Hasta La Gadget!

Today, there’s a lot of scaremongering in the media surrounding online trolling. When people are being terrible to each other, there’s often this knee-jerk reaction to blame the technology rather than acknowledge that human beings have always been just plain horrible. Case in point: the radio trolls of 1910.

Read more…

Tired of all the patent-related stories? Especially the ones that seem like they are more about financial gain than fairness? We thought so. We’d imagine it’s even more of a frustration if you’re one of the companies regularly involved. No surprise then that some firms — such as Google, BlackBerry, EarthLink and Red Hat — have decided to do something about it, taking the fight directly to the FTC and DoJ. In a recent blog post, Google explains that — along with its collaborators — it has submitted comments to the aforementioned agencies, detailing the impact that “patent trolls” have on the economy.

While the financial cost to the US taxpayer is said to be nearly $30 billion, the four companies also point out how such behavior hurts consumers even further, suggesting that when start-ups and small businesses are strong-armed, innovation and competition suffer. Some specific practices such as “patent priveteering” — when a company sells patents to trolls who don’t manufacture anything and therefore can’t be countersued — also come under direct criticism. The cynical might assume this all comes back to the bottom line, but with the collaborative extending an invitation to other companies to help develop revised, cooperative licensing agreements, they are the very least making it difficult for them to engage in similar behavior in the future. At least until the FTC and DoJ respond.

Filed under: Misc, Google, Blackberry

Comments

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Google Public Policy (blog)

We’ve heard it shouted from the mountaintops more times than we’d care to mention: the patent system is fundamentally broken. But that manner of righteous indignation can often fail to make an impression on those attempting to live their lives unaffected on the sidelines, as hardware behemoths level a seemingly endless string of suits based on often overly broad language. One’s perspective shifts easily, however, when targets change and the defendants themselves are no longer aggressively litigious corporations with an arsenal of filing cabinets spilling over with intellectual property, as was the case when one company used a recently granted patent to go after a number of podcasting networks.

When we wanted to get to the bottom of this latest example in a long line of arguably questionable patent litigation, we phoned up Julie Samuels, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has also been designated the organization’s Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents. Samuels has been fighting the battle against dangerously broad patents for some time now, recently traveling to DC to support passage of the SHIELD Act (Saving High-tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes), a congressional bill that would impose heavy fines against so-called patent trolls.

We spoke to Samuels about supposed trolls, podcasts, SHIELD and how those with microphones can make their voices heard.

Note: The owner of the podcasting patent in question declined to comment on the matter.

Filed under: Internet, Software

Comments

VirnetX is not a company that, strictly speaking, makes things. It is, instead, a company that collects patents the way joyless millionaires collect hermetically sealed comic books: for profit. And while it just scored an impressive $368 million in a successful Apple lawsuit, it’s not stopping there. It’s out for a full-on iPhone, iPad, and Mac ban. More »

You don’t pay for porn. That’s a problem for pornographers, but aces for porno copyright trolls like John Steele, attorney at law. Buzzfeed took a deep look into how they squeeze money out of porn torrenting cases, whether you downloaded anything or not. More »