TV’s iPod moment

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Good report by Bobbie Johnson of Vint Cerf’s Alternative McTaggart Lecture at Edinburgh.

The 64-year-old, who is now a vice-president of the web giant Google and chairman of the organisation that administrates the internet, told an audience of media moguls that TV was rapidly approaching the same kind of crunch moment that the music industry faced with the arrival of the MP3 player.

“85% of all video we watch is pre-recorded, so you can set your system to download it all the time,” he said. “You’re still going to need live television for certain things – like news, sporting events and emergencies – but increasingly it is going to be almost like the iPod, where you download content to look at later.”

Dr Cerf, who helped build the internet while working as a researcher at Stanford University in California, used the festival’s Alternative McTaggart Lecture to explain to television executives how the internet’s influence was radically altering their businesses and how it was imperative for them to view this as a golden opportunity to be exploited instead of a threat to their survival. The arrival of internet television has long been predicted, although it has succeeded in limited ways so far. But the popularity of websites such as YouTube – the video sharing service bought by Google in 2005 for $1.65bn (£800m) – has encouraged many in the TV industry to try and use the internet more profitably. Last month the BBC launched its free iPlayer download service, and digital video recorders such as Sky Plus and Freeview Playback allow viewers to instantly pause and record live television.

Dr Cerf predicted that these developments would continue, and that we would soon be watching the majority of our television through the internet – a revolution that could herald the death of the traditional broadcast TV channel in favour of new interactive services.

“In Japan you can already download an hour’s worth of video in 16 seconds,” he said. “And we’re starting to see ways of mixing information together … imagine if you could pause a TV programme and use your mouse to click on different items on the screen and find out more about them.”

Some critics, including a number of leading internet service providers, have warned that the increase in video on the web could eventually bring down the internet. They are concerned that millions of people downloading at the same time using services such as iPlayer could overwhelm the network.

Dr Cerf rejected these claims as “scare tactics”. “It’s an understandable worry when they see huge amounts of information being moved around online,” he said. But some pundits had predicted 20 years ago that the net would collapse when people started using it en masse, he added. “In the intervening 30 years it’s increased a million times over … We’re far from exhausting the capacity.”

Life’s getting tougher for patent trolls

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Hooray! Good analysis by Scott Feldman of recent US Supreme Court decisions…

Filings of patent suits increased from 2,112 in 1997 to 2,830 in 2006. That does not take into account any increase in the number of defendants per filing. Between 2001 and 2005, the average cost of litigating a large case through trial jumped from $3 million to $4.5 million. How much of that jump is due to the increase in filings–and thus in demand for lawyers–is unknown. At several million dollars a case, plus the costs of settlement and of the many expensive patent opinions sought, the direct costs mount. Indirect costs do, too: companies feel obliged to practice “defensive patenting” to protect against infringement claims, and litigation can disrupt a company’s operations.

In three quick strokes, the Supreme Court has made things better. Though the recent rulings did not necessarily involve trolls, they will affect them. In eBay v. MercExchange, decided in May 2006, ­MercExchange sought an injunction shutting down much of eBay’s operations. Absent exceptional circumstances, courts used to presume that an injunction should be issued in any instance of patent infringement. But in this case, the Supremes instructed lower courts to apply what’s called a traditional test before entering injunctions. The test gives a trial court more discretion to deny injunctions, since the court must assess what is “fair.” Trolls can no longer count on getting injunctions, even if they win their cases.

In January 2007, the justices made it harder for trolls to wage licensing campaigns. Before, trolls could send letters to targeted companies, putting them on notice–and in so doing putting them at risk of being found “willful” infringers facing triple damages. Companies that wanted to remove that potential liability, however, could not themselves file suit to get a court to declare that they were not liable. Now, according to ­MedImmune v. Genentech, as interpreted by the Federal Circuit, a company receiving a letter referencing its activities and offering a patent license may file a lawsuit where it resides.

And in April, in KSR International v. Teleflex, the Supreme Court made it easier to find that a patent should not have been issued in the first place, or that it should be declared invalid once sued upon. In KSR, the patentee claimed a patent on the combination of a gas-pedal accelerator and a sensor. The Court found the combination obvious and the patent consequently invalid. The Supremes have reëmphasized that “obvious” inventions are not entitled to patent protection. District-court judges may now use common sense to determine whether a patent for a combination of existing technologies merits protection…

Five years on

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My lovely Sue died five years ago today. It’s a beautiful summer afternoon, just as it was then. The house is peaceful. The lilac tree we planted where she planned to put it is thriving. Life goes on, but the sense of loss endures. A few evenings ago, walking in the grounds of the church where she’s buried, I remembered Thomas Hardy’s poem, The Walk:

You did not walk with me
Of late to the hill-top tree
By the gated ways,
As in earlier days;
You were weak and lame,
So you never came,
And I went alone, and I did not mind,
Not thinking of you as left behind.

I walked up there to-day
Just in the former way;
Surveyed around
The familiar ground
By myself again:
What difference, then?
Only that underlying sense
Of the look of a room on returning thence.

iMovie ’08: another view

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Michael has posted some interesting thoughts about the iMovie controversy. His view is that the new iMovie is a better fit with the rest of the iLife package. The old iMovie HD, he argues, is really a cut-down variation on professional editing software.

iMovie ‘08 is clearly not as flexible as iMovie HD was if you want total control over your movie, or more special effects and so on, but in return you get something that I think is much more accessible for non technical people to use. People who want to just take a few camcorder clips and put them together, cut out a few duff bits, and add some sounds and titles. iMovie 08 makes that so much easier, and that to me is what Apple’s iLife was meant to be about. iMovie HD was too complicated for that, iMovie 08 fills that gap.

Michael thinks that the actual product spectrum looks like this:

iMovie 08 — iMovie HD — Final Cut Express — Final Cut Pro

On reflection, I think he’s right.

iPhone SIM unlock software put on ice

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Hmmm… Engadget reports that:

UniquePhones (the team behind iPhoneUnlocking.com, who’ve claimed to have the second proper iPhone SIM unlock software hack) got a threatening call from AT&T’s legal team urging them to not release their software — or else. Now, we can understand why any smallish business wouldn’t exactly want lawyers repping AT&T (and Apple) breathing down their necks for a potentially market-shifting discovery — which is why the company is now officially holding the release of their SIM unlock solution indefinitely while they assess their legal position. Fair enough, but we still haven’t even had a chance to verify their solution does unlock iPhones.

However, the interesting (and possibly telling) bit comes up at the end of their release, where apparently UniquePhones is “evaluating what to eventually do with the software should they be legally denied the right to sell it.”

I mean, it’d be such a shame if it found its way onto the Net, now wouldn’t it…

The Ides of August

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This morning’s Observer column…

Irish Novelist Edna O’Brien once wrote a novel called August is a Wicked Month. Tell that to the folks who run Skype, the internet telephony service that 200 million people worldwide now habitually use for voice calls and instant messaging, and you’ll be rewarded with rueful nods….