Click Once to Kill Stupid Patent

Recently the Internet has started to seem like a lighter, happier place. Web pages have been clearer, graphics have looked snappier, Flash advertisements have seemed a tiny bit less annoying. It's almost as if a great darkness has begun to lift.

What has been the cause of all of this good cheer? Why nothing less than the defeat of a great evil that has served as a symbol of all that is wrong with modern technologies and all the negative forces that threaten innovation today.

Yes, the notorious Amazon One-Click patent has finally been dealt a mortal blow and will hopefully soon no longer exist to threaten those who wish to innovate in the field of eCommerce.

Since it first rose from its dark pit in the late 1990's, the Amazon One-Click patent has served as a symbol of all that was wrong with the patent system in the United States.

Even from a purely technological standpoint, the One-Click patent was pretty weak and based on obvious techniques that had been done in earlier electronic shopping models.

But what made the One-Click patent so infamous was that it was one of the first and most egregious examples of the incredibly stupid idea that is business method patents.

Government Is No Friend of Tech

In the world of the Batman comics, one of the more interesting villains that the Caped Crusader has to contend with is Two-Face. You see, Two-Face wasn't always a bad guy. He was originally Batman ally and Gotham District Attorney Harvey Dent but after a criminal disfigures half his face with a vial of acid, Harvey loses his grip on reality and turns into the evil Two-Face.

But the really interesting thing about Two-Face is that he does sometimes do the right thing. That's because he often decides whether he will do good or evil on the flip of a coin. This can make things especially tough for Batman, who must fight to stop the crimes of Two-Face but also occasionally sees his old friend Harvey whenever the coin makes Two-Face do the right thing.

And I'm starting to understand Batman's problem myself. Because there's an enemy out there that I'm often striving against. One who often seems to be dedicated to destroying the freedoms and innovations that technology has brought to us and bring all exciting and disruptive technologies to a stand-still. However, every once and a while this enemy does something helpful and makes me think that maybe it isn't all that bad after all.

The enemy I am talking about is, of course, government.

Pump It Up for Web Radio

In the classic song "Radio Radio," Elvis Costello sang the words, "They say you better listen to the voice of reason. But they don't give you any choice because they think that it's treason."

Of course that song is nearly thirty years old so I doubt that Elvis Costello and the Attractions were talking about Web radio. But much of the anger and contempt that Elvis was directing at commercial radio of the time holds true for the controversy raging today over Web radio.

Here's the history of the problem: As the ability to stream quality audio over the Internet has improved over the years, a huge benefit arose in the form of Web radio. By providing the ability to listen to music over the Internet, it enabled many benefits, including the ability to listen to hometown stations after moving to another area, niche music programming that would never occur on standard radio, and, best of all, the ability for independent and unsigned musicians to easily promote their music to wide audiences.

Now to you, me and pretty much everyone else in the world, this all sounds pretty good. But to the Recording Industry Association of America, anything that lets people listen to what they want to listen to rather than what the RIAA tells them they should listen to—especially anything that lets musicians promote themselves without first signing away their souls to RIAA member companies—is very bad and must be destroyed.

More Web 2.0 fun?

Finished editing really long podcast file, need to take a break. About 17 hours ago.

Drove to band practice, listened to Minutemen CD in the car. "Tour spiel!" About 14 hours ago.

Gotta write my column. But what to write about? Wait, I know! Less than 20 seconds ago.

Well that's enough Twittering for now. Oh, you don't know what Twittering is? It's the latest in utterly self-indulgent Web 2.0 fun.

At Twitter.com, millions of people are constantly answering one question: What are you doing right now? It's sort of like a blog but without all of that, you know, actual content.

As I look at Twitter.com right now, some of the fascinating content includes a person going to get Indian food, someone waiting to get into a breakfast joint and a guy who has just signed up for DirecTV. Wow! What will happen next?

I have to admit that Twitter is one of those things that makes me feel like an old fogy. Even though I'm a cutting-edge, tech kinda guy, the whole constant-connection thing is one that just doesn't connect with me.

But I can definitely understand why this is a hit with the younger crowd. Every sub-25-year-old that I know is constantly on his or her cell phone, and the subject of 99 percent of the calls is similar to Twitter's content: "Hey, whatcha doin?" "Nothing, what are you doing?" "Watching Futurama." "Cool, talk to you later."

Heck, if Twitter cuts down on even half of the calls like that, it's doing society a great service.

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Big Win in the War Against Patents

When it comes to technology patents and the effect they have on innovation and the ability to use and create technology, the news is usually on the bad side (for example some company crushing a competitor using a patent, or a troll attacking real innovators with a questionable patent). But finally the news is good, possibly even very good. Today the U.S. Supreme Court made a ruling (PDF) that will make it much harder to get iffy patents and even harder to attack real innovators with these iffy patents. In this case, which had some of largest technology companies in the world arguing on both sides, the Supreme Court has removed a very weak test for whether an invention is obvious, making it much harder to get a patent on an obvious technique, such as one that merely combines several other inventions in an obvious way. This is huge news....

Happy Birthday EFF!!

Sixteen years ago technology luminaries Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore and John Perry Barlow met on the Well and decided to form a new group dedicated to protecting technology freedoms against misguided federal laws and massive corporations determined to protect their aging business models against the incursions of progress. The group that they founded was the Electronic Freedom Foundation and on January 11 that group will celebrate it's sixteenth birthday.