Tag: intellectual property

Links of the day: Connected cars and fast trains

CES, Connected cars, fast trains and copyright laws are today’s links

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas kicks off today with thousands of product announcements at what is by far the biggest technology convention in the world. No doubt news from the show is going to dominate the tech media for the rest of the week.

One of the biggest fields for tech vendors at CES will be Internet of Things with connected cars being in the spotlight with both BMW and General Motors leading the way.

GM unveil their connected car of the future

For some years GM have offered a connected car service with their OneStar system. At this year’s CES they’re showing how they intend to extend the service with more integrated social and navigation services.

Driving the crashless car

While we fixate on the driverless car of the future, the next few years are going to see the technologies be incrementally introduced into our motor vehicles. A good example of this is BMW’s Active Assist that CNET writer Wayne Cunningham claims he could not crash.

The story points out Active Assist isn’t affordable in today’s cars but undoubtedly much of this technology will be standard in many automobiles by the end of the decade.

California starts work on its high speed railway

Cars aren’t the only thing in the news with California turning the first soil in its Los Angeles to San Francisco high speed railway.

This troubled project has been years in the making and it’s not expected to be completed until the end of the next decade at a cost of over 60 billion dollars. An interesting aspect in the story is how communities in California’s Central Valley region are pinning their hopes of an economic resurgence from the project.

 

Google takedown notices explode

While cars and trains are being reinvented, the entertainment industry is still struggling with its disruption. Torrent freak reports Google is being overwhelmed with movie industry take downs notices.

As the story suggests, this campaign is hurting Google’s relationship with the movie industry.

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Mortein and The Queen

The story of Queen Elizabeth II and fly spray tells us much about modern scientific research.

A great little story from the Australian government’s research arm, the CSIRO, tells the story of how the Queen Elizabeth II lead the commercial insect repellent industry and how intellectual property has changed.

The story tells how the original experiments were carried out in 1940 to see what substances were best in repelling mosquitos as part of the preparation for a tropical war against Japan.

After the war, research continued and during the 1963 Royal Tour of Australia, the Queen was sprayed with the government repellant to keep flies off her while she played golf.

Journalists following the Queen noted the absence of flies around the official party, and word about CSIRO’s new fly-repellent spread. A few days later representatives from the company making Mortein insecticides called Doug Waterhouse for his formula, which he passed on freely, as was CSIRO’s policy at the time and the rest, as they say, is history.

It’s unthinkable today that any research organisation would give intellectual property away and a modern agreement would include hansom royalties for the formula.

There’s an argument that giving away the intellectual property helped innovation and public health, but in these stingy and cash strapped days it’s hard to see how government scientific organisations could survive without royalty payments.

It certainly is true that the past is a different country.

Fly spray can courtesy of Wikipedia

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Undermining the cloud

Google’s broad claim on users’ data risks the viability of their services

Whenever I do a presentation on cloud computing and social media for business, I focus on one important area – The Terms Of Service.

Google’s relaunch of their Cloud Drive product has reminded us of the risks that hide in these terms, particularly with the one clause;

When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). Some Services may offer you ways to access and remove content that has been provided to that Service. Also, in some of our Services, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted in those Services. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to our Services.

This is an almost identical clause to that introduced – and quickly dropped by file sharing Dropbox – last year. It’s also pretty well standard in the social media services including Facebook.

Basically it means that while you retain ownership of anything you post to Google Drive, or most of other Google’s services including Google Docs you’re giving the corporation the rights to use the data in any way they choose.

While the offending clause does go onto say this term is “for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones” there is no definition of what operating, promoting or improving their services actually means.

Not that it matters anyway, as one of the later terms says they reserve the right to change any clause at any time they choose. So if Google decided that selling your client spreadsheets to the highest bidder will improve the service for their shareholders, then so be it.

If you’re a photographer then the pictures you upload to Facebook or Google+ now are licensed to these organisations as are all the documents stored on Cloud Drive.

To be fair this is not just a Google issue, Facebook has similar terms as do many others. Surprisingly just as many premium, paid for services have these conditions as free ones.

Because these Terms Of Service are about establishing a power relationship, there’s usually an over-reach by large companies with these terms.

While an over-reach is understandable, its not healthy where the customer has to trust that the big corporation will do the right thing.

Right now, if you’re using a cloud or social media service for important business information you may want to check that service doesn’t have terms that grant them a license to your intellectual property.

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When the little guy wins

Australian innovator Ric Richardson and Uniloc settle with Microsoft

Australian entrepreneur Ric Richardson has finally won his patent dispute with Microsoft over the use of software protection software.

In a post on his personal blog, Ric declared “it’s over!” and said;

“It’s kind of like having your career anchored on a test you did when you were a kid and someone questioning your score decades after the fact… all you can do is stick to your position and hope the truth rings true.”

After winning a three hundred million dollar award against Microsoft, then an appeal striking down the size of the damages it’s been a hell of journey for Ric and Uniloc.

The silly thing is for Microsoft they largely abandoned this method of validating software after 2003, so they could have settled this a lot earlier. Or just paid the license fees in the first case.

You also can’t avoid the irony of Microsoft being successfully sued over a product design to protect intellectual property.

It’s always good to see the entrepreneur and inventor get up in a world that often seems tilted in favour of the corporations.

Now we can look forward to seeing a lot more innovations out of Ric’s caravan, that flat tyre detector looks really useful.

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