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Patents

Startup Seeks To Preempt Patent Trolls 117

anaesthetica writes "The WSJ reports that a San Francisco startup is buying up patents with the promise never to assert them in order to help large corporations hedge against patent trolling firms. The company, RPX Corp, receives an annual fee in exchange for licensing the patents it has purchased. Cisco and IBM have already signed up for this service of 'defense patent aggregation.'"
Patents

Groklaw Says Microsoft Patent Portfolio Now Worthless 219

twitter writes "P.J. concludes her look at the Bilski decision: 'you'll recall patent lawyer Gene Quinn immediately wrote that it was bad news for Microsoft, that "much of the Microsoft patent portfolio has gone up in smoke" because, as Quinn's partner John White pointed out to him, "Microsoft doesn't make machines." Not just Microsoft. His analysis was that many software patents that had issued prior to Bilski, depending on how they were drafted, "are almost certainly now worthless." ... He was not the only attorney to think about Microsoft in writing about Bilski.'"
The Internet

EU Strikes Down French "3 Strikes" Copyright Infringement Law 271

Erris writes "Opendotdotdot has good news about laws in the EU: 'EU culture ministers yesterday (20 November) rejected French proposals to curb online piracy through compulsory measures against free downloading ... [and instead pushed] for "a fair balance between the various fundamental rights" while fighting online piracy, first listing "the right to personal data protection," then "the freedom of information" and only lastly "the protection of intellectual property." [This] indicates that the culture ministers and their advisers are beginning to understand the dynamics of the Net, that throttling its use through crude instruments like the "three strikes and you're out" is exactly the wrong thing to do.'"

Comment Re:Obvious.... (Score 1) 1563

And if your research indicates the sky is bright green with yellow paisleys? :) Sorry, but I can look out my window and see that you seemed to have misplaced a decimal. :) Sunday, everyone was sick and I was laying down. My toddler daughter laid beside me, hugged me and said "Are you OK daddy?" Two minutes later my toddler son stabbed me in the throat with his sword. (No we didn't force the sword on him, I think we kind of discouraged that to start with, but I'm afraid our boys were oh so fascinated) Yellow paisleys? I don't think so. John Milnor (the fields medalist) once said that he and his wife decided to raise their children in a completely non-sexist way, then joked "Our poor son had to make his guns out of Legos."

Comment Math research is a different animal (Score 2, Informative) 90

I work as an assistant professor in mathematics. This sort of program really won't address the needs of the vast majority of publications for any highly regarded professional math journals because math publications are typically very concise and rarely fill in very many of the details. It is not too uncommon for steps in proofs well beyond most talented undergraduates to be taken as "obvious". If they don't want to bother entering all the steps into a paper, you can be sure they don't want to be bothered to enter them into a piece of software and the sheer quantity of math and the wide variety of subtle distinctions in the ways it is used mean this just isn't going to happen. Whats more, Mathematicians really aren't worried that their proofs are incorrect.
Microsoft

Microsoft's Ethical Guidelines 271

hankwang writes "Did you know that Microsoft has ethical guidelines? It's good to know that 'Microsoft did not make any payments to foreign government officials' while lobbying for OOXML, and that 'Microsoft conducts its business in compliance with laws designed to promote fair competition' every time they suppressed competitors. In their Corporate Citizenship section, they discuss how the customer-focused approach creates products that work well with those of competitors and open-source solutions. So all the reverse-engineering by Samba and OpenOffice.org developers wasn't really necessary."

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