Friday, July 25, 2003

Microsoft's Patent Problem, by Roger Parloff, Fortune. Last month, when Microsoft announced its bellwether decision to award employees restricted stock instead of options, it also made news in a federal courtroom - the kind of news you keep quiet about. Microsoft suffered utter defeat at a crucial pretrial hearing in what appears to be the highest-stakes patent litigation ever - one in which a tiny company called InterTrust Technologies claims that 85% of Microsoft's entire product line infringes its digital security patents. . . . . InterTrust's engineers developed and patented what they say are key inventions in two areas: so-called digital-rights management and trusted systems. The technologies are essential to the digital distribution of copyrighted music and movies, and to maintaining the security of e-commerce in general. At its prebubble height, InterTrust (founded in 1990) employed 376 people and marketed its own software and hardware products; today it consists mainly of a patent portfolio, 30 employees, and this lawsuit. An investor group led by Sony Corp. of America and Royal Philips Electronics bought the company in January for $453 million, hoping to convince consumer electronics and tech companies—beginning with Microsoft—of the need to license its patents. Microsoft argued in court that crucial phrases in InterTrust's patents were too vague to be enforceable, and that others required such narrow interpretation that they would have been hard for Microsoft to infringe. But in her July 3 ruling, an Oakland judge resolved 33 of 33 disputed issues against Microsoft and rebuked the company's lawyers for wasting her time by promising proof that never materialized—legal vaporware, in essence. . . . As agreed before the hearing, the parties now enter a round of settlement talks. Though InterTrust declines to place a pricetag on the suit, it's hard to imagine the company settling now for any sum that does not have a "B" in it. InterTrust claims that its inventions cover technologies that Microsoft has been weaving into its Windows XP operating system, Office XP Suite, Windows Media Player, Xbox videogame console, and .NET networked computing platform, to name just a few. If settlement talks fail and InterTrust prevails in court, it would be entitled to a court order halting sales of all those products. InterTrust CEO Talal Shamoon asks rhetorically, How much would that be worth to Microsoft? See, also, earlier coverage: Can This Man Bring Down Microsoft? 4:02:51 PM    comment []

>From yesterday's Benton Headlines: POETRY WEBSITE GOES FROM BAD TO VERSE David Rea, a programmer from Greenwich, Connecticut, has developed a website to see if poetry can "evolve" from a random collection of words. Rea started his "Darwinian Poetry" site by generating 1,000 poems, each containing four lines of randomly selected words chosen from a pool of 30,000 possibilities. When users visit the site, they are presented with two poems and are asked to vote for the better one. The chosen poem "survives" and continues to evolve with words added or subtracted, while the losing poem is "killed off." The newly evolved poems are then put up for a vote, and the cycle repeats itself. With thousands of users visiting the site, Rea says that the random collections of words are beginning to evolve into actual poetic structures, but the eloquence of the current generation of poems remains debatable. For example, a test of the website this morning generated the following: "Distill jumbled little sifting millstones / Shield to the further fueling / Old but of interfere unfinished in the." New Scientist, Duncan Graham-Rowe Darwinian Poetry: http://www.codeasart.com/poetry/darwin.html 11:02:05 AM    comment []

Lots of Programs in Can for 'ETV'. Interactive TV, Enhanced TV -- call it what you want. But after 20 years of false starts, producers and technologists say souped-up TV is about to catch on. Really. Xeni Jardin reports from American Film Institute's workshop in Los Angeles. [Wired News] We'll see . . . 4:41:01 AM    comment []

Ann Coulter, woman. The right's she-devil talks about why she loves the Grateful Dead, what Tolstoy and Dostoevsky taught her about life, and how she meets men. [Salon Headlines] 4:38:30 AM    comment []

sexing the machine: Three digital women debate gender, technology and the Net, by Laura Miller, in Salon (1997). this three-way e-mail conversation about technology, the changes it's working on our lives and how those changes affect women in particular was held at the request of a national magazine. Later, the magazine decided the discussion would "go over the heads" of its readers. Perhaps its editors were also confused when so little of the conversation amounted to what we dubbed "whining at the gates" -- that is, the familiar complaint that women have been excluded from the world of high technology. To us, the debate about the role of computers in our lives has moved on from those early days. Instead, we felt at home enough to question the more fundamental ways high technology is reshaping our world. If more and more women are practicing "multi-tasking" as a way of life, is that liberating or maddening? Do computers concentrate or decentralize authority? Does the World Wide Web give users more power or less? Can machines ever be considered "intelligent"? Our conversation might indeed go over the heads of the shrinking ranks of the resolutely unwired -- but for everyone else, we think it goes right to the heart of the matter. The participants were: Laura Miller, of Salon Sadie Plant, then at the University of Birmingham and author of Zeroes and Ones: The Matrix of Women and Machines and, this millennium, Writing on Drugs, and Ellen Ullman, author of Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents and, just recently, The Bug: A Novel. Enjoy. 3:08:39 AM    comment []