Canadian Blogs.net

Not so many years ago, even as I was filled with fear and loathing of the hideous misconduct of the US Patent & Trademark Office, I retained some respect for the notion of patents. I even wrote what I think is an unusually easy-to-read introduction to Patent Theory. But no more. The whole thing is too broken to be fixed. Maybe it worked once, but it doesn’t any more. The patent system needs to be torn down and thrown out. I offer the following evidence, just a few random things that came across the radar in recent weeks. Some of these are long but they’re all worth reading: RIM hit with more patent woes. Sample quote: “A black cloud of litigation is nothing new for RIM, as lawsuits are commonplace in the competitive technology sector.” Sawyer Weighs In On Intellectual...

It’s like this: If you send data to someone over the Net, you can’t control what they do with it. At least cost-effectively. Or, if you want a good outcome. This applies to Internet Standards. Any standard that tries to constrain the way in which data, once received, is processed, is broken. Similarly, to business. Any use of legislation or technology that tries to control what people can do with digital media objects, once they’ve been transmitted, is broken. Also any business model that relies on such control. For supporting arguments, check the last five years of this blog. I offer as further supporting evidence the fact that the Internet works and that it’s a good place to learn, have fun, and make money. This is true irrespective of value judgments. If it were a bad...

This is my submission to Canada’s public consultation on copyright policy. For background, see Michael Geist, and I’d also like to highlight his submission to the same process, which I find compelling. The general policy trade-offs have been covered well in submissions from people much more eloquent and erudite than I, so I tried to limit myself to a couple of brief points where I might have something unique to offer. This presented here exactly as submitted, except for I HTMLified the links in transitioning from ASCII email, and omitted my street address. Cc: Don Davies (my Member of Parliament). Thank you for the deadline extension. Introduction My name is Tim Bray. I have been in the Information Technology business since 1981, and it has been good to me. I say, in joking...

This is gripping stuff. Sun’s chief counsel Mike Dillon posted a blow-by-blow report on our in-progress litigation with NetApp on his blog today. The story of the case is pretty interesting, but the fact that a major corporation’s Chief Counsel is blogging it in real-time is ground-breaking, I think. Just as interesting is the only-slightly-redacted declaration by NetApp’s Dave Hitz (PDF), filed in the case, that Mike linked to. It’s a remarkably unvarnished take on the issues facing closed-source vendors with a portfolio of software patents in the era of Open Source.......

Good legalese, immigration, Lord Black, and Anaheim. Legal Sanity Check out Contributor Agreement by Mike Dillon, who’s Sun’s General Counsel (i.e. head lawyer). People complain about legalese, lawyer says “OK”, it gets fixed. Eben Moglen, get a clue. Not Born Here Via the BBC: One-fifth of Canadians immigrants. And here in Vancouver, it’s a whole lot more than 20%; the last tally I heard said that 46% of the city’s residents weren’t born in Canada. I try to judge by the evidence, and on the evidence, immigration is a very good thing. 78 Months It looks like that’s the sentence for Conrad Black. I've mixed feelings about this; like most Canadians, I have long loathed Mr. Black for his lecturing tone, towering arrogance, and unbearably-pompous writing style. I’ve...

Today we have music, China, head counts, terrorism, and telemarketers. Music I’ve had Ian Rogers’ Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses and Content vs. Context, a Presentation for Some Music Industry Friends open in a browser tab for weeks, looking for a chance to use this quote as evidence of enlightenment: I’m here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo!...

Well, it’s all over the news; we and NetApp are in court. Blecch. There is one interesting side-note in this dreary story, a first I suspect: NetApp’s CEO provided color commentary on his blog (no linkage from me to bloggers who are suing us). And then later on today, on our official PR blog, appears Sun response to NetApp lawsuit which says, more or less, “In yo face”. Now, I guess, it’s over to the......

Sun just announced a Patent Non-assert Covenant on OpenID; chapter and verse and FAQ here. Simon Phipps has a useful write-up. But what really impresses me is the text of the covenant itself; four short paragraphs of simple, almost jargon-free, English. Why can’t we do this more often? I’m told that our own Eduardo Gutentag gets the credit. [Ed. note: I’ve been asked a couple of times now why don’t do one of these for Atom, too. Good idea, I should have been working on it and I’ve been......

OK, I have to acknowledge that just possibly there are more than four words to be said on the eve of the war that Microsoft is (apparently) about to launch against the whole technology industry. Greg Papadopoulos considers the question Are Software Patents Useful? at some length, ending up at what feels like a sensible end-point. What really grabbed my eye, though, was our General Counsel Mike Dillon’s Cautiously Optimistic, which starts out with specifics about who’s suing us, the kind of territory that most lawyers won’t go near in public. Mike’s piece is about legal tactics and business realities, and I like it a lot. And I must admit that I’ve also emitted voluminous prose on the subject: see Patent Theory and Patents and Linux, both from 2004 but still relevant. Oh, and...

As usual, there isn’t a unifying theme. In this issue: lumpiness, stuff, microformats, eye candy, metaprogramming, beards, and psychology. Let’s start with Paul Kedrosky’s Building the Perfect Board Package, which quotes a “sales-guru colleague” as saying the following: “Lumpy is not a fact of life in enterprise sw companies - lumpy companies should never go public.” Jeepers, can that be right? I’ve never been in Oracle’s board-room, but enterprise SW traditionally has been one of the lumpiest businesses there is that doesn’t involve building nuclear power plants or Olympic facilities. While we’re on the subject of surprising things in Mr. K’s vicinity, he wrote a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed that concludes with “And Mr. Jobs knows that there is pretty much...

While I was tied up, Mr. Jobs stirred the intellectual-property business pot. Even after three days of discussion, there are things worth saying. First, while I don’t at all hate to say “I told you so”, I’ll contain my glee to the extent of not inserting links to the places where I did. The music biz may be pushing back but the end-game is obvious. Edgar Bronfman can bluster all he wants, but he’s swimming upstream. Second, Steve’s arithmetic is bogus. He calculates 22 iTMS songs per iPod on the basis that they’ve sold 90 million of them. Well, first of all, how many of those are still in use? Most people I know are on their second or third. Also, the 22 number is useless, whether it’s the mean or median. My feeling is that there’s a large number of people with...

The Times writes about the music labels toying with the idea of selling products without poison oops I meant DRM. Chris Anderson takes it further, arguing that the economics of music favor performance over recording. (I’m not sure about that, I still think selling recordings is a good business). Andrew Orlowski over at the Reg has a lengthy and instructive interview with music management maven Keith Harris covering related territory. But the future is already here. James Governor sent me a link to Tim Anderson writing about Linn Records, who are an interesting outfit. The other half of the company is Linn Audio, a successful and long-lived Scottish manufacturer of high-end audio equipment, generally regarded as very good by those who care about such things. I have a Linn pre-amp...

Nick Carr’s excellent Curtains for music DRM? is an explanation, simple enough to be understood even by a music-biz exec (at least the brighter ones like those at EMI) as to why this whole notion of selling DRM’ed bits, then trying to reach into your customers’ computers to micromanage their use, is just too stupid to live. Cory Doctorow and I and other people have been banging this drum for years, but Carr has captured the essence, in business-friendly language, in eight short......

Simon Phipps pointed me at Protest the Microsoft-Novell Patent Agreement, saying “The emotion is remarkable”, and he’s right, it is. The more I thought about that deal the less I worried about it. Sure, software patents being what they are, GNU/Linux, like every nontrivial chunk of code, doubtless infringes lots. So who’s Microsoft gonna sue? Any large-scale Linux user is also a large-scale Microsoft customer; that would be bad for business. They could go after Red Hat or Canonical, but that’d end up hurting their customers, helping Sun, and anyhow you could no more squish Linux that way than you can squeeze water in your fist. “Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence” they say, and it’s true too; so maybe some Redmond strategist...

Unifying theme: none. Item: Excellent Rails-vs.-Django study, from Google. No axe to grind, apparently. No obvious winner, which is news given the Rails hype. Item: Dana Blankenhorn’s Means and ends in open source; very thought-provoking. My guess is that the immense licensing fees driving the bloated sales infrastructures at Oracle, SAP, and friends are small in relation to the whole software acquire/deploy/maintain monetary pie, so the size of the whole industry isn’t likely to change that much. Item: Irving Wladawsky-Berger, grand IBM technology poo-bah, speculates about the future of the 3-D Web in An Unusual Meeting. Speaking as one who’s made two concerted efforts to build a 3-D representation of the Web, I sure hope he’s right. Item: I can read Takashi’s cat’s...

Mary Jo Foley (who has been excellent recently, a must-read) reports that both Windows Vista and Office 2007 have a “Kill Switch”; if you can’t prove you’re properly licensed, the software turns itself off. Maybe I’m missing something, but this seems like complete batshit-looney territory. Let’s see, suppose I’m a black-hat profiteer sitting beyond the reach of Western law but with control over a few botnets. If I can get my hands on your Kill Switch, I’ll have a nice little extortion business, as in “Pay up or all your desktops will decide they’re unlicensed and turn off.” It’d work best in a sales-centric business near end-of-quarter. Another potential victim would be any government (or company even) that has a lot of enemies; they don’t want your money,...

You really have to snicker at YouTube trying to suppress tools that let you capture video to disk. Lessig is amusing on the subject. Uh, just in case there are one or two people in the universe who still don’t know: if you post video to YouTube (or to anywhere else on the Web), it can be captured and downloaded and it will be captured and downloaded and no lawyer in the world, however expensive and threatening, can stop this happening. Deal with......

Check out Jason Matusow’s Your Input Requested, on the reaction to the recent Microsoft-Novell deal. Jason notes the push-back and seems to be saying that some of it is reasonable and they’re willing to fine-tune. But there’s this one sentence that leaps off the screen at me: We are not interested in providing carte blanche clearance on patents to any commercial activity - that is a separate discussion to be had on a per-instance basis. Oh really. At one level that’s a tautology, but placed like this in the immediate context of the Novell deal, it’s more than a little threatening. It’s hard for me to imagine Microsoft firing a barrage of litigation, or even of royalty demands, at a bunch of Linux developers or integrators or packagers—that would be a nuclear first...

The Internet has been amazingly quiet about IBM’s litigation against Amazon. It feels to me like maybe the biggest Internet story of, well, maybe, ever. I haven’t gone and read the IBM patents yet, because reading patents always depresses me. If the titles mean anything (not always a sure bet), this might mean that IBM has finally managed to figure out how to set up that Internet Tollbooth that we’ve always been afraid of. If you’re interested in “Presenting Applications in an Interactive Service”, “Storing Data in an Interactive Network”, “Presenting Advertising in an Interactive Service”, “Adjusting Hypertext Links with Weighted User Goals and Activities”, or “Ordering Items Using an Electronic Catalogue”, apparently IBM thinks you need to pay them for...

Mark Pilgrim’s Waiting for the revolution has been rattling around the back of my brain the last few days. Mark argues, and his argument seems awfully coherent to me, that the “NonCommercial” option on Creative Commons is inconsistent with being an Open-Source partisan. I wonder if I’m weird, because I discover that my attitudes towards code and, non-code are different. The notion of restricting anyone from using code I contribute to feels entirely foreign, and if they want to use it to make some money, good on ’em. But I have strong negative feelings about other people making money from my words or pictures without involving me. (Not that I or anyone else have actually made any real direct money from ongoing fodder.) In the time that ongoing has been on the air, I’ve...

Sometimes we make progress. Way last year, I got email from Norbert Lindenberg, grousing about the Terms of Use on Java.net; they were full of scary language about how you and your employer had to indemnify Sun and “its business partners” against anything bad that might happen with any connection to anything you did, and about how you were signing up for the similarly-scary sun.com terms of use. So I went poking around and asked the Java.net people why they sounded unfriendly, and they said, “Hmm, let’s talk to the lawyers”, who said, more or less, “If there are good business reasons to relax this a little, well OK then.” It turns out we’re partnering on this stuff with O’Reilly and CollabNet, so there were a lot of moving parts involved; a whole bunch of people had......

I’m talking about the Canadian Music Creators Coalition, which includes quite a few of our better-known pop musicians (disappointingly, quite a few of them are missing, too), and whose manifesto includes refreshingly-sane statements like “Suing Our Fans is Destructive and Hypocritical” and “Digital Locks are Risky and Counterproductive”. Exactly. Let’s see some more names on that......

Hey, here’s this week’s first juicy DRM-bashing opportunity. At a conference in London, Microsoft’s Amir Majidimehr helpfully explained the goals of their DRM strategy: “We don’t want this technology to be available to every hobbyist. We need to keep the number of licensees down to a manageable number. We charge a license fee to keep the number of people we have to deal with down to a level we can handle.” Now, there’s a damn fine way to build a nice, disciplined business. Wouldn’t want any of those nasty entrepreneurs stirring things up, would we? There’s more at Boing Boing....

A week without some DRM fightback is like a week without sunshine, which we’ve just had seven or eight of here in Vancouver, so let’s load up and blaze away. First, Simon Phipps has a really first-rate rant; he starts by building a really good metaphor on the Paris and Nürnberg subway systems, and goes from there. Second, grounds for hope: this EFF report from Washington covers what happens when the lawmakers actually encounter DRM themselves. Let me put it this way: the timeframe available to the DRM banditos to get their abusive laws passed is growing shorter and......

The GNU Public License is an important piece of our infrastructure these days, so I read Simon Phipps’ report with interest, and decided I should give the V3 draft a good close read. Unfortunately, while the text may be sensible, the HTML is an unreadable stinking heap of Plone dung; I attempted to print out a human-usable version and the results were unprintable. So I cleaned it up by hand, inserted a tiny bit of minimal styling to make it a bit more human readable, made sure it was validated, and here it is: GPL3 Draft of January 2006. [Update: On Simon Phipps’ suggestion, I equipped the draft with purple pilcrows, so each paragraph has its own......