Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
Friday, March 28th, 2008
Under Canadian patent law, the scope of patentable subject matter is still expanding. But under U.S. patent law, “anything under the sun made by man” is patentable. This has come to include patents for computer software.
Software patents raise a debate over which algorithms are novel, and which are non-obvious. Some ...
Posted in Commercialization, Originality, Technology, Patentability, IP, Patents, Copyright | No Comments »
Saturday, March 22nd, 2008
Open Access, Competition, and Spectrum Auctions
This past week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the US announced the winners of their 700Mhz spectrum auction, with Verizon and AT&T being the big winners. In bidding 19.6 billion dollars in the process, the winners secured rights to broadcast on a very ...
Posted in Telecommunications, Technology | No Comments »
Monday, March 3rd, 2008
I recently attended a lecture by professor Bruce Ziff, of the University of Alberta Law School, where he described what he termed as his only original academic idea. He posited that the reason we as a society are so restrictive about property rights is because it is basically impossible to ...
Posted in Technology, Infringement, Infringement, Digital Locks, Privacy, Copyright, IP, Patents, General | 1 Comment »
Saturday, February 16th, 2008
Advertising has always been, or has tried to be, “targeted” at potential and existing customers. The entire purpose of advertising has, and continues to be, to communicate the virtues of a product or services to consumers in the marketplace in an effort to turn potential consumers into actual customers.
In the ...
Posted in Technology, Privacy, IP | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 5th, 2008
Mashup culture continues to expand and proliferate, especially in the online word. Many audience members are no longer content merely to consume media, but actively comment on it, interact with it and reshape it. The explosion of repurposed copyrighted material that appears online challenges old notions of the fair use ...
Posted in Technology, Movies, IP, Copyright | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007
With much fanfare last Monday, Amazon.com released their wireless e-book reader that uses e-ink technology and allows users to purchase books wirelessly over Sprint's cellular network in the United States. Though the product lacks the immaculate design of some other consumer electronics (read: the iPhone), it nevertheless hit the ...
Posted in Technology, IP, Copyright | No Comments »
Monday, November 19th, 2007
IBM is going to offer free programs to compete with Microsoft’s Office programs. A new attempt for some good old Microsoft-bashing, IBM failed in 1990 to compete head-on with its OS/2 system, and an ambitious plan to challenge one of the most lucrative businesses for Microsoft. The more important question ...
Posted in Open-Source, Technology, Patents, IP | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007
Over a decade ago, the seminal article, “The Digital Silk Road,” by Norman Hardy and Eric Dean Tribble[1] conceptualized the Internet as “a flee-market where cash and anonymity prevail.” This vision helped spark a flurry of activity and multiple attempts to develop a successful model for collecting payments ...
Posted in Technology, IP | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007
Like many cell phone customers, you might be irritated that your service
provider locks you in. Shortly after Apple released its iPhone, hackers
developed unlocking software so the popular phone could be used on
networks other than AT&T. Since it has not been made official that the
iPhone is coming to Canada, many buyers ...
Posted in Technology, Digital Locks, IP | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, November 14th, 2007
Second Life, as it is aptly named, is a virtual world. Through online personas, known as avatars, users of Second Life interact with each other as well as with the virtual items that they create. Users reap rewards for their creative efforts by retaining and exploiting intellectual property (`IP’) rights ...
Posted in Ownership, Technology, IP, Copyright | 1 Comment »
