An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Muse Group -- owner of the popular audio-editing app Audacity -- is in hot water with the open source community again. This time, the controversy isn't over Audacity -- it's about MuseScore, an open source application that allows musicians to create, share, and download musical scores (especially, but not only, in the form of sheet music). The MuseScore app itself is licensed GPLv3, which gives developers the right to fork its source and modify it. One such developer, Wenzheng Tang ("Xmader" on GitHub) went considerably further than modifying the app -- he also created separate apps designed to bypass MuseScore Pro subscription fees. After thoroughly reviewing the public comments made by both sides at GitHub, Ars spoke at length with Muse Group Head of Strategy Daniel Ray -- known on GitHub by the moniker "workedintheory" -- to get to the bottom of the controversy.

While Xmader did, in fact, fork MuseScore, that's not the root of the controversy. Xmader forked MuseScore in November 2020 and appears to have abandoned that fork entirely; it only has six commits total -- all trivial, and all made the same week that the fork was created. Xmader is also currently 21,710 commits behind the original MuseScore project repository. Muse Group's beef with Xmader comes from two other repositories, created specifically to bypass subscription fees. Those repositories are musescore-downloader (created November 2019) and musescore-dataset (created March 2020). Musescore-downloader describes itself succinctly: "download sheet music from musescore.com for free, no login or MuseScore Pro required." Musescore-dataset is nearly as straightforward: it declares itself "the unofficial dataset of all music sheets and users on musescore.com." In simpler terms: musescore-downloader lets you download things from musescore.com that you shouldn't be able to; musescore-dataset is those files themselves, already downloaded. For scores that are in the public domain or that users have uploaded under Creative Commons licenses, this isn't necessarily a problem. But many of the scores are only available by arrangement between the score owner and Muse Group itself -- and this has several important implications.

Just because you can access the score via the app or website doesn't mean you're free to access it anywhere, anyhow, or redistribute that score yourself. The distribution agreement between Muse Group and the rightsholder allows legitimate downloads, but only when using the site or app as intended. Those agreements do not give users carte blanche to bypass controls imposed on those downloads. Further, those downloads can often cost the distributor real money -- a free download of a score licensed to Muse Group by a commercial rightsholder (e.g., Disney) is generally not "free" to Muse Group itself. The site has to pay for the right to distribute that score -- in many cases, based on the number of downloads made. Bypassing those controls leaves Muse Group on the hook either for costs it has no way to monetize (e.g., by ads for free users) or for violating its own distribution agreements with rightsholders (by failing to properly track downloads).

As Axios reports, a company called playerWON (kill me), described as "a first-of-its-kind in-game advertising platform" (bring me back then kill me again), has signed deals with companies like EA and Hi-Rez (Smite) to try to bring TV-style commercials to their console games. Kotaku reports: Having tested this tech for over a year, they feel like it's now ready to be implemented, the idea being rather than just beaming videos to them in the middle of a game, players would be able to view an ad then, when servers detected the commercial had been viewed in its entirety, "release rewards to the player." This tech would be licensed out to developers so it could be implemented in the game itself (unlike the ads we already see on consoles, in places like system menu screens), and they're trying to justify it by saying that because young people are "cord-cutters," they're unreachable via traditional, cheaper marketing, and are only being reached by branded content deals (like the sneakers and clothes in NBA 2K, or cup noodles in Final Fantasy).

Testing has been taking place inside Smite for around a year, and the findings are as awful as you're probably expecting: "Data from one of Simulmedia's pilot campaigns with Smite, a F2P multiplayer battle arena game from Tencent's Hi-Rez Studios, shows that players were much more likely (22%) to play a game and spend money within the game (11%), if they watched in-game ads that gave them access to more gaming perks." As a result, playerWON "plans to launch in-game ads in roughly a dozen more games by the year's end."

"Even as IBM has sued an increasing number of companies, its IP income has shrunk," reports Bloomberg: Intellectual property rights historically brought in more than $1 billion a year, on average, helping offset massive research and development costs and shrinking revenue. Last year, IBM's income from intellectual property was $626 million, its lowest point since 1996, and 2019 wasn't much higher. While it continues to secure license deals, they are fewer and harder-won, with companies like Airbnb Inc. and Chewy Inc. waging battles in court...

In February, online pet-food seller Chewy requested a court order to block a $36 million patent fee IBM is demanding. Chewy accused IBM of "seeking exorbitant licensing fees for early internet patents having no value." IBM's claims against Chewy include years-old inventions such as targeted advertising and content resizing based on cursor activity, both ubiquitous on the web. Chewy said IBM doesn't make or sell products covered by the vast majority of the thousands of patents it has received over the past 20 years, but instead just threatens to sue if companies don't agree to pay for licenses. IBM has not answered Chewy's complaint, and no trial date has been set.

Companies that use their IP licensing aggressively as a way to make money are often referred to as patent trolls. However, IBM's position as the largest aggregator of U.S. intellectual property is more akin to being a patent godfather, says Robin Feldman, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings. With more than 38,000 active patents in its portfolio, and thousands of license agreements bolstering its legitimacy, IBM's demands have traditionally gone unchallenged, Feldman said. Such patent godfathers, with large portfolios, are "able to make offers that can't be refused." Even some of the most innovative technology giants have licensed IBM patents over the years. Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Amazon.com Inc. and LinkedIn are among countless companies that have had to pony up.

IBM also has long served as a patent bank for young companies to jump-start their portfolios. Facebook Inc. was not yet public in 2012 when it bought 750 patents on software and networking from IBM. As Instacart Inc. prepares to go public, it purchased almost 300 IBM patents in January ranging from e-commerce to smart shopping bags.
Noting a series of Supreme Court verdicts making it easier to invalidate a patent, Feldman, the law professor, told Bloomberg that "Being the godfather isn't what it used to be. It's not that patent aggregation as a business is over. You just make less money."

Massive blackouts and smog have hit cities across Iran. It's a toxic mix as the country, already under economic duress and suffocating U.S. sanctions, simultaneously battles the region's worst coronavirus outbreak. Blackouts are not new in Iran, where an aging and subsidized electricity sector is plagued by alleged mismanagement. But this time, government officials say that bitcoin mining at cryptocurrency farms -- the energy-intensive business of using large collections of computers to verify digital coin transactions -- is partly to blame. From a report: Iran's state-owned electricity firm Tavanir announced Wednesday that it had shut down a large Chinese-Iranian-run cybercurrency center in the southeastern province of Kerman because of its heavy energy consumption. The company reportedly was licensed to operate under a process the government had put in place to regulate the industry. Alongside pointing a finger at legal operations, Iranian officials have specifically singled out illegal cryptocurrency miners as a strain on the electricity grid spurring outages, Mostafa Rajabi Mashhadi, a spokesperson for the electricity industry at Iran's energy ministry, told the IRNA state-run news agency. On Wednesday, Ali Vaezi, a spokesperson for Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, said the government would be investigating cases of unlicensed cryptocurrency farms. But Iranians in the bitcoin industry reject the government's accusations, saying the industry is being blamed for a broader problem. "The miners have nothing to do with the blackouts," Ziya Sadr, a cryptocurrency researcher in Tehran, told The Washington Post. "Mining is a very small percentage of the overall electricity capacity in Iran."

Co-founder and ex-president of Arm Holdings Tudor Brown says that SoftBank's projected sale of the chip company to Nvidia is the result of a bungled business strategy that saw the fund throw too much money at Arm and prioritize the wrong business areas. NS Tech reports: "In my opinion, they put too much money into it, spent money on things that clearly -- in my opinion -- weren't going make money in the short term, and now, suddenly, they're saying, 'Oh, dear me, this company isn't performing very well,'" says Brown. He added that "[SoftBank] invested too heavily [...], threw too much money at it and haven't got a good return as a result."

Brown laments the potential purchase, saying that it would fundamentally clash with Arm's underlying business model. Because the firm designs technology that is sold or licensed to a great number of companies, Arm's business model requires it remaining on good terms with "an unholy clan of competitors," according to Brown. Brown says Nvidia or any other semiconductor company owning Arm is "immediately going to upset that balance and make it very, very difficult for other companies to feel that they have equal access to the technology." Brown says he can't imagine why a company would want to buy Arm if it wasn't seeking to give itself an unfair advantage such as "early access" or to "deprive the other guys from having whatever innovations were to take place." Another Arm co-founder, Hermann Hauser, told the BBC that the UK government should intervene to help the firm go public and remain an independent British company.

The World Health Organization has now halted research on whether hydroxychloroquine could be an effective treatment for COVID-19, reports NBC News, after multiple studies showed the drug "has no impact on the coronavirus."

But now that America's Food and Drug Administration has revoked permission for using it to treat coronavirus patients, CNN reports that the U.S. government "is stuck with 63 million doses of hydroxychloroquine." The government started stockpiling donated hydroxychloroquine in late March, after President Trump touted it as "very encouraging" and "very powerful" and a "game-changer." But Monday, the FDA revoked its emergency use authorization to use the drug to treat Covid-19, saying there was "no reason to believe" the drug was effective against the virus, and that it increased the risk of side effects, including heart problems... [M]any infectious disease experts, including those who've studied the drug for coronavirus, say there was never any evidence that the drug worked for the virus.
And some of America's states are now also stuck with millions of hydroxychloroquine pills which they're no longer allowed to use to treat COVID-19, reports The Columbus Dispatch: The state of Ohio purchased more than 2 million hydroxychloroquine pills for $602,629 on April 9, Melanie Amato, spokeswoman for the Department of Health, said via email. [And an additional 2 million were donated by an Ohio-based drugmaker...] The FDA change leaves the Ohio Department of Health with more than 4 million pills, which Amato said have a shelf life of about 18 to 24 months... [T]he state can give the drug only to facilities licensed to maintain dangerous prescription drugs...

Utah purchased $800,000 worth of the drug and Oklahoma spent $2 million on it...

A spokeswoman for Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, a Glenford Republican, called the state Health Department's purchase of hydroxychloroquine "a waste of money."

Newly-elected politicians in Munich "have decided its administration needs to use open-source software, instead of proprietary products like Microsoft Office," reports ZDNet: "Where it is technologically and financially possible, the city will put emphasis on open standards and free open-source licensed software," a new coalition agreement negotiated between the recently elected Green party and the Social Democrats says. The agreement was finalized May 10 and the parties will be in power until 2026. "We will adhere to the principle of 'public money, public code'. That means that as long as there is no confidential or personal data involved, the source code of the city's software will also be made public," the agreement states...

Munich began the move away from proprietary software at the end of 2006... By 2013, 80% of desktops in the city's administration were meant to be running LiMux software. In reality, the council continued to run the two systems — Microsoft and LiMux — side by side for several years to deal with compatibility issues. As the result of a change in the city's government, a controversial decision was made in 2017 to leave LiMux and move back to Microsoft by 2020. At the time, critics of the decision blamed the mayor and deputy mayor and cast a suspicious eye on the US software giant's decision to move its headquarters to Munich. In interviews, a former Munich mayor, under whose administration the LiMux program began, has been candid about the efforts Microsoft went to to retain their contract with the city.

The migration back to Microsoft and to other proprietary software makers like Oracle and SAP, costing an estimated €86.1m ($93.1m), is still in progress today.

"We're very happy that they're taking on the points in the 'Public Money, Public Code' campaign we started two and a half years ago," Alex Sander, EU public policy manager at the Berlin-based Free Software Foundation Europe, tells ZDNet. But it's also important to note that this is just a statement in a coalition agreement outlining future plans, he says. "Nothing will change from one day to the next, and we wouldn't expect it to," Sander continued, noting that the city would also be waiting for ongoing software contracts to expire. "But the next time there is a new contract, we believe it should involve free software."

In a landmark acknowledgment of the toll that content moderation takes on its workforce, Facebook has agreed to pay $52 million to current and former moderators to compensate them for mental health issues developed on the job. The Verge reports: In a preliminary settlement filed on Friday in San Mateo Superior Court, the social network agreed to pay damages to American moderators and provide more counseling to them while they work. Each moderator will receive a minimum of $1,000 and will be eligible for additional compensation if they are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder or related conditions. The settlement covers 11,250 moderators, and lawyers in the case believe that as many as half of them may be eligible for extra pay related to mental health issues associated with their time working for Facebook, including depression and addiction.

Under the terms of the settlement, every moderator will receive $1,000 that can be spent however they like. But the companies intend for the money to be spent partly on medical treatment, covering the costs associated with seeking a diagnosis related to any mental health issues the moderator may be suffering. The amount of money a moderator will receive beyond the initial $1,000 will depend on their diagnosis. Anyone who is diagnosed with a mental health condition is eligible for an additional $1,500, and people who receive multiple concurrent diagnoses -- PTSD and depression, for example -- could be eligible for up to $6,000. In addition to payment for treatment, moderators with a qualifying diagnosis will be eligible to submit evidence of other injuries they suffered for their time at Facebook and could receive up to $50,000 in damages. The exact amount of the payout depends on how many members of the class apply for benefits, and it could shrink significantly if the majority of the class is found to be eligible for benefits. In the settlement, Facebook also agreed to roll out changes to its content moderation tools, such as muting audio by default and changing videos to black and white. These tools will be rolled out to 80 percent of moderators by the end of this year and 100 percent of moderators by 2021.

Additionally, "Moderators who view graphic and disturbing content on a daily basis will also get access to weekly, one-on-one coaching sessions with a licensed mental health professional," the report says. "Workers who are experiencing a mental health crisis will get access to a licensed counselor within 24 hours, and Facebook will also make monthly group therapy sessions available to moderators." Moderators working in California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida from 2015 until now are covered by this settlement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The billionaire behind six-month-old Vietnamese auto startup VinFast plans a feat even Toyota and Hyundai couldn't pull off during their early days: sell a car in the U.S. Pham Nhat Vuong, the Southeast Asian country's richest man and now in charge of the new automaker, is so intent on exporting electric vehicles to the lucrative American market in 2021 that he's plowing as much as $2 billion of his own fortune to reach that goal. His cash would account for half the capital investment of VinFast, which began delivering cars to Vietnamese consumers with BMW-licensed engines earlier this year and aims to expand into electric vehicles.

"Our ultimate goal is to create an international brand," the 51-year-old tycoon said in an interview at the Hanoi headquarters of the car company's parent Vingroup JSC, which Vuong founded and holds the title of chairman. "It will be a very difficult road and we will have to put in a lot of effort. But there's only one road ahead." [...] The tycoon, whose net worth is $9.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, is undaunted. He sold some of his shares in Vingroup last year and plans to sell as much as 10% more to raise funds for the ambitious project. He owns 49% of VinFast, while the parent, Vingroup, holds 51%. [...] VinFast's first EV won't roll off its assembly line until late next year, but Vuong said he plans to export those vehicles to the U.S., Europe and Russia in 2021. VinFast, which operates a 335-hectare factory in the northern port city of Haiphong, is selling its first line of vehicles -- a hatchback, sedan and SUV -- at below cost. The hatchback retails for the equivalent of $17,000, while the four-cylinder sedan goes for $47,400 and its SUV is offered at $60,400. The company targets production of as many as 500,000 vehicles a year by 2025.

Would you pay $1 million and fly to South America for a chance to live longer? From a report: Libella Gene Therapeutics, a Kansas-based company that says it is developing a gene therapy that can reverse aging by up to 20 years, is hoping your answer is yes. In an interview with OneZero, the company says it is ready to give an experimental anti-aging therapy to older people at a clinic north of Bogota, Colombia. But that's not all -- it's also charging people $1 million to participate. Scientists and ethicists say the company's experiment is not only dubious but it also raises concerns about how anti-aging treatments should be tested in people. The aim of Libella's therapy is to lengthen a person's telomeres, which sit at the tips of chromosomes like caps on the end of shoelaces. First discovered in the 1970s, telomeres have been linked to aging because they seem to shorten as a person gets older. By delivering a gene called TERT to cells, which in turn makes a telomere-rebuilding enzyme called telomerase, Libella thinks it can prevent, delay, or even reverse aging.

"I know what we're trying to do sounds like science fiction, but I believe it's a science reality," Jeff Mathis, CEO of Libella Gene Therapeutics, tells OneZero. Libella's therapy is based on studies published by American geneticist Ronald DePinho in 2010 and Spanish scientist Maria Blasco in 2012, which found that telomerase gene therapy could reverse signs of aging in mice. While intriguing, many have dismissed the idea of using gene therapy to reverse aging in humans because it would involve a permanent change to a person's DNA, a risk that's hard to justify in someone who's healthy. Behind Libella's technology is Bill Andrews, a molecular biologist who, 20 years ago, led a research group at the Bay Area biotech firm Geron to identify the human telomerase enzyme. He tells OneZero that he developed a telomerase gene therapy and licensed the technology to Libella. "I can't say it's the only cause of aging, but it plays a role in humans," he says about telomere shortening.

An anonymous reader shares a column: Derek Thompson, writing in the Atlantic last month, highlighted the ways in which contemporary millennial lifestyles are in many ways subsidized by venture capital. Unprofitable businesses are currently offering up great deals to urbanites who otherwise would be unable to afford their fancy city-living in large part because of losses incurred as the cost of buying up market share. "If you wake up on a Casper mattress, work out with a Peloton before breakfast, Uber to your desk at a WeWork, order DoorDash for lunch, take a Lyft home, and get dinner through Postmates, you've interacted with seven companies that will collectively lose nearly $14 billion this year," Thompson wrote of the "Millennial Lifestyle Sponsorship." He doesn't mention it, but there's another key player in the MLS field: Netflix. As Richard Rushfield has noted in his excellent newsletter on Hollywood business, The Ankler, Netflix is in a tricky position. The vast majority of Netflix's viewers (upwards of 80 percent, according to him) watch licensed content ("Friends" and the like) and in order to create a library of programming audiences will pay for, they've gone massively in debt: "Netflix is currently in the hole for about $20 billion in debt and obligations and still operating at a loss."

Those benefiting from the "Netflix and Chill" branch of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy tree don't care. And it's all well and good for a Silicon Valley unicorn, one of those rare tech beasts whose valuations do not match profit-loss statements because there's no real competition yet and everyone believes first-mover status is an insurmountable advantage. But with the rapid rise of vicious streaming competition -- the ascendancy of Hulu and niche programmers such as Criterion; the creation of streaming services by Disney, Warner Brothers and Apple, to name a (very) few -- Netflix's advantage seems to be fading. One can already sense a sort of nostalgia for the golden age of bingeing while reading the Hollywood Reporter's roundtable with seven studio heads. "Doesn't it bum you out that you can't make 'The Irishman?'" asked THR's Matthew Belloni. And while one might expect studio heads to go the diplomatic route and say no -- everyone in Hollywood believes in their own product, after all, and there are no regrets ahead of time -- you believe the execs when they answer in the negative. "You know, it actually doesn't. It would bum me out if no one made the movie," Universal's Donna Langley said. "It's never been a better time for filmmakers and storytelling and for things to find their way into the world that were getting squeezed over the last five or six years or even longer."

"Some businesses, such as pharmaceuticals, still spend enormous amounts of time and money on intellectual property (IP) fights," reports ZDNet. But "thanks to the Open Invention Network (OIN), the largest patent non-aggression community in history, Linux and related open-source technologies have become mostly free of these expensive entanglements."

And now they're reporting that the OIN's membership has grown to over 3,000 licensees: OIN's mission is to enable Linux, its related software, and its programmers to develop and monetize without being hogtied by patent fights. In Linux's early years, this was a constant threat. Now, thanks largely to the OIN's efforts to get everyone to agree on the basic open-source principle -- that's it's better and more profitable to share than to cling to proprietary property -- open-source software has taken off in the marketplace... The OIN, which has grown by 50% in the last two years, has turned patent non-aggression into policy for thousands of companies. By agreeing to the OIN license, members gain access to patented inventions worth hundreds of millions of dollars while promoting a favorable environment for Linux and related open source software.

The license works by everyone agreeing to patent non-aggression in core open-source technologies by cross-licensing Linux System patents to one another on a royalty-free basis. OIN-owned patents are similarly licensed royalty-free to any organization that agrees not to assert its patents against the Linux System. While it started out just covering the Linux operating system the Linux System has evolved to address Linux and adjacent Linux-related open-source technologies. It now covers open-source programs covering mobile communications, mobile payments, computing, blockchain, cloud, Internet of Things, and embedded and automotive technologies.

"For innovation and invention, open source and Linux are unmatched in the modern world. The open-source community's success is powered by the fact that shared innovation acts as a force multiplier -- where one plus one equals orders of magnitude more than two," said Keith Bergelt, OIN's CEO. "OIN's remarkable growth has been driven by heightened recognition of the importance of open source and a broad-based recognition of patent non-aggression as a cultural norm in the Linux and greater open source community. Joining OIN is viewed by many as a litmus test of authenticity in the open-source community."
The Linux Foundation's executive director says their group's success "has been directly enabled by the patent risk mitigation platform that the OIN has provided.

"Absent the now 3,000 strong member community of patent non-aggression that Keith Bergelt and his team at OIN have painstakingly built over the last dozen or so years, the level of open-source software innovation and unprecedented adoption rates could simply not have been achieved."

The remaining nuclear reactor still operating at Three Mile Island in South-central Pennsylvania will shut down by September 30th, Exelon announced Wednesday. The decision to close the reactor comes 40 years after the nation's worse commercial nuclear accident. NPR reports: The company says the plant has been losing money for years. The nuclear industry generally has struggled to compete with less expensive electricity generated from natural gas and renewable energy. Exelon first announced it would close two years ago unless lawmakers stepped in to keep it open. It then campaigned to save the plant by seeking a subsidy from Pennsylvania's legislature. The company argued that, in light of climate change and efforts to address it, the plant deserves compensation for the carbon-free electricity it produces.

That argument has worked in other states, including Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey and New York. But in Pennsylvania, the state's powerful natural gas industry opposed it, along with industrial users and consumer advocates, calling the proposal a "bailout." When it became clear the subsidy legislation wouldn't pass within the next month Exelon decided to retire the plant, which was licensed to operate for 15 more years. Exelon says it will offer positions elsewhere in the company to employees who are willing to relocate. But the plant also employed thousands of contract workers during refueling and maintenance outages. On March 28, 1979, Three Mile Island Generating Station Unit 2 "suffered a partial meltdown after a pump stopped sending water to the stream generators that removed heat from the reactor core," reports NPR. "The accident was the start of a backlash against the nuclear industry that halted its growth for decades."

"Redis Labs is dropping its Commons Clause license in favor of its new 'available-source' license: Redis Source Available License (RSAL)," reports ZDNet -- adding "This is not an open-source license." Redis Labs had used Commons Clause on top of the open-source Apache License to protect its rights to modules added to its 3-Clause-BSD-licensed Redis, the popular open-source in-memory data structure store. But, as Manish Gupta, Redis Labs' CMO, explained, "It didn't work. Confusion reigned over whether or not the modules were open source. They're not open-source." So, although it hadn't wanted to create a new license, that's what Redis Labs ended up doing....

The RSAL grants, Gupta said, equivalent rights to permissive open-source licenses for the vast majority of users. With the RSAL, developers can: Use the software; modify the source code; integrate it with an application; and use, distribute, support, or sell their application. But -- and this is big -- the RSAL forbids you from using any application built with these modules in a database, a caching engine, a stream processing engine, a search engine, an indexing engine, or a machine learning/artificial intelligence serving engine. In short, all the ways that Redis Labs makes money from Redis. Gupta wants to make it perfectly clear: "We're not calling it open source. It's not."
Earlier this month the Open Source Initiative had reaffirmed its commitment to open source's original definition, adding "There is no trust in a world where anyone can invent their own definition for open source, and without trust there is no community, no collaboration, and no innovation."

And earlier this week on Twitter a Red Hat open-source evangelist said they wondered whether Redis was just "clueless. There are a lot of folks entering #opensource today who are unwilling to do the research and reading, and assume that these are all new problems."

An anonymous reader writes: For those unfamiliar with the project, Stage 9 is a beautiful virtual recreation of the Enterprise ship from Star Trek: The Next Generation for Windows, Mac and Linux. More experience than game, Stage 9 was built by fans over two years in the Unreal Engine. "There were two things that we were always pretty careful with," says project leader 'Scragnog'. "We made it as clear as we possibly could that this was NOT an officially licensed project. We had no affiliation with CBS or Paramount and the IP we were trying our hardest to treat with respect was not our own. We were fans, just creating fan art."

In an announcement this week, Scragnog reminded fans that no one involved in the project was in it for any financial reason and everyone was well aware that throwing money into the mix could be a problem. However, the team says it has always known that they could be shut down at any time on the whim of a license holder because in this world, that's what can happen. Unfortunately, that day has come all too soon for the impressive project. Stage 9 was hit with an intellectual property complaint from CBS just over two weeks ago and has now been shut down.

"This letter was a cease-and-desist order," Scragnog explains. "Over the next 13 days we did everything we possibly could to open up a dialog with CBS. The member of the CBS legal team that issued the order went on holiday for a week immediately after sending the letter through, which slowed things down considerably."

Dean Takahashi, reporting for VentureBeat: Gil Hyatt has gotten many rewards from his days as an inventor. In 1990, he received a fundamental but controversial patent on what he called the first microprocessor, or computer on a chip. It was 22 years late, but he nosed out rivals such as Intel in being the first to file for a patent application in 1968. He then licensed that patent and 22 of his 69 other patents to Philips Electronics, which then began enforcing them on the rest of the electronics industry and collecting royalties.

Philips' efforts netted Hyatt more than $150 million, though the state of California would try for 24 years to take a big chunk of that money for taxes. It argued that Hyatt pretended to move to Las Vegas in 1991, but in 2017, he finally prevailed in convincing the tax board that he really did move. But at 80 years old, Hyatt still isn't resting on the rewards he got. In fact, he's still in a bitter battle with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He claims the office is sitting on his remaining applications, and is waiting for him to die. Hyatt sued to get the patent office to issue his remaining patent applications. The patent office declined to comment, citing the litigation. Further reading: Gil Hyatt interview: Why patent examiners gave controversial patents a scarlet letter.

An anonymous reader shares a report: GTA V and its multiplayer GTA Online mode has already proven itself a thriving game and money maker for both developer Rockstar and publisher Take-Two -- with sales approaching 100 million copies and bringing in more than $6 billion, now one of the most successful video games in history is also becoming something else, perhaps not too unexpectedly: A powerful tool for music discovery. Use of music has always been something video game makers Rockstar prides itself on. From the Billy Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Dinah Washington songs found in L.A. Noire, a detective action-adventure game, to the mix of 1970s rock in The Warriors game, music is one of the more important elements of pop culture that the developers use to help create memorable times and places for its titles.

Nowhere is that more evident than in the long-running Grand Theft Auto series. While the franchise has always featured some sort of working, in-game radio stations, each new iteration expanded on the concept. By 2013 and the release of GTA V, the game's 15 unique radio stations, packed with 240 fully licensed songs and pre-recorded on-air talent, had become nearly as important as the game itself. [...] In the five years since launch, GTA V and GTA Online gamers have listened to more than an estimated 75 billion minutes of music from the game's 18 radio stations, according to Rockstar's own analysis provided to Rolling Stone.

An anonymous reader shares a report: While the legal status of the Moon as a "global commons" accessible to all countries on peaceful missions did not meet any substantial resistance or challenge, the Outer Space Treaty left further details unsettled. Contrary to the very optimistic assumptions made at the time, so far humankind has not returned to the moon since 1972, making lunar land rights largely theoretical.

That is, until a few years ago when several new plans were hatched to go back to the moon. In addition at least two U.S. companies, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, which have serious financial backing, have started targeting asteroids for the purpose of mining their mineral resources. Geek note: Under the aforementioned Outer Space Treaty, the moon and other celestial bodies such as asteroids, legally speaking, belong in the same basket. None of them can become the "territory" of one sovereign state or another.

The very fundamental prohibition under the Outer Space Treaty to acquire new state territory, by planting a flag or by any other means, failed to address the commercial exploitation of natural resources on the moon and other celestial bodies. This is a major debate currently raging in the international community, with no unequivocally accepted solution in sight yet. Roughly, there are two general interpretations possible. Countries such as the United States and Luxembourg (as the gateway to the European Union) agree that the moon and asteroids are "global commons," which means that each country allows its private entrepreneurs, as long as duly licensed and in compliance with other relevant rules of space law, to go out there and extract what they can, to try and make money with it. [...] On the other hand, countries such as Russia and somewhat less explicitly Brazil and Belgium hold that the moon and asteroids belong to humanity as a whole.

On Monday, IBM asked a jury to award the company $167 million in a lawsuit against deals site Groupon for using patented technology without authorization. The patents involve e-commerce technology that had already been licensed to Amazon, Facebook, and Alphabet for between $20 million and $50 million per company. "Most big companies have taken licenses to these patents," IBM's lawyer, John Desmarais, said. "Groupon has not. The new kid on the block refuses to take responsibility for using these inventions." Reuters reports: Groupon lawyer J. David Hadden argued that IBM was overreading the scope of its patents and claiming ownership of building blocks of the internet. "A key question for you in this case is whether these patents cover the world wide web," Hadden told jurors. "They do not and that is because IBM did not invent the world wide web."

An IBM executive is expected to testify during the two-week trial about licensing deals with technology companies like Amazon and Google, providing a rare glimpse into IBM's efforts to derive revenue from its large patent portfolio. The Armonk, New York-based company invests heavily in research and development and has secured more U.S. patents than any other company for the past 25 years.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A sculptor who created a replica of the Statue of Liberty for a Las Vegas casino was awarded $3.5 million in damages last week after the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) accidentally used a photo of his statue -- rather than a photo of the original statue in New York harbor -- on one of its most common stamps. If you bought a "forever" stamp between 2011 and 2014, there's a good chance that it showed the face of the Statue of Liberty replica that sculptor Robert Davidson constructed for the New York-New York Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The Post Office licensed a photo of Davidson's statue from the image service Getty for $1,500, initially believing it was a photograph of the original statue. (The license only covered the rights to Getty's photograph of the statue -- not the statue itself.)

The stamp with the resulting image was released to the public in December 2010; it took four months before anyone pointed out the mistake to the Post Office. In March 2011, a spokesperson said that the USPS "still loves the stamp design and would have selected this photograph anyway." The Post Office continued using the photo for almost three years before retiring it in January 2014. The court reportedly awarded Davidson a five percent royalty for $70 million worth of unused stamps; it also awarded him $5,000 in damages for the nearly $5 billion worth of stamps that were used to pay postage. The total damages amounted to $3.55 million.