March 31, 2006

Nathan Myhrvold on Patent Reform

Much of the online debate about patent reform has been centered on addressing the problem of information technology patent law "abusers". In his Inventors Have Rights, Too!, Nathan Myhrvold argues against the weakening of patent laws. The way he sees it, the software industry is invoking the "patent troll" as the source of their troubles, when the real problem is a widespread disregard for the rights of legitimate patent holders. According to his reasoning, should patent law be reformed to protect the software industry, the real loser would be the lone inventor.

My own set of perspectives on patent reform have been influenced by slashdot, boing boing, and other "open source geek" feeds, so I was very happy to have been challenged by what he wrote today.

Many of the largest tech companies have a standing policy that engineers are not allowed to read patents or check whether their work infringes. Why bother to look, if you know you'll find lots of infringement? Besides the cost, it's a distraction that might hurt time to market. Their strategy is simple -- damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

The trouble is, this cavalier attitude toward the law runs afoul of the rights of legitimate patent holders and the big tech companies know this. Rather than pay out a small fraction of their huge profits, they're fighting a campaign to weaken patent laws for the little guy. Some of this has taken place in Congress under the banner of "patent reform."

Source: Inventors Have Rights, Too!

Spotter: The Big Picture.

March 4, 2006

Comet

It was inevitable that the term Comet would be affixed to an old, familiar web technology. I may make fun of the re-purposing of brands from under the sink, but I do think that Comet is an appropriate identifier. While event-capturing over HTTP/1.1 has been discussed in recent memory, Alex Russel's ETech presentation this coming Wednesday could get a lot of people talking about it. Again.

...and Eric, thanks for jogging my memory about streaming chat :)

References:
Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1: Persistent Connections
Comet: Low Latency Data for the Browser
HTTP Streaming - Ajax Patterns