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Tech at Night: Same old, same old. Obama administration run amok.

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  August 28th, 2012 at 03:00 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Tech at Night

I know, it’s terrible, but after missing Friday due to the RedState upgrade, I feel behind tonight and so am just going to have to speed through some of this tonight.

Ah, the ARRA, aka the Porkulus. Picking Internet winners and losers in Colorado, and probably nationwide in many “little” stories the national media chooses not to pick up.

That, combined with the final, eventual word that the FCC is looking at a national Internet tax, is why we must all be aware, and make the country aware, that a vote for Barack Obama, and only a vote for the President, is a vote for greater government and less liberty online.

But, those aren’t the only bad things the administration and its FCC are up to. Even before the election they’re starting to suspend deregulation, reminiscent of the last minute push to suspend key elements of welfare reform. In fact Larry Downes says they’ve scored a hat trick of errors on internet regulation.

I think Google’s worried, and maybe learning the lessons from AT&T that Verizon apparently did, by trying to make nice with reporters, Republicans, and regulators. How genuine and sustained these efforts are, only time will tell.

Quick hits: Yeah, I don’t care if our government is spying on foreigners, I just don’t.

PATENT WARS: Samsung loses big to Apple. Some suspect the jury got dazzled by the trade dress issues, and so got tricked into interpreting patents broadly, but a win’s a win.

Click through agreements are kind of stupid, especially when they get pretentious. Frank J is right.

I’d be apathetic to California choosing to be less safe by restricting cops from watching what criminals are actively broadcasting, if I didn’t have family living there still.

According to Fox, it’s copyright infringement for Dish Network to offer hardware that lets your customers skip ads. Insane. I hope they lose big. This kind of irrational overreach can discredit copyright if allowed to stand.

Twitter sticks up for Occupy. One wonders if they’d stick up for a conservative.

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  • Dave_A

    RE: Patent wars…

    The jury system has it’s usage, but right now the fate of the phone market may well have been sealed by ’12 folks too stupid to avoid jury duty’…

    Apple tried this same ‘sue the competition out of existence’ thing with the early versions of MS Windows, and lost due to a variety of legal-technical factors such as prior licensing contracts between them and Microsoft…

    But immagine if Apple had been able to halt sales of Windows and ‘own’ the concept of a ‘desktop’ based operating system? Right now they are trying to own the entire concept of a touch-screen smartphone, media player, and tablet… Which goes beyond securing their legitimate rights to not have the iStuff counterfeited, to anti-competitive behavior.

    The current patent law, in the IT field, goes beyond the realm of ‘securing the rights of inventors’ as per the Constitution, to being usable to prevent competition. It should be fixed – mainly, it should not be able to patent user-interfaces or ‘methods of user-interaction’ (such as pinch-to-squeeze, rubber-banding, or slide-to-unlock). IT patents should be limited to functionality – eg, you should be able to patent a specific implementation of a ‘virtual machine’ but not the CONCEPT of a virtual machine no matter how invented…

    Make it like a physical invention – you can patent whatever way you invented something, but if someone finds a mechanically different way to do the same thing, it’s a new ‘work’ not patent-infringement (eg, you can patent wing-warping as a method of airplane roll-control (Wright Bros original method)… But if someone invents ailerons (mechanically different way to make a plane roll – some Frenchman figured it out & now everyone uses it), your patent isn’t infringed)….

  • utahtim

    A win’s a win? To think the verdict in the Apple vs. Samsung case was a win, one or more of these have to be true: (1) one would have to lack an understanding of how messed up the patent system is and/or (2) be in the tank for Apple. As a consumer, I don’t care if Apple wins $1B from Samsung, but I care greatly that my choices are being limited by government enforcement of an IP monopoly on extremely low quality patents. A win for me, you, and all consumers of electronic goods would have been if the patents in question had been found invalid, e.g., because of the prior art that the jury ignored.