Today’s Observer column…

… on the significance of peer-to-peer networking is here. Audio version here. (MP3, 4.91MB)

Understanding the impact of the mobile phone

Fascinating essay by Christine Rosen in The New Atlantis. Quote:

“Although [Irving] Goffman wrote in the era before cell phones, he might have judged their use as a ‘subordinate activity,’ a way to pass the time such as reading or doodling that could and should be set aside when the dominant activity resumes. Within social space, we are allowed to perform a range of these secondary activities, but they must not impose upon the social group as a whole or require so much attention that they remove us from the social situation altogether. The opposite appears to be true today. The group is expected never to impinge upon — indeed, it is expected to tacitly endorse by enduring — the individual’s right to withdraw from social space by whatever means he or she chooses: cell phones, BlackBerrys, iPods, DVDs screened on laptop computers. These devices are all used as a means to refuse to be ‘in’ the social space; they are technological cold shoulders that are worse than older forms of subordinate activity in that they impose visually and auditorily on others. Cell phones are not the only culprits here. A member of my family, traveling recently on the Amtrak train from New York, was shocked to realize that the man sitting in front of her was watching a pornographic movie on his laptop computer — a movie whose raunchy scenes were reflected in the train window and thus clearly visible to her. We have allowed what should be subordinate activities in social space to become dominant.”

This is a long piece but worth it — the most perceptive piece I’ve read on the way the mobile phone has changed behaviour.

Checking the facts

Here’s a terrific idea — an independent website that checks the ‘facts’ spouted by US politicians. We could use one of those in the UK. I hadn’t heard of it until Dick Cheney mentioned it during his debate with John Edwards. (He suggested that anyone making allegations about his time in charge of Halliburton should go to FactCheck.org.) Here’s what the site has to say about this:

“Cheney wrongly implied that FactCheck had defended his tenure as CEO of Halliburton Co., and the vice president even got our name wrong. He overstated matters when he said Edwards voted “for the war” and “to commit the troops, to send them to war.” He exaggerated the number of times Kerry has voted to raise taxes, and puffed up the number of small business owners who would see a tax increase under Kerry’s proposals”

It’s also critical of John Edwards:

“Edwards  falsely claimed the administration “lobbied the Congress” to cut the combat pay of troops in Iraq, something the White House never supported, and he used misleading numbers about jobs.”

The Creative Commons idea in a Flash animation

Lovely animation from South Africa.

The Mac effect

Cory Doctorow: “Conferences organized by geeks, freaks and academics are like walking into an Apple distribution warehouse. If you only lived in this world, you would think that Apple makes up 70% of the market share.”

It’s true: every non-business event I go to is like that.

How to run Mac OS X on your X-Box

My colleagues Joe and Dave have hacked an X-box to run Linux, which is gratifying. But now someone has a hack to get the X-Box to run Mac OS X. Whatever next.

Was Dubya wired for guidance during the debate?

Lots of speculation about the mysterious bulge in the back of his suit.

For example: this from Salon:

The latest clarification, explanation or evasion — depending on your perspective on all this — comes from White House Chief of Staff Andy Card. We caught up with him in spin alley here, and we asked him whether Bush was wearing a wire at the last debate.

“If he was, I didn’t know about it,” Card said. “I have no reason to believe he was wearing a listening device at all.” So what was that tell-tale lump under Bush’s suit coat? “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Maybe people didn’t have very good eyesight.” Was the president wearing a bullet-proof vest? “No, he was not, not to my knowledge.” Some are speculating that he was wearing some kind of medical device, like a portable IV machine. How about that? “Not to my knowledge.”

That Kodak patent suit: Sun pays up.

Some of us were alarmed by the implications of Kodak’s victory in a patent suit. The case seems to have been settled out of court. Here’s Good Morning, Silicon Valley‘s take on it:

“Sun Microsystems … agreed to pay Eastman Kodak $92 million to settle a suit over its popular Java programming technology. A bit of background: Late last week, after a three-week trial, the U.S. District Court of Rochester, N.Y., found that Sun infringed on three of Kodak’s object-oriented software patents when it created Java. (One of the patents covers the method by which one application asks for help from another application. Talk about overly broad). The penalty phase of the trial was to have begun yesterday, and in it Kodak, which ironically was an early supporter of Java, was expected to demand $1.06 billion in lump-sum royalties from Sun and, worse, ask the court to enjoin Sun from using Java pending the case’s appeal. Had the court granted Kodak’s request, the result would have been disastrous, for Sun and for the software industry that has for years made free use of Java. So I suppose it’s a good thing that Sun rolled over and paid — good for Sun’s bottom line anyway, less so for the software industry, whose continued advancement seems threatened every day by asinine patent infringement suits like Kodak’s.”

So… panic over? I doubt it. Maybe Kodak settled because the case wasn’t as strong as they maintained. Why else would they settle for $92 million when they could have struck for $1.06 billion? My initial relief has given way to foreboding. In effect, Sun has made things much worse by caving in rather than fighting. Here’s a gloomy assessment from ZDNet UK:

“If you’re a software developer, your world is about to become a colder place — thanks to Sun. If you use software, get ready to pay much more for much less — thanks to Sun. If you had hopes that free and open source software would provide competition for proprietary systems, forget them — thanks to Sun.

We owe this huge debt of thanks to that company because it has caved in to Kodak. Instead of fighting the patent claims that Kodak raised over Java, Sun has settled out of court. We don’t know the details — delightfully, such settlements often remain secret no matter what their public interest — but it undoubtedly includes a cross-licensing deal. In short, Sun has given Kodak millions of dollars to go away and the companies will have agreed not to sue each other in future over mutual use of their IP.

Although Sun has bravely said that this settlement is no admittance of guilt, it’s handed over the Danegeld. Kodak is already crowing that its patents have been validated in court. Armed with this, it is free to go after anyone — and those patents can be argued to cover just about every aspect of modern software practice. They may even cover processors. That’s just three patents out of the tens of thousands which are sprinkled around the industry. Which one will you infringe today?

Anyone who makes software is now at risk. Big companies will solve the problem cheaply by doing Sun-like cross-licensing deals — it’ll cost less and be far less risky. Shareholder value demands it. Microsoft knows this. It has been assiduous at setting these up with many companies over the last year or so, and it already has an agreement with Kodak. In no time, there’ll be a legal web over the industry, with everyone paying everyone else for the rights to use their respective IP. Nothing will escape: someone will already have patented 1+1=2, and can you afford to fight it?

That’s fine if you’re a big company and can afford to join the club. What if you’re not? Then you either pay up your licence fees or you don’t write software. Be sure that the big boys will set up a helpful organisation to issue cross-patent licences, so you only have to go to one place with your cheque, and be sure that the licence you get will be quite clear about what you can and cannot do with your software. After all, the rights of the intellectual property holders have to be maintained. That’s the only way to encourage innovation — to give total control of invention to large companies.”

Content industries to take Morpheus case to the Supremes

Hollywood studios and record companies on Friday asked the US Supreme Court to overturn a controversial series of recent court decisions that have kept file-swapping software legal.

Larry Lessig’s lecture launching Creative Commons UK

Audio recording available from here. (8MB)