Web-Tones

IP Lawyers Run Amok

Link: Wired News: Pod People Ponder Litigation.

 

Not a day seems to go by when you don't read about an emerging intellectual property issue on the Web.

But Apple's attempt to trademark the word 'pod' is more than just a little over the top. Now an 'iPod' trademark is not only legitimate but it would be sheer legal stupidity not to trademark it. However, we have lots of case law in the trademark space that says that you cannot trademark common words, and the use of pod, in its many incarnations (podcast, podcasting, procaster, etc.) is so common that you would think Apple would be laughed out of court if it attempted to bring an infringement action (assuming that the PTO was crazy enough to grant it).

Besides that, why antogonize an entire industry and  risk losing (even a little) of that magical qaulity called "goodwill?" This is not as bad as the O'Reilly infringement suit on its "Web 2.0 Conference" trademark, but it is in the ballpark!

Cheap Computing is Hip

Forbes September '06 front page article "The New Barbarians" covers the "four waves" of computing as follows: 1) mainframes (think IBM); 2) Mini-Computers(think DEC); 3) PC (think Dell); 4) Cheap & Obiquitous Utility Computing (think Linux). The entrepreneurs at Cassatt (virtualization), ActiveGrid (developemnt tools), & Zimbra (email) all have their sights set on industry heavyweights and with the right mix of luck and technology they are likely to succeed. Why? Because better, faster, cheaper has always carried the day in the technology space and the there is no reason to believe that trend will not continue. The incumbents see the writing on the wall, but tech has always favored the young and the hip (see the innovator's dilemma).

However that is not the interesting part--the transformation (the real impact) will be at the companines that use cheap cycles to transform their organizations and in some cases their industries. The historically luddite legal industry will not be spared--somewhere there is a "new barbarian" with some heavyweights in her sights.

OneWebDay

Sounds like a "hippie" gathering (more info here) but honestly there is lots on the web to be thankful for. I recently was diagnosed with Type II diabetes and was out of commission for a few days. Still I was able to get a "ton of stuff" done from home and felt connected and "plugged in." For the universe of knowledge workers, being out of the office no longer means "missing work"--at least not entirely. Clearly 24/7 connectivity should be having a positive impact on productivity and no doubt the increasd productivity should "soon, if not already" be reflected to the upside in the economic data.

Not only was I somewhat productive, I got to do some reasearch on what the hell I had been diagnosed with--no shortage of information regarding diabetes on the net, including at http://www.diabetes.org. Again the number of people doing personal medical research on the net includes just about everyone (for sure the old folks like me). Again a better medically informed populis should have positive system wide benefits.

The list goes on and on...we may never have a perfect "electronic commons", BUT what we have is pretty damn good, and certainly worth celebrating!

ZDNet Whiteboard "Shorts"

The ZDNet At the Whiteboard video "shorts" appear to be a great way to get a brief introduction into topics where a person is seeking to a get a conversational introduction.

Think of these as visual dictionary entries that allow you to say: "OK I think I grok it" at least with respect to the identification of the "idea behind the term." Scroll down to the bottom of this page for a directory of technology "shorts" by category.

I predict that you will see this idea spread to non technology centric subject matter soon. Kudos to ZDNet for their current implementation!

CyberLaw: Does RSS Encourage Copyright Infringement?

The current debate about whether RSS encourages copyright infringement highlights the potential tension between what we want the law to be and what the law is. John Palfrey (from the Berkman center Harvard Law School) argues here that RSS (as used by aggregators such as Bloglines & others) does not violate current copyright law, however he also discloses that he is an investor in Top10Sources a company which is itself an aggregator of sorts (and it appears to be a particularly useful one at that). His pro-aggregator argument is interesting and plausible, but not argued in as forceful a manner as on might have expected.

Here's the point, while I, and many others like Bloglines because it is useful to us-that is obviously not an argument relevant to whether it is or is not infringing someone's copyright. The debate rages on, and sooner or later the Courts or the Legislature will get into the act, as the law struggles to keep up with the velocity of the digital universe.