snowdeal.org - conflux

conflux

eCompany Would You Buy a Patent License From This Man?
"In all likelihood, you have never heard of U.S. Patent 5,253,341. But if you have a website, you may be in violation of it. And someday soon, a man named Tony Brown might ask you to pay for this transgression."

"Patent 5,253,341 was granted in 1993 to two inventors, Anthony Rozmanith and Neil Berinson, and it covers a process whereby a computer user at a terminal asks a remote server for information, receives it, and then decompresses it on his computer. This, as it happens, describes what takes place pretty much anytime someone looks at a picture or listens to an audio file on the Internet. When they submitted the patent application in 1991, Rozmanith and Berinson couldn't have known how common this would become, but they happened to secure the license on something that happens millions of times each day."

redux [03.11.00]
The New York Times Magazine Patently Absurd
[requires 'free' n.y.t. registration]
"When 21st-century historians look back at the breakdown of the United States patent system, they will see a turning point in the case of Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com and their special invention: "The patented One Click� feature," Bezos calls it."

"In ways that could not have been predicted even a few years ago, the patent system is in crisis. A series of unplanned mutations have transformed patents into a positive threat to the digital economy. The patent office has grown entangled in philosophical confusion of its own making; it has become a ferocious generator of litigation; and many technologists believe that it has begun to choke the very innovation it nourish."

redux [03.04.00]
Salon Patently Absurd
"Contrary to popular belief, business-method patents have flowed from the Patent and Trademark Office for over 100 years. Many appear at least as obvious as Amazon's. For example, patent 44,778, awarded to Isaac Bates on October 25, 1864, covers a "method for teaching penmanship," specifically an innovative position of arm, pen and hand. Meanwhile, patent 660,255 protects a method for teaching speaking and reading to the deaf. It was issued in 1900."

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[ rhetoric ]

“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

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