Category Archives: Events

IP, IT, and Internet Law and Policy Conferences and Colloquia

Theorizing the Web

Posted on by

Those near NYC this Saturday might consider visiting the “Theorizing the Web” conference. Provocative presentation titles include:

The Automation of Compliance: Techno-Legal Regulation in the U.S. Trucking Industry
What We Talk About When We Talk Data: Metrics, Mobilization, and Materiality in Performing Health Online
Crowdsourcing Assassination 2.0
Identity Prosumption and the Quantified Self Movement
Beyond Bridges, Speed-Bumps, And Hotel Keys: A New Design Paradigm for Control Technologies
There is no difference between the “real” and the “virtual”: a brief phenomenology of digital revolution

I am also really looking forward to seeing Rob Horning and Daniel Kreiss present. Having just enjoyed the WIPIP at Seton Hall organized by my colleague Gaia Bernstein, I can say that there really is an embarrassment of riches in internet thought in the NY area these two weeks.

X-Posted: Concurring Opinions.

Smartphones and Software Patents

Posted on by

I will be speaking at Santa Clara Law School’s outstanding conference about Solutions to the Software Problem tomorrow.  It promises to be a great event, with academics, public interest advocates, and government officials all weighing in.

As a lead-in to the conference, I want to discuss an oft repeated statistic: that there are 250,000 patents that might be infringed by any given smartphone. I’m going to assume that number is accurate, and I have no reason to doubt its veracity. This number, many argue, is a key reason why we must have wholesale reform – no piecemeal action will solve the problem.

Here are my thoughts on the subject:

1. Not all of these patents are in force. Surely, many of them expired due to lack of maintenance fee payments.

2. Not all of the remaining patents are asserted. After all, we don’t see every smartphone manufacturer being sued 250,000 times.

3. Many of these patents are related to each other or are otherwise aggregated together. Thus, there are opportunities for global settlements.

4. Even if you think that 250,000 is huge number of patents (and it is, really – there’s not disputing that), it is unclear to me why anyone is surprised by the number when you consider what’s in a smartphone. More specifically:

  • A general purpose computer and all that comes with it (CPU, RAM, I/O interface, operating system, etc.).
  • Active matrix display
  • Touch screen display
  • Cellular voice technology
  • 1x data networking
  • 3G data networking
  • 4G data networking
  • Wi-Fi data networking
  • Bluetooth data networking
  • GPS technology (and associated navigation)
  • Accelerometer technology
  • Digital camera (including lens and image processing)
  • Audio recording and playback
  • Battery technology
  • Force feedback technology (phone vibration and haptic feedback)
  • Design patents

The areas above are by and large “traditional” patent areas – they aren’t software for the most part. And there are thousands of patents in each category, before we even get to the potential applications of the smartphone that might be patented (and these are of greater debate, of course).

So, yes, there are many, many patents associated with the smartphone, but what else would you expect when you cram all of these features into a single device? Perhaps smartphones are the focus of the software patent problem because, well, they do everything, and so they might infringe everything. I’m not convinced that this should drive a wholesale reform of the system. Maybe it just means that smartphones are underpriced given what they include. Not that I’m complaining.

ICANN Announces New gTLD Program

Posted on by

On June 20, ICANN announced that it would be opening up the domain space for new generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs),  meaning that anyone will be able to register virtually any word or phrase in almost any language or script as a gTLD.  Up until now, there have been 22 available gTLDs (eg .com, .net, .org, .info etc) along with a number of country-code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) such as .us, .uk, .au, .ca etc.

Applications for new gTLDs will begin early in 2012.  It will be interesting to see how effectively this program is administered particularly in dealing with battles between trademark holders and others.  Additionally, it will be interesting to see if the possibility of so many new gTLDs actually does make any inroads into the prominence of the .com space over time.

The Virtues of Getting Shredded

Posted on by

I just finished participating in and presenting at the two-day “Cyberlaw Colloquium,” an annual mid-Atlanticish conference devoted to cyberlaw scholarship (with some bleeding into IP). This year it was hosted by Madisonian’s own Greg Lastowka at Rutgers – Camden, with other Madisonians Mike Madison and Mike Carroll participating.

An hour was devoted to each paper, and several more people attend/ comment than present. The price of admission is reading each paper, and very little time is spent by the author presenting each paper. I spoke for maybe 5 minutes before we got rolling with a “This is great and all that, but what’s your point…” type comment.  I think one presenter got three sentences in.

That’s really the benefit of a conference like this – it is hard to get the focused minds of 10 or more senior scholars on your problem. But that’s also the scary part – it occurred to me that I was one of very few untenured participants and I was presenting an early draft of a paper that I knew was outside my comfort zone. But that’s precisely why I needed to present.

Some people advise junior scholars to refrain from showing work that’s unpolished to senior scholars who might gossip about how dumb you are. To that, I say, “hogwash.” Sure, it’s better to have complete sentences and best to have complete thoughts, but sometimes you need a group of smart and experienced people to figure out why you aren’t making your point the way you wanted to.

You just can’t get that kind of help at a big conference where no one has read the paper and you get 8 minutes to present with another 10 minutes of comments. I don’t even think you can usually get that kind of help at your average faculty workshop, where you spend a lot of the time presenting your idea (and where your oral presentation might clarify some of the shortcomings of the paper so that you never get the right critical comment).

So, I got shredded, but in a good way, and the final paper that results will reflect that – I hope.

Symposium on Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property

Posted on by

There will be an online symposium on the new book Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property at Concurring Opinions this Tuesday to Thursday (Feb. 1 to Feb. 3, 2011). This book, edited by Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski, is available for free download here, and can also be purchased here. Here is a quote from the introduction that gives a sense of the book’s themes:

In a hospital in South Korea, leukemia patients are expelled as untreatable because a multinational drug company refuses to lower the price of a life-saving drug. Thousands of miles away, a U.S. group called the Rational Response Squad is forced by the threat of a copyright lawsuit to take down a YouTube video criticizing the paranormalist Uri Geller. Could we—should we—see these two events, so seemingly remote from one another, as related? Yes—or such is the premise of a new political formation on the global stage, one that goes under the name of the “access to knowledge movement”—or more simply, A2K.

A2K is an emerging mobilization that includes software programmers who took to the streets to defeat software patents in Europe, AIDS activists who forced multinational pharmaceutical companies to permit copies of their medicines to be sold in South Africa, and college students who have created a new “free culture” movement to “defend the digital commons”—to select just a few. A2K can also be seen as an emerging set of theoretical commitments that both respond to and reject the key justifications for “intellectual property” law and that seek to develop an alternative account of the operation and importance of information and knowledge, creativity and innovation in the contemporary world.

Krikorian and Kapczynski have assembled a top-notch group of contributors, and we welcome comments from across the blogosphere. A2KBook