'a term coined by Jason Mazzone (Associate Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School) to describe situations where individuals and institutions illegally claim copyright ownership of the public domain and other breaches of copyright law with little or no oversight by authorities or legal consequence for their actions.' Good term (via Nelson)

satire of whiny rich-girl complaining is not permitted

'After we moved in, we were asked to file patents for anything and everything we’d invented while working on Upcoming.org.'

'Do intellectual property (IP) rights on existing technologies hinder subsequent
innovation? Using newly-collected data on the sequencing of the human genome by
the public Human Genome Project and the private rm Celera, this paper estimates
the impact of Celera's gene-level IP on subsequent scientic research and product
development. Genes initially sequenced by Celera were held with IP for up to two
years, but moved into the public domain once re-sequenced by the public eort.
Across a range of empirical specications, I nd evidence that Celera's IP led to
reductions in subsequent scientic research and product development on the order of
20 to 30 percent. Taken together, these results suggest that Celera's short-term IP
had persistent negative eects on subsequent innovation relative to a counterfactual
of Celera genes having always been in the public domain.' (via Tony Finch)

'A discussion with Vint Cerf, Van Jacobson, Nick Weaver, and Jim Gettys' -- the big guns! Great discussion (via Tony Finch)

'Wi-Fi Sync' was rejected from the App Store last May -- and a year later, iOS 5 is released with the same feature. what a coincidence! 'Hughes said Wi-Fi Sync was rejected from the iTunes App Store in May, 2010, one month after he submitted it. He said an iPhone developer relations representative named Steve Rea personally called him prior to sending a formal rejection email to say the app was admirable, but went on to explain there were unspecified security concerns and that it did things not specified in the official iPhone software developers' kit. “They did say that the iPhone engineering team had looked at it and were impressed,” Hughes told El Reg. “They asked for my CV as well.”'

'The publication of Digital Opportunity follows a six-month independent review of IP and Growth, led by Professor Ian Hargreaves. He was asked to consider how the national and international IP system can best work to promote innovation and growth.' Some fantastic recommendations here. I hope this provides clear direction to similar Irish efforts...

scummy. don't use TwitPic if they are planning to monetize your photos, even if it's currently just for a "small number of celebrities". (via my dad)

'some first thoughts on how the just-published coalition agreement (Fine Gael and Labour) in Ireland proposes to deal with issues of interest to cyberlaw and media law.'

'the [large] buffers are confusing TCP’s RTT estimator; the delay caused by the buffers is many times the actual RTT on the path.' [..] 'by inserting big buffers into the network, we have violated the design presumption of all Internet congestion avoiding protocols: that the network will drop packets in a timely fashion.'  QoS traffic shaping avoids this -- hooray for Tomato firmware

Rossa McMahon rounds up some highlights from Mr. Justice Charleton's judgement on the UPC case; good post

'Pam Samuelson, one of the co-authors of the report, says that her conclusion from the research is that the world may be better off without software patents; that the biggest beneficiaries of software patents are patent lawyers and patent trolls, not entrepreneurs.' no shit, Sherlock

'Apparently Commodore-Amiga owed $10M for patent infringement. Because of that, the US government wouldn't allow any CD-32's into the USA. And because of that, the Phillippines factory seized all of the CD-32's that had been manufactured to cover unpaid expenses. And that was the end'

upshot: IMRO will think about it and get back to Nialler et al; in the meantime, everyone operates as before. one to keep an eye on, even if you're not Irish; this will play out overseas soon too. Good call getting Simon McGarr along

"There is a huge Digital Single Market for audiovisual material. The problem is that it's illegal [...] We have effectively allowed illegal file-sharing to set up a single market where our usual policy channels have failed." "While the internet is borderless, Europe’s online markets are not. It is often easier to buy something from a US website than online from the country next-door in Europe. Often you cannot buy it at all within Europe."

yay, Red Hat beat down patent troll IP Innovation, L.L.C. (a subsidiary of Acacia Technologies), in East Texas no less

'a proxy server that works behind a NAT, even when the client is behind a NAT, without any 3rd party'. nifty, by Samy "MySpace worm" Kamkar

ouch, nasty allegations. Strikes me that there's a chicken/egg problem: scraping the Dublin Bus website to build a database which you then sell as part of a commercial iPhone app is probably pretty shaky ground to start with

'Of course you have to appreciate the irony – the agency in charge of enforcing France’s new anti-piracy legislation using a pirated proprietary font in its very own logo.' hoho! hoist by their own petard