From the Financial Times: (and you should buy a subscription) Piracy is a problem as old as the music industry itself. In Victorian times, it was illicitly copied sheet music that was the avowed enemy of the artist, and the
Space-X patents
Anderson: So what have all your creative people come up with, then? What’s different in your basic technology versus 50 years ago? Musk: I can’t tell you much. We have essentially no patents in SpaceX. Our primary long-term competition is
The Horrors of Software Patents
US Patent Number 4701722 A is a perfect example of everything software patent opponents hate about software patents: It implements mathematical functions that are pretty well known. It covers a process of changing information not changing any physical object one
Paying for music
Streaming services rely on a weird conceit, but it’s not a new one. Like record labels, these companies can’t exist—they literally have no product—without musicians. Yet hardly any musicians are pleased with the advent of digital streaming, and understandably so—they
Samsung’s trial brief in the Apple patent lawsuit
http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1257891/Samsung_unredacted_trial_brief.pdf Contrary to the image it has cultivated in the popular press, Apple has admitted in internal documents that its strength is not in developing new technologies first, but in successfully commercializing them. When Apple was developing its campaign to promote
Murdoch strikes against copyrights
The witnesses allege a software company NDS, owned by News Corp, cracked the smart card codes of rival company ONdigital. ONdigital, owned by the ITV companies Granada and Carlton, eventually went under amid a welter of counterfeiting by pirates, leaving
Apple’s Patents possibly covering android
Apple’s initial legal victory over rival HTC in a patent infringement suit could pave the way for Apple to collect high royalties from devices running Google Android, according to one analysis. Mike Abramsky with RBC Capital Markets believes that Apple
Incumbent Capitalism
This is one of my big beefs with the way we think about capitalism in this country: We fundamentally support what I call incumbency capitalism. We don’t support innovation capitalism. What’s the difference? Every rule around tax credits in the
Social Network and Lessig
Two lawsuits provide the frame for The Social Network. One was brought by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, twins at Harvard who thought they had hired Zuckerberg to build for them what Facebook would become. The other was brought by Eduardo