Friday 26 October 2012

UK open standards and the proprietary ecosystem - Public Sector IT

UK open standards and the proprietary ecosystem - Public Sector IT: "But the three leading vendors of proprietary ecosystems - Apple, Microsoft and Oracle - opposed the policy. They protested. They wanted the right to make proprietary claims on open standards, by claiming royalty payments. The government had said the thing that distinguished an open standard was that it did not countenance proprietary claims. The matter will be settled when the government publishes the results of its consultation.
Microsoft has meanwhile defended its position by claiming its dominant ecosystem benefits the economy." 'via Blog this'

Wednesday 24 October 2012

MIT Press website now accepting orders

Regulating Code has a formal US release date of 15 February 2013, a bargain at $40 hardback. Hardcover, Pages: 288p. Illustrations: 2 figures. Dimensions: 6 x 9 inches. Publication Date: February 15, 2013. Distributor: The MIT Press. ISBN: 9780262018821. ISBN10: 0262018829

Sunday 14 October 2012

Do-Not-Track Movement Is Drawing Advertisers’ Fire

Do-Not-Track Movement Is Drawing Advertisers’ Fire - NYTimes.com: "When the W3C met recently in Amsterdam to hammer out Do Not Track standards.. advertising industry executives and privacy advocates accused each other of trying to stymie the process.
“There is a strong concern that the W3C is not the right forum to be making this decision,” says Rachel Thomas, the vice president of government affairs at the Direct Marketing Association. “The attempt to set public policy is entirely outside their area of expertise.” During the Amsterdam meeting, Ms. Thomas proposed that Do Not Track signals should actually permit data collection for advertising purposes, the very thing the mechanisms were designed to control. That provocative idea went over with European privacy advocates about as well as a smoker lighting up in a no-smoking zone full of asthmatics." 'via Blog this'

Thursday 4 October 2012

A RAND Primer, or how Google-Motorola tried to use H.264 video standards against Microsoft

This fascinating US Court of Appeals (9th Circuit) case shows in a snapshot how companies are using and abusing the regulation of code for commercial gain - a patent-RAND-standards arms race, if you will. Motorola (which was bought by Google for its patent treasure chest) holds patents that are essential to the H.264 ITU-approved video compression standard used by the entire industry. Microsoft uses this in its operating systems and video player - and here Motorola decided not to play fair with RAND, and to seek an order in Germany forum-shopping away from the US. Motorola even reduced its 100s of patents licensed under RAND to just two in Germany - a ruse criticised by the US Appeals court as undermining and simplifying ad absurdum the licensing issues involved. Naughty Motorola-Google!
COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT: MICROSOFT CORPORATION   v. MOTOROLA, INC. No. 12-35352 D.C. No. 2:10-cv-01823 JLR