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Patents

Submission + - So how long before eating is a patented process?

Submitted by dwarfking
dwarfking writes: The subject line is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the article about a lawsuite of the IP of a salad recipe is either funny or scary, depending on the outcome.

From the article:

But the legal action, one of the first in which a restaurant owner has gone to court over intellectual property, has opened up a veritable can of lobster tails over when culinary influences stray into imitation.


What seems to have upset Ms Charles in particular is Ed's Caesar, a $7 (£3.50) salad that she alleges in the legal action was taken from her own recipe. But Ms Charles acquired the recipe from her mother, who, in turn, wheedled it out of a chef in Los Angeles.
Privacy

Submission + - Googlebot following Gmail users?

Submitted by
omeomi
omeomi writes: "I recently set up a script that emails URL's with unique id's to users of a mailing list that I maintain. When users click on the URL in their email, they are directed to a private page on my website, and their username and IP address is logged. However, I noticed that when the user is a Gmail user, their IP address is always followed by a Googlebot-IP address (confirmed with whois). It appears that the Googlebot follows Gmail users when they click on links in their emails. I wonder, what does it do with this information? Is it used only for Gmail-advertising, or are these pages that I've intended to be private and unique being indexed by Google? Has anybody else experienced this?"
Television

Submission + - The New Age of Portable Video?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the past, I didn't see the point of ripping a DVD because they were already pretty compact. But that's changing now that I've got several pocket-sized things for displaying video. Even my DVD player from Philips plays Divx and MPEG4s. This mainstream NY Times article (reg. required) notes that there are more and more reasons for legitimate movie owners to move their copy like keeping "sticky little fingers off DVDs". Many want to download videos from YouTube, reformat them, and take them along in their video iPod. Will the proliferation of options and needs going to put more pressure on studios to let users move their copies from machine to machine? Will the gadget manufacturers take the lead?
Television

Submission + - When will broadcast TV die?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This article about how to hook up your PC to your living room TV ends up predicting that "I think in the future, the broadcast stations will all turn off. There is a very limited amount of content on them." The billion+ videos on sites like YouTube, Revver or LuluTV dwarf the broadcast and cable stations that are "numbered in the hundreds." Is the snacky nature of Internet video going to rollover the old school broadcast stations? Or will the low cost of broadcasting to millions give the old stations a perpeptual advantage of the new Internet sites that must pay bandwidth to deliver each and every copy?
The Gimp

Submission + - The ethics of photo retouching

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Is it ethical to use Gimp on your holiday cards? What about your wedding photos? What about the photos for a dating site? This article describes how a cottage industry in photo retouching is appearing to help the aesthetically challenged. You can upload your picture to sites like touchofglamour.com or fixuppix.com and get a thinner, smoother, prettier picture. One program from Anthropics even automates much of the process. If no one knows you're a dog when you type on the Internet, is it fair to cloud the issue even further by editing the photo from meatspace?

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