Posts tagged #legal

I came across this fascinating piece by Adrian Colyer — Applying the Universal Scalability Law to organisations — and it genuinely reframed how I think about both technical systems and leadership. The core idea is that the Universal Scalability Law, typically used to model the throughput and latency of distributed systems, maps surprisingly well onto the dynamics of growing organisations. Colyer draws out four practical lessons for leaders: delegate ruthlessly, minimise the number of stakeholders involved in any given decision, be brutal about limiting how many things you work on concurrently, and ...

Very interesting review of github copilot, open source and the law. The

GitHub Copilot investigation · Joseph Saveri Law Firm & Matthew Butterick –Very interesting review of github copilot, open source and the law.

I came across a wonderful quote about intellectual property. I am not sure I agree with it myself but wanted to share it. It is from Carsie Blanton’s blog post “New Rules for the Music Business” and it goes like this:

““Intellectual property” is an absurd concept that only a society of clueless, museless marketers could possibly conceive of. It’s an idea that serves markets, cripples muses, and is willfully ignorant of all of human history.

We are stealing from one another constantly and shamelessly, and that’s a blessed and beautiful thing. Every folk song is a mashup of all previous folk songs. Every film stands on the shoulders of all other films. Every ...

A fascinating although quite long article by Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair. Michael Lewis is an amazing non-fiction writer, best known to me for Moneyball (about baseball) and Liars Poker (about Wall Street.)

Michael Lewis: Did Goldman Sachs Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer? | Vanity Fair:

A month after ace programmer Sergey Aleynikov left Goldman Sachs, he was arrested. Exactly what he’d done neither the F.B.I., which interrogated him, nor the jury, which convicted him a year later, seemed to understand. But Goldman had accused him of stealing computer code, and the 41-year-old father of three was sentenced to eight years in federal prison. Investigating Aleynikov’s case, Michael Lewis holds a second trial.

In the continuing stories around Aaron Swartz and events that led to his tragic suicide recently:

“Many people speculated throughout the whole ordeal that this was a political prosecution, motivated by anything/everything from Aaron’s effective campaigning against SOPA to his run-ins with the FBI over the PACER database. But Aaron actually didn’t believe it was — he thought it was overreach by some local prosecutors who didn’t really understand the internet and just saw him as a high-profile scalp they could claim, facilitated by a criminal justice system and computer crime laws specifically designed to give prosecutors, however incompetent or malicious, all the wrong incentives and all the power they could ever want.” (fromTarenSK)

An interesting view on patents from Judge Posner:

“In Posner’s view, many patents are unnecessary. Patents, he believes, are important for drug companies that spend hundreds of millions of dollars bringing a new drug to market — a drug that can easily be copied by a competitor. Without the protection that a patent affords, pharmaceutical companies would have far less incentive to come up with new drugs.” (from New York Times)

In another article that discussed Posner’s view on patents: “Why there are too many patents in America” (from The Atlantic)

If you are in the tech community you’ve likely heard that Aaron Swartz committed suicide yesterday in New York. I didn’t know him but I was in the same room with him, at conferences or conversations a few times about 10 years ago. I certainly knew of him.

I’ve read many things about him in the last 24 hours. Here are some of the ones that spoke to me the most:

RIP Aaron Swartz

The Truth about Aaron Swartz’s Crime

Prosecutor as bully

Processing the loss of Aaron Swartz

I was rather proud of the art I designed for a t-shirt this summer. It’s cool but of course it’s a direct ripoff, um, no, I mean, it was inspired by a well known piece. If I show you my design, below:

You will immediately see the resemblance. You might say, oh that was on a postage stamp:

Or you might say, oh, that was a New York City thing. But you would be remembering wrong:

...

Lucky Me! After tortured litigation and lots of legal fees (not mine, of course), I am receiving a check for $0.47 as my payout for the litigation between Hanson and Google.

What, never heard of Hanson? Well apparently the law suit was about Google doing something wrong in how the charged or paid for Google Adwords. Which I think I might have used a little some long time ago.

But really, how does it make sense to pay out 47 cents? I am sure the lawyers (for both sides) are laughing all the way to the bank!

This article gives a fascinating perspective on the disconnect between what they teach in law school and what knowledge is required to actually be an effective lawyer. Some great facts from the article:

“Last year, a survey by American Lawyer found that 47 percent of law firms had a client say, in effect, “We don’t want to see the names of first- or second-year associates on our bills.” Other clients are demanding that law firms charge flat fees.”

…and …

““Law school has a kind of intellectual inferiority complex, and it’s built into the idea of law school itself,” says W. Bradley Wendel of ...

I am not dead set against software patents, although I’ve been on both sides of the issue.

I am the proud inventor listed on 3 or 4 patents. Some are more worthy in my opinion that others. I was also leading a development team that had to stand on its head to avoid conflicting with a patent that everyone agreed should never have issued, but we didn’t have the nerve or resources to contest.

So I was interested to see some behind the veil of “Intellectual Ventures”, Nathan Myhrvold’s IP/Patent company:

“…But IV is not buying inventions. It’s buying patents. And most software engineers will tell you, at least when it comes to software, a patent and an invention are not the same. Lots of patents cover things that people who write software for a living wouldn’t consider inventions at all… (from When Patents Attack)

An interesting commentary on a couple of patents that issued from the US Patent Office:

“The US patent office no longer grants patents on perpetual motion machines, but has recently granted at least two patents on a mathematically impossible process: compression of truly random data” (from Gailly.net)

Also you might be interested in the topic, there’s a second patent that seems also to be fatally flawed — ...

Check out The Flawed Legal Architecture of the Certificate Authority Trust Model(from Freedom to Tinker: ** "The bottom line is that the CA Trust Model’s legal architecture inures to the benefit of no one. Neither website operators, certificate authorities, nor end-users can be sure of their rights or exposure. The Model’s legal structure may therefore be just as troubling as its security vulnerabilities." (from: **The Flawed Legal Architecture of the Certificate Authority Trust Model)

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Check out Targeted Copyright Enforcement: Deterring Many Users with a Few Lawsuits(from Freedom to Tinker: “One reason the record industry’s strategy of suing online infringers ran into trouble is that there are too many infringers to sue. If the industry can only sue a tiny fraction of infringers, then any individual infringer will know that he is very unlikely to be sued, and deterrence will fail.” (from: ...

Interesting commentary on a new book by Harvey Silvergate called “Three Felonies a Day”. The article also touches on the notion that “Under the English common law that we inherited, a crime requires intent.”, saying: “Sometimes legislators know when they make false distinctions based on technology. An “anti-cyberbullying” proposal is making its way through Congress, prompted by the tragic case of a 13-year-old girl driven to suicide by the mother of a neighbor posing as a teenage boy and posting abusive messages on MySpace. The law would prohibit using the Internet to “coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person.” Imagine a law that tried to apply this control of speech to letters, editorials or lobbying” (from Wall Street Journal)

Recently of course, because of the ‘torture memos’, the topic is all over the papers and cable ‘news’ programs. It’s brought back to mind a discussion that was raging hot and heavy, starting back in 2001, about the idea of allowing the issuance of ‘Torture Warrants‘. Alan Dershowitz, famous Harvard Law Professor first espoused that in 2001 (as best I can determine) in this article in the LA Times. If you search google you will see lots of ...

This New York Times article, “What’s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer” is pretty interesting, and makes sense at some level: “Judges and jurors who must decide whether sexually explicit material is obscene are asked to use a local yardstick: does the material violate community standards?” (from “What’s Obcene?”)

and then:

...

I’m not trying to start anything. I just thought this was amusing. Two totally different business books, published years apart, with practically the same cover. Funny?

Regular readers of this blog know about AllOfMp3.com, a Russian music site that sells music of all kinds for a ridiculously low price. It’s kind of like the iTunes or EMusic store, but at a fraction of the price. Every so often there is news that they are about to be shut down because they are fraudulently selling copyrighted music. They say that what they are doing is strictly legal by Russian law.

I don’t know who is right. But as they say, “If it seems too good to be true, then it probably isn’t true…”

Anyway, from time to time their ability to be paid via credit card (like Visa etc.) is disabled....

A bit of a debate is developing regarding Microsoft’s recent patent for (and here’s where the editorializing starts) "RSS". It’s only a slightly interesting question which is why I won’t pursue it, save to say that patents are very technical and narrow so it’s easy to jump to the wrong conclusion about them when reading them only superficially.

At any rate if there’s any beef to be had, IMHO, it’s with the Patent Law and the Patent Office, not with Microsoft.

Check out this post from ...

From ZDNet: Federal judge orders halt to NSA spy program | Tech News on ZDNet “The warrantless Internet and telephone surveillance program authorized by the Bush administration violates the U.S. Constitution and must cease immediately, a federal judge ruled Thursday.”

I was probably the last one to hear about AllofMp3.com. It’s this massive, well organized and apparently solid Mp3 download site. Music is not free, but extremely cheap. It’s apparently hosted in Russia or somewhere else.

The question is of course, “is it legal” and “is it ethical”? Friends of mine who’ve known about it for years (claim to) never use it. I have to say it gives me pause to download the whole “Tapestry” Album (Carole King, from the Jurasic Period) for something like $1.50. Ridonculous.

There apparently have been lawsuits trying to shut down the site. Just today I there’s talk about another one: “...

From the Wall Street Journal: (subscription required)

“Research In Motion Ltd. agreed to pay $612.5 million to settle its long-running legal dispute with patent firm NTP Inc., according to NTP lawyer Jim Wallace.”

I know that this blog (Power Line) is pretty hard-core conservative, but I found their analysis of the legal questions around the NSA electronic intercept program fairly convincing.

“The only constitutional limitation on the President’s power to intercept communications by Americans for national security purposes is that such intercepts be “reasonable.”

Is it reasonable for the administration to do all it can to identify the people who are communicating with known terrorists overseas, via the terrorists’ cell phones and computers, and to learn what terrorist plots are being hatched by those persons? Is it reasonable to do so even wh...

Peter Moldave, a friend of mine who has helped me immensely with BlogBridge has (gulp) started blogging! Yup, another one bites the dust 🙂

Peter is a lawyer (at Gesmer Updegrove LLP), expert in intellectual property, patents, licensing, open source, and other legal matters of great interest to us computer folk.

He also has a comprehensive site on all matters relating to open source, Check out his site and blog, it’s very informative!

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, opensource

Aren’t you glad, since every other blogger is blah-blah-blah’ing about it? But here is a linkwith some really insightful posts about it.

I just came off listening to Dan Bricklin’s first podcast, an interview with Linda Hamel of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts about patents, intellectual property and open source. Quite interesting info. I am looking forward to listening to the other ones.

One link, right off the bat is to Linda Hamel’s own web site with lots of interesting resources about Open Source licensing in the public arena.

Particularly cool isthis huge Excel chart doing a comparison of all the multitude of open source licenses.

Technorati Tags: opensource, legal

Doc comments with grudging admirationthat IBM has decided to give away some parts of their much vaunted patent portfolio. One interesting tidbit is that in addition to being responsible for the most patents granted annually, IBM is also the leader in the most patents allowed to expire annually.

Why? Because keeping all those patents current is very costly, and if there is no economic benefit to having those patents, that’s a lot of money down the shute.

So maybe some clever strategist/marketer (difference?) probably realized that the PR value of open sourcing these worthless patents might actually be the most valuable of all!

The demos at this year’s DEMO are quite good. One interesting thing I noticed is that there are several productsconnected to keeping companies out of legal trouble due to problematic internal and external emails, or to help get them out of trouble if they get into it. In several demos we were treated to examples based on the “Enron internal emails.” The first two times I thought I was seeing a coincidental picking of the same humor by two seperate companies.

But when it came up again, I went searching, and wouldn’t you know that during the discovery process of the whole Enron ...

This puzzled me. Once we released the BlogBridgesource code under the LGPL, it was out in the open, and published to the world. Had we forfeited the right to change the license? The answer depends on who owns and holds the Copyright to the code. As it is, all the code was either personally written by me (90%) or written by others who have agreed to transfer ownership to me. In other words, I hold a clear copyright to all the code, and that is the key. This makes it legitimate and legal to reissue the same source code under a new license.

What existed before (i.e. everything up to 0.5.3) under LGPLwill ...

I’ve done a little research about what the Open Source really means, legally, when it comes to BlogBridge. I wrote about this question a few months ago, and now, having consulted with people who know, here’s an update. First of all, start with the goals.

BlogBridge should be available, in source code form and executable form to everyone who wants to look at it and use it. It should be a bona fida open source project. Reasoning: We will be able to recruit others to help us build it; It is a significant differentiator among the other blog readers out there; And we can legitimately use services such as Source Forge to manage the project and its source code. If ...

As I continue to make rapid progress on BlogBridge, now with a significant amount of help, I am asking myself some tricky questions about licensing, which I thought I’d try out here. (By the way, BlogBridge is the blog reader that I’ve been working on and which is soon going to be available in beta form.)

BlogBridge is an open source application. The source code is all available on www.sourceforge.netfor any and all to look at and play with. It’s open source also because of the license that you’ll see in each source file, the so-called “...

One of the reason that society needs people to transact with each other using real identities, maybe, is that in the end, virtual digital persona can’t own and transfer ownership. I can’t buy or sell or trade with a virtual digital persona. Corporations in fact are virtual people in some sense, and indeed they are legally regulated much like people are. Maybe in the future the law will expand to allow my virtual identity to own and transact separately from me, with it’s own ‘social security number’, the ability to have a checking account, to own property and generate income. But for that to happen it would seem to me that the law would have to catch up and regulate digital personas as a third actor along with natural people and corporate-like entities.