Eclectic Views

    

   The Rules Are Changing

The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 "allowed universities to hold patents on federally
funded research and to license the intellectual property to industry";
formerly I think it had been required to be put into the public domain,
which was seen as discouraging colleges from making their research available
outside the educational field. But it had the side effect of introducing
major rights wrangles over IP rights among the partners which (say critics)
slows innovation and drives research overseas where the ground rules are
simpler.  To address this concern, a group of four IT companies and seven
universities under the aegis of the National Science Foundation and the
Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation put together a set of "Open Collaboration
Principles" in which they agreed:
 * That intellectual property arising from selected research collaborations
will be made available free of charge for commercial and academic use;
 * to an established set of guidelines that address the rights of the
participants and the public.

Participants are Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of
Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Stanford University, Berkeley,
U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, U of Texas, Cisco, HP, IBM and Intel. The
document is available at   http://www.kauffman.org/items.cfm?itemID=662

Together with the proposed revision of the open-software (GNU/Linux) General
Public License, this could lead to a real shakeup in IP licensing.
  

    

   Beyond The Valley Of The Silicon

To paraphrase Tennyson, they looked into the future far as human eye could
see; and the authors of the International Technology Roadmap saw the end of
growth in silicon transistors about ten years from now. Around 2015 it
predicts "chip makers will have exhausted their ability to shrink the wires
and switches" that compose processors and memory, and further improvements
in speed will have to come from somewhere else.  Speculation focuses on
circuitry that will utilize rather than fight quantum effects. One is the
"spin transistor" based on electron states; experiments indicate its on/off
status "can be detected and altered without applying an electrical charge".
Another, called "crossbar latch technology", uses organic molecules with a
potential switching speed of a trillion cycles a second.
  

    

   Sony Settles

Sony BMG Music Entertainment a.k.a. "Rootkit Records" has reached agreement
with plaintiffs in a group of lawsuits over its DRM software; the federal
judge hearing the case will decide next month whether to approve the deal.
Purchasers of the CDs at issue will be entitled to a new one free of the
spyware and may choose between two additional benefits: either 3 free
downloads from a list of about 200 albums (which may includes Apple iTunes)
or one download and $7.50 cash.
  

    
It costs my dad $70 to get viruses and whatnot removed from his computer
when he takes it into a shop.  $7.50 should about cover that.  Fuckwads.
(I'm sure the lawyers involved got more than $70 a piece.)