company or who licenses patents from the company are required to sign extensive non-disclosure agreements. When asked why, Myhrvold skirts the question by claiming many companies don’t want to reveal what they’re doing with IV. If that’s true, though, why do they need NDAs in the first place? The company also uses an array of secret shell companies to go around buying patents, again raising questions about what it’s doing. If the company is really so proud of its business model and doesn’t think it’s shameful, why is it hiding behind shell companies like garden variety a href=”http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071127/015820.shtml”patent hoarders/a. But, as we’ve learned, patent hoarders very much a href=”http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080815/0346231992.shtml”rely on secrecy/a to convince others to pay up.
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And, then, of course, there are the myths that Myhrvold loves to repeat, but no reporters ever push him on. He insists that those who disagree with his business model are merely “infringers.” Yet, as we’ve all seen, so many patent infringement lawsuits these days are hardly about actual infringement, and much more about a company that didn’t succeed in the marketplace suing one that did. He also repeats the myth that patent lawsuits are decreasing, claiming that the number of lawsuits peaked in 2004 and has been declining. That’s misleading because it ignores the fact that patent hoarders are now suing larger and larger groups of companies in a a href=”http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071130/010512.shtml”single lawsuit/a meaning that the number of companies being sued has been a href=”http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071221/012831.shtml”increasing rapidly/a.
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Either way, Myhrvold may want to close that new fund as quickly as possible. The a href=”http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080409/011406799.shtml”Bilski ruling/a that could put an end to software and business method patents is expected sometime in October, and it could put a big dent in his patent portfolio.
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a href=”http://torrentfreak.com/study-says-intellectual-property-system-should-die-080911/” target=”_new”TorrentFreak/a alerts us to the latest in a long line of research that a href=”http://www.theinnovationpartnership.org/en/bioip/report/”highlights just how damaging the intellectual property system has been to innovation/a. This isn’t new, of course. We’ve been pointing to tons of research on this subject for years, but it’s great to see some more to add to the pile. And this isn’t just a couple of folks with an opinion either — but a seven year study, involving a large interdisciplinary team of folks examining all aspects of intellectual property, with the main focus being on the biotech industry. The report hits on a few key themes we’ve highlighted over the years:
blockquotei
The current era of intellectual property is waning. It has been based on two faulty assumptions made nearly three decades ago: that since some intellectual property (IP) is good, more must be better; and that IP is about controlling knowledge rather than sharing it. These assumptions are as inaccurate in biotechnology – the field of science covered by this report – as they are in other fields from music to software.
/i/blockquote
The full report is a good read. It’s well researched and documented, and points out that listening to IP lawyers alone, or just looking at IP laws is a huge mistake in analyzing the overall impact of IP:
blockquotei
An analysis of IP laws alone gives a distorted understanding
of how IP facilitates innovation and dissemination. Such
an analysis must be complemented by an understanding of
business and governmental practice as well as the public
and private institutions and entities that create, grant and
govern IP.
/i/blockquote
There’s plenty more in the report, and it’s all footnoted, and some of the additional research is new to me and will be fun to explore over the next few weeks.
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However, while the report’s description of the problems is dead on, the report runs into trouble when it gets to the “and what do we do about it” section. It talks a lot about “new IP” which is vaguely defined, and involves a lot of wishy-washy statements about trust and collaboration and openness. It basically suggests that a bunch of different parties all have to start acting differently but doesn’t necessarily explain why or how that will work. That seems… difficult, and a tad idealistic. This is really too bad, given how solid the earlier part of the report is. It’s almost as if the group putting together the report saw all the problems, but couldn’t come up with really concrete solutions. That’s unfortunate, given that plenty of folks have shown real world examples of how the system can work just fine by simply removing IP from the equation, and watching the business models that result. Overall, this is an excellent addition to the literature in looking at the iproblems/i, but comes up short when it gets to the isolutions/i side of the discussion.
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Apparently a whistleblower recently leaked some evidence that German authorities were using a special trojan horse software to tap Skype audio conversations. The document detailing this was leaked to the German Pirate Party, one of many international “Pirate Parties” that have been formed in recent years to push for more reasonable government policies on a variety of fronts from intellectual property to privacy and government surveillance. Illegally tapping Skype conversations may be illegal, but it seems that German authorities are a lot more interested in tracking down who leaked the documents and a href=”http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party-official-raided-after-uncovering-state-trojan-080917/” target=”_new”have raided the homes of various German Pirate Party members/a, confiscating computer equipment. Of course, if anything, this would seem to confirm that the government was at least experimenting with, if not actively using, such a trojan horse wiretapping program — and the raids have only served to generate much more attention over that fact.
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pspan class=”mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image” style=”display: inline;”img alt=”remote chopper.jpg” src=”http://uk.gizmodo.com/remote%20chopper.jpg” width=”397″ height=”397″ class=”mt-image-none” style=”" //span/p pWe’ve been hearing quite a bit about futuristic remote controlled flying machines recently, ranging from those a href=”http://uk.gizmodo.com/2008/08/18/uk_military_enlists_the_creati.html”controlled by humans from the ground/a to a href=”http://uk.gizmodo.com/2008/06/16/brits_aid_in_first_stage_of_ro.html”pilotless drones/a. /p pNow we have what’s kind of a mix between the two. It’s a four foot long helicopter, uses artificial intelligence instead of weak pathetic humans to fly and recently did a circuit over Stanford University in California./p pbr / /pimg width=’1′ height=’1′ src=’http://feeds.uk.gizmodo.com/c/552/f/9581/s/1e5f115/mf.gif’ border=’0′/div class=’mf-viral’table border=’0′trtd valign=’middle’a href=”http://res.feedsportal.com/viral/sendemail2.html?title=http://uk.gizmodo.com/2008/09/16/more_power_to_the_robot_army_a.htmllink=More Power To The Robot Army: AI-Controlled ‘Copter Takes Test Flight” target=”_blank”img src=”http://rss.feedsportal.com/images/emailthis2.gif” border=”0″ //a/tdtd valign=’middle’a href=”http://res.feedsportal.com/viral/bookmark.cfm?title=http://uk.gizmodo.com/2008/09/16/more_power_to_the_robot_army_a.htmllink=More Power To The Robot Army: AI-Controlled ‘Copter Takes Test Flight” target=”_blank”img src=”http://rss.feedsportal.com/images/bookmark.gif” border=”0″ //a/td/tr/table/divbr/br/a href=”http://da.feedsportal.com/r/18827526578/f/9581/c/552/s/31846677/a2.htm”img src=”http://da.feedsportal.com/r/18827526578/f/9581/c/552/s/31846677/a2.img” border=”0″//a
We were just talking about how a huge number of public interest groups had explained to the Senate why the new Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act was a such terrible idea since it would add a Copyright Czar in the White House and let the FBI file civil charges against people caught infringing on copyrights. After all, there’s simply no logical explanation for why the FBI should be propping up the obsolete business model of an industry that refuses to change with the market.
However, it appears that public interest groups don’t fund campaigns like the entertainment industry does. The Senate Judiciary Committee has gone ahead and approved moving the bill forward by a 14-4 margin, basically handing over Justice Department resources to Hollywood to protect its business model with no real justification.
The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Patrick Leahy’s explanation is pretty stunning in its ignorance:
“We all know that intellectual property makes up some of the most valuable, and most vulnerable, property we have. We need to do more to protect it from theft and abuse if we hope to continue being a world leader in innovation.”
Can someone send him a copy of Against Intellectual Monopoly so he can understand how nearly every part of that sentence is wrong. First off, intellectual property, despite the name, is not “property” at all. It’s also not “vulnerable” except if you mean that there are better business models out there for dealing with. He gives no convincing reason why we should “protect” it, other than a factually untrue statement about “theft,” when infringement and theft are two totally different things and should be dealt with in two totally different ways. Finally, studies have shown that the more “protected” IP is, the less innovation results, so his final clause is simply backwards. This bill will serve to limit American innovation, and open up more foreign innovation instead. But, as long as it means the RIAA doesn’t need to innovate…
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Last month, we wrote about how some record labels were experimenting with waiting until a song became popular and then removing it from iTunes, hoping that this would somehow encourage people to buy the physical CD instead. Of course, it appeared to really just help cover bands who quickly filled the void (and it’s likely that unauthorized file sharing shot up). However, it didn’t create a huge boost for CD sales — though, it didn’t appear to harm the artist all that much either. Jon Healey over at the LA Times lets us know that the music of Estelle, for whom this experiment was conducted, is now back on iTunes, and the Nielsen SoundScan data suggested not much of a change in album sales. They went up slightly during the time period, but not significantly — and clearly the label decided that it was better just to have the songs back on iTunes. Hopefully other labels recognize that making it more difficult to get music isn’t a particularly intelligent idea.
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