It's worse than frivolous.

Smart DVRs skip commercials using a number of different algorithms, but one of them most definitely involves monitoring changes in volume. Advertisers have incentive to lower the volume to begin with and our government is creating a law that essentially benefits or has no effect on advertisers who claim billions of dollars effectively "lost" because of commercial skipping in high-end DVRs.

There's nothing especially bad about this from an advertiser's point of view, but we're led to believe the legislation is intended to protect consumers. Meanwhile, our legislative branch can't pass a budget or figure out what to do about taxes. That's what enrages me most about all this.

IANAL, but I believe the correct term to use is "public disclosure", which is allowed up to one year prior to a patent application in the United States only. In other countries, it would invalidate a patent if the invention was publicly disclosed prior to the patent being filed.

I think prior art is used to argue against infringement, which would typically lead to a number of patent claims being invalidated by the courts (but not necessarily the entire patent). It doesn't invalidate a patent solely based on the existence of prior art; determining what is and isn't prior art and what patent claims are being infringed on is usually a lengthy and expensive process that involves teams of lawyers and the courts.

Then there's also the issue of what constitutes public disclosure. Is publishing the app public disclosure? Or is the invention still protected because the source code or some internal algorithm isn't readily apparent to the end user?

There's a whole mess of things in the way of any independent developer making a claim against Apple. Not the least of which is the developer agreement.

Not to make light of the efforts of indie film makers, but let's face it...giving an award to a film that was only distributed in that format as opposed to one that you can actually see is kind of an insult. Film is a visual art form. I think we can all agree that the quality of films distributed over the Internet just doesn't live up to what one might consider art (although we're getting close).

Despite all my obnoxious and presumptious statements, I will agree with those of you who say it's unfair to the movies that actually hit celluloid AFTER having first been released on the Internet. I think at that point it's as eligible as any other film out there.