I thought that I had read it all when it came to silly patents. Apparently not. The Register reports on U.S. patent application 20060015812 by mobile giants Cingular, attempting to patent the use of emoticons in wireless devices. The abstract reads: A method and system for generating a displayable icon Read more…
(via IPKat) A very unfortunate turn of events for innovation. The U.S. Supreme Court will not hear the case of Research in Motion Ltd (RIM), the inventors and makers of the famous (and perhaps infamous) Blackberry, versus patent trolls NTP Inc. RIM has been trying to attack an injunction against Read more…
I have become addicted to The Truth Laid Bear‘s rankings. Incredibly, I’ve been upgraded to Multicellular Organism (I was an Insignificant Microbe just last week). I have decided to place a link indicating what my status is. I have also noticed that I have now received more than 10,000 hits Read more…
(via Denis Magnusson). How much are your illegally downloaded copyright works worth? (well, they are not really yours, they belong to the copyright owners, but you know what I mean). Use the piracy calculator and find out! I was surprised of how little my stuff is worth, but I have Read more…
The techie press has been filled with reports that Wikipedia Germany was shut down for three days for hosting an article that revealed the name of German hacker Boris Floricic (aka Tron). The story has also been taken up by the blogosphere. But is the story accurate? Not according to Read more…
(Thanks to Hector MacQueen for the link) IP Watch is reporting that a group of pro-software patent lobbyists and big industry representatives are intent in proposing that there should be another attempt to pass a European directive allowing the patentability of software (pardon me, the patentability of computer implemented inventions). Read more…
This is a very funny website with the top ten reasons why nobody reads your blog. True, I will never be a good-looking naked female from Tonga, but in my opinion the list is obsessed with tech consultancy. Most intriguing to me is the fact that it does uncover a Read more…
I have been looking in more detail at GPL v3 and also reading some comments in mailing lists, and I am starting to become deeply troubled by the new version of the world’s most popular copyleft licence. In the good old version 2, the viral aspects of the GPL only Read more…
The draft of the version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPL) has finally been released, and what a document it is! In general, the wording is clearer, tidier and tighter than version 2. The preamble is still as ideological as always (an in my opinion a tad superfluous). Read more…
Court of Appeals judge Sir Robin Jacob has made a vocal attack against the American practice of patenting everything under the sun, and has stated that there is no evidence that software patents encourage innovation. “The United States takes the view that anything made by man, under the sun, can Read more…