Cloud Computing, open source, and business models

From a comment on the Slashdot discussion of Stanford Teaching MBAs How To Fight Open Source:

resistence is futile

unless your product is targeted at such a small subset of users that noone in the OSS world would bother to create a competing product there will always be some geek out there willing to dedicate all their spare time to create something that will compete with your product... for free. What proprietry vendors need to do is charging for software as a service and provide support packages that the OSS world don't bother to do.

In a world of Software as a Service and Cloud Computing, where the developer charges for the initial work and usage, the role of intellectual property in guaranteeing a return on investment will diminish.

Great moments in records management

Hired through WorkforceLogic USA, he claims to have come up with the idea and presented it on an internal Google Groups e-mail discussion group.

In a lawsuit filed on Wednesday in Atlanta's Northern District Court of Georgia, a former Google (NSDQ: GOOG) contract worker claims that Google stole his idea for Google Sky.

Google Sky is a feature that was added to the Google Earth application last August that lets users navigate through stars and galaxies.

Plaintiff Jonathan Cobb claims that starting in 2006, as a contractor hired through WorkforceLogic USA, he convened an internal Google Groups e-mail discussion group wherein he "presented, advanced, and refined the Google Sky concept and idea."

Obviously I have no opinion on the merits of the case; it depends on the terms of his contract. Clearly we will see more of this sort of litigation until the legal status of contract workers is better defined. I would just note the crucial role email will clearly play in this case.

Email, every case seems to come down to email

The murky world of pay TV pirates

If few remarked on Adams’s departure in May 2002 during the hullabaloo, no one noticed a minor incident involving his vehicle. According to NDS, someone broke into the family car that month and stole the hard drive from his laptop. The hard drive contained some 26,000 pages of confidential NDS documents, including hundreds of pages of internal NDS emails detailing the activities of its covert operations group.

In a global hunt to retrieve the documents, NDS lawyers appeared in a Vancouver court last September, where they claimed the hard drive had been obtained by Plamen Donev, a Bulgarian hacker who had been on the NDS payroll. He had passed copies of the documents to Canadian satellite pirates on two CDs.

The Vancouver hearing was just an outlying skirmish related to a much larger case due to go to trial in April in the California District Court, where EchoStar (and its smartcard provider, NagraStar Corp) is claiming $US1 billion damages against NDS for industrial espionage in a trial.

The EchoStar lawsuit quotes extensively from an explosive series of NDS emails that NDS says came from the missing hard drive. EchoStar says it obtained the emails from a range of sources.

The issue of source seems beside the point. The bottom line is that on NDS’s own account, the innermost secrets of its undercover ops are on CDs being hawked around the world in a boxed set.

Department of what are you talking about?

Public Knowledge has a post about a proposed law that will increase penalties for copyright violations ('cause suing their customers is working so well for industry). What is the name of the law? Which committee is considering the law? What is the current status? The post does not say, nor does it provide links.

It is called the "Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (“PRO IP”) Act of 2007", and Slashdot has a vigorous discussion about the act.

When you are an expert and talk about an issue all the time it is easy to forget that most people do not have the basic information. One of the strengths of blogging as a medium is that you can write for your fellow expert and provide links for those who need additional information.

Do you have a policy on code reuse?

How Mainstream Can Code Scavenging Go?

How to Deal With Stolen Code?

Have a policy, communicate your policy in a clear, but low key way. Deal with violations in a low profile way.

The public relations of patent litigation

This morning I attended NVTC’s fascinating panel discussion on Verizon vs Vonage. John Kohlenberger of the Voice On the Net coalition had the two full page advertisements Vonage had placed, one in the New York Times, and one in the Wall Street Journal.

Why those papers? All the decision makers they need to influence: Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the FCC, FTC, USPTO, etc., are all located in greater Washington. Surely a full page advertisement in the Washington Post would have been more to the purpose.

Why confine your advertising to traditional media? VON’s most likely allies are on the Web. Why not use Blogads?

Patenting the wisdom of mobs

Open Call From the Patent Office

The government is about to start opening up the process of reviewing patents to the modern font of wisdom: the Internet.

The Patent and Trademark Office is starting a pilot project that will not only post patent applications on the Web and invite comments but also use a community rating system designed to push the most respected comments to the top of the file, for serious consideration by the agency's examiners. A first for the federal government, the system resembles the one used by Wikipedia, the popular user-created online encyclopedia. ...

... Last year, the agency's 4,000 examiners, headquartered in Alexandria, completed a record 332,000 applications. The tremendous workload has often left examiners with little time to conduct thorough reviews, according to sympathetic critics.

Under the pilot project, some companies submitting patent applications will agree to have them reviewed via the Internet. The list of volunteers already contains some of the most prominent names in computing, including Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, as well as IBM, though other applicants are welcome. ...

... "I'm sure there will be a degree of gaming. There always is," Kappos said.

To say the least. Still, this is a very encouraging development.

Edit -
I have a further thought on how to use the wiki on For Immediate Release.

Studios, FBI Teach Swedish Cops to Hunt File Sharers

Daniel Goldberg, Computer Sweden

The FBI and the MPAA, with the Swedish antipiracy organization Antipiratbyren, are training Swedish law enforcement officers in copyright and piracy matters.

So the FBI is content to play enforcer for a trade association and the Swedish government is going along with it? Not what you would call citizen centric is it?

NewsCorp, MySpace, YouTube, redux

MySpace Shakes Up Social Media: Hot Site Unveils Piracy-Blocking Technology—Which Turns Up the Heat on YouTube

Fox' MySpace Violates Net Neutrality

Lesson for Murdoch: Keep the Bloggers Happy