Al Gore for President public bookmark list
I just set up a page at IntelligentTeams that uses a new OPML bookmarklet system that Charlie Wood, Mary Melthaus and I have been playing with. If you are interested in Al Gore for President, or in OPML, or in social networking and presidential politics:
You can help out by visiting the page and doing any of the following:
1. Digg the page to bring attention to Al and attention to the use of social bookmarking to create networks of supporters for Al (and others, if you like).
2. Comment on the page.
3. Drag-and-drop (Firefox) the bookmarklet into your browser, and help us find good content on Al from around the web. Bookmark stuff on Al and his/our issues. I found a terrific Neil Young rock video based on the Gore movie…ok, I’m betraying my age as well as my politics, but I love Neil Young!
4. Use the “Invite friends” to send two or three emails about the page.
5. (Advanced) Use the “Edit folio” to do some clustering of the items, etc. Use the “Clone folio” to make a copy of the folio and “fork the folio” to make a new Al Gore folio of your own flavor.. Use ‘New folio” to start a new thread…
OK, I am not without an interest here. I need your help. I want to help Al, and I don’t know how.
I would love to help ginn up encouragement for Al, and help make connections among Al supporters in order not to fall behind the other candidates’ grassroots activities. Contact me on the “email to Opie” on the web site. Thanks so much for your help. Al needs us. We need Al. Let’s try to find each other sooner rather than later.
Mark my words, reporters: This is going to be a big day for PR flacks calling to pitch patent stories to you. Beware. Here is how you can expect them to talk:
The IBM-and-Microsoft-funded “patent reform” folks are going to be calling every news person they know today, pitching the story that “poor Microsoft” should not have to pay $1.6 billion to “this French company” for patent infringement. A great associated story, if you are an investigative journalist, is to look up the amount of patent infringement exposure Microsoft currently has in the litigation pipeline. The amount the last time I looked is about $12 billion. Does this mean Microsoft is being unfairly targeted by what it calls “trolls”? Is it possible Microsoft is guilty of much of this infringement? Is the Pope Catholic? Is it possible that Microsoft had a culture of impunity with regard to intellectual property?
I have written on this specific story in my previous post. Now I want to address another issue. Patents ARE the original open source mechanism. “Make your trade secrets public, and we will give you a limited property right to them. Let others freely try to work around them, and society will benefit from the innovation of the community.” Thomas Jefferson
But we do need a way for inventors to make available non-commercial, educational licensed use of thier ideas, but keep the commercial rights. Creative Commons does this for music.
Like laws governing parks and real estate, one can respect property rights, and have “public easements” over land for non-commercial users.
Creative Commons–set up to protect the property rights of the little guy, and make music freely available for non-commercial use.
From San Diego to Santa Monica:
Imagine a writer in San Diego that wants to make a song available free for non-commercial use–for friends, for social action, for YouTube videos and home-made music.
Then one day Brittney Spears records it in a studio in Santa Monica. The song is released on her new label, Shaved My Head Music, and the song goes platinum. Brittney, bless her soul, gets all the money if the song was put in the public domain by the songwriter in San Deigo.
Patent Commons is NOT such a solution. It is named after Creative Commons, but it is funded by IBM and others as a way to get individuals to give up property rights and undermine the system of property rights for software engineers and inventors of software.
Patent Commons is what Creative Commons would be like if it were funded by the recording industry. Creative Commons, in that case, would encourage the person in San Diego to make her song available to all, to renounce, with others–perhaps including Brittney–property rights to songs. This, by the way, would be a terrific deal for Brittney, who would have free songs to sing. By the way, as IBM becomes a consulting firm, it wants to be a free behemoth of consulting, with free technology. Concidence that IBM funds a particular type of “patent reform”? I don’t think so.
We need a “both-and” solution for patents: Patents ARE property, and that is not going to change. AND educational and non-commercial users of patented intellectual property should have easy ways to see what is available. Inventors should have easy ways to license non-commercial use of their intellectual property, without undermining their rights in the case of commercialization.
Isaac Newton said: If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
A jury has decided that Microsoft must respect Bell Labs patents on which Microsoft has built its multimedia business. The principle here is that when you stand on the shoulders of giants such as Bell Labs scientists, you may have to feed them too.
Microsoft v Alcatel-Lucent [Bell Labs]
The Patent Board | Our Services | Data & Research Services | The Wall Street Journal – Readers Guide
Story One: Microsoft executives as bullies
Remember Danny the bully on the playground? And remember Eddie the clever little comic that could get under Danny’s skin? Edie would ridicule Danny the bully in front of Shirley and the other cute girls. Shirley and Patricia and Janette would snicker. Danny couldn’t do anything about it. Even if he pounded on Eddie, which he sometimes did, he could never look cool in the eyes of the girls.
Alcatel-Lucent, owners of Bell Labs (post the split-up of AT&T, for history buffs), have found a way to get under Microsoft’s skin. Oh yea. Make it clear for all to see that Microsoft’s touted research group had to license an MP3 encoder. And make it clear for all to see that Microsoft avoided licensing the encoder from its rightful inventor. Instead, Microsoft cut a sweetheart deal with a small offshore company to get an equivalent–but according to the jury invalid–license. And in this case Danny the bully may have to pay some damages to Edie. Big damages.
Microsoft execs can be bullies when it comes to stepping on others’ intellectual property. (Of course, they can also be very nice.) It’s former CTO has testified that when he worked at the company, there was a macho culture that encouraged ignoring other companies’ prowess and patents. Microsoft execs tended not to worry about licensing intellectual property, or even giving credit to previous inventors. The culture at Microsoft was to make anything necessary to win at competition. Execs dealt with issues like idea theft and intellectual property rights only as needed.
For years this worked for Microsoft, according to its CTO. Microsoft could pretty much bully its way around the playground.
Finally with the Netscape case, Microsoft was brought down. It bullied Netscape and was caught and disciplined. But not much, and taming the bully required years of effort on behalf of the government and many companies.
Now consider this: What if Netscape had patented its innovations? Netscape had licensed from the University of Illinois the core browser patents. Netscape had paid for the innovation it popularized. And Mark Andresson left the University of Illinois and joined Netscape and created a team that made many many new inventions. Do you remember when Netscape put out a new release ever few days?? Many of those would have been patentable inventions.
Should Netscape have patented those inventions? Yes, they should have!
Would Netscape patents have leveled the playing field when Microsoft started threatending and bullying Microsoft? In the famous meeting where Microsoft said to Jim Barksdale, the Netscape CEO, that Netscape would have to let Microsoft have the market or be crushed, would a strong portfolio of pending patents have led to a different conversation? I think so.
Now Microsoft is facing an acusation that it infringed ideas created at Bell Labs. Bell Labs can not be accused of being other than a real lab. Bell Labs may seem passe now, but Bell Labs brought us many of the most important information technology inventions of the past century. Bell Labs genuinely invested in innovation. If you put Bell Labs scientsts up against Microsoft research scientists, by any measure Bell Labs scientists did more innovation, more “deep innovation–for example in materials and semiconductors–they invented the transistor and fiber optic communications, for example.
Microsoft build an empire on top of innovation at Bell Labs and other companies. Now Microsoft may have to pay for that priviledge, or develop its own technlogy.
Oh, yea, remember, the first Microsoft operating system, DOS, was developed by little “Seattle Computing” and purchased by Microsoft who then licensed it to IBM…
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Story Two: Bullies can crush an individual inventor even when she or he has patents.
Consider this story, based on true accounts and put into a fictionalized form:
An independent inventor named Joe lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Joe educated himself in engineering at the nearby University of Iowa, lived modestly, and focused on inventing as new type of graphic display.
After ten years of work, Joe made a series of important inventions for touch screens and swirling images. These make possible a new form of user experience.
He was excited. Joe’s old high school buddy who runs a successful landscaping and garden center had partially financed him. He wondered if they and their families might get a little of their money back. They and Joe paid a total of $123,000 to file patents over the years, playing by the rules of innovation that started back in Thomas Jefferson’s day.
The inventor open sourced his ideas, relying for fairness of attribution and commercial return on patent protection.
Joe the inventor contributed his ideas to the public dialogue, openly. [By the way, Bell Labs did this as well, at a large scale. In addition, Bell Labs worked with universities to share and teach advanced ideas. Unix, the ancestor of Linux, was a Bell Labs operating system licensed free to education.]
Joe’s patent applications were published 18 months after each filing–years before they were successfully awared to him. Scientists at Microsoft and other companies read Joe’s patent applications and learned from them, and tried in many cases to engineer around them.
Joe did not hide behind trade secrets. He depending on the protection of patents in a world of open dialogue. He spoke to others in the industry. He was a good citizen of the innovation community.
Joe believed he did not need to be secretive, because he had patent protection. His inventions were his property, registered and certified by the government.
Under the law, Joe’s patents were exactly like the real estate title to his thee-bedroom, one-bath house and the 100 by 50 plot of land under it. His next door neighbor–a nice person, by the way– would not be able bully him out of his house and land, because he had title registered with the State of Iowa and the County of Linn.
Joe’s patents were a property right. Albeit a limited one. Land title lasts forever, and house title outlasts the house. In the case of patents, the title is of a limited term, so that if others cannot work around it, they can freely use it after a period of years. A patent is a limited-term property title to an invention. A patent provides a property right to something an inventor makes.
Joe decided the time was right to visit a big company, because he saw a big market that he and his friends in Cedar Rapids could not reach. [Cedar Rapids is not perhaps as isolated as you might think. Collins Radio was founded there. The founder of Go Daddy, the ever-clever Bob Parsons, started his prediscesor business Parsons Technology in Cedar Rapids.].
The people Joe met at the big company seemed very nice. They payed for his flights to Seattle, they put him up in a nice little boutique hotel on Lake Washington. He had never stayed in a boutique hotel before, and he especially liked the big fluffy pillows and the down comforter. He told his spouse and kids about this when he got back to Cedar Rapids.
The big company executives were happy to meet with Joe. They knew his work from his published patents and from his high profile in the community. The executives were so interested that they assembled nine people including six computer scientsts for the first meeting.
A leading big company scientist in the Graphics group said on behalf of the group that they were “very excited.” The inventor became excited. He thought to himself: “Finally myideas would reach fruition on a large scale. This big company had resources!”
After the first meeting he took an early flight from Seattle to Chicago. Then he flew a smaller regional jet into into Cedar Rapids. The whole way he was high! When the plane landed in Cedar Rapids, he practically danced down the steps from the plane and across the taxiway into the terminal. He barely noticed the light rain that drenched his blue cotton shirt.
Over the next few months discussions continue by phone. The company scientists talked with him. Some days he barely left his basement study, because he was trapped in endless conference calls. He put a small coffee maker in his study, so he could make coffee while his speaker phone was on mute.
His contacts at the big company apologized that “things move slowly here..”
Then one day a strange thing happened. He call Seattle and his main contact wasn’t available. He was “in a meeting”.
The inventor kept calling, but was not able to get through. Things seemed strange to him. The nice admin at the other end of the phone now seemed nervous and strangely distant. She had seemed so open before.
Then one day he checked his email, looked on the net, and saw a special announcement from the company. They had made “a revolutionary invention” in their labs.
He put an urgent call to the company. There must be a mistake.
The scientist does not call back. A person in the legal department responded later in the day. He said that there will be no deal. He said what the big company scientists learned in meeting with Joe was that their own technology was better. “We were working on it already.” Sorry.
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Joe did not have the resources to fight the bully. When he talked to lawyers, they didn’t want to take his case, because they had a “conflict” about suing a large potential client.
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Times are changing. Now law firms will take small inventor’s claims. Private investors will fund these efforts. No longer can large firms step on small inventors with inpunity.
It is ironic that big companies call these small inventors “trolls.” Kind of insulting. The term “troll” was invented by the Intel chief lawyer. Intel?? Ask AMD about Intel and patent litigation. I think the record will show that Intel is perhaps the most aggressive about its patents and about stomping out small companies that it sees as infringers.
Let us go back to the playground. Is the class comic who gets under the skin of the bully a troll? Or a hero??
Is the class bully a “pillar of the technology establishment” and worthy of special “patent reform” to protect if from the class comic? From “trolls?”
Or is the bully a bully.
“Troll” is a term that bullies at Intel (this is literally true) popularized to deride and undercut support for the little guys who piss them off but who they can’t crush.
Bryan Alexander posted this nice note:
Liberal Education Today – Post details: Teaching with OPML
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007
Teaching with OPML
Filed under: Pedagogy, Weblogs, Tools — Bryan Alexander @ 02:55:01 am
Ursinus College religion professor Nathan Rein is exploring using OPML files in the classroom. OPML files can organize information and sources in openly accessible, easy to use formats.
Rein mentions OPML Workstation [AKA Intelligent Teams] as one resource, where he created a sample class, along with one OPML reader.
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Imagine a course, “The Internet and Presidential Politics”. Imagine that you are the professor of this class. Imagine that you ask members of your class–perhaps a hundred students in all-to participate in the following experiment:
During the first week of class, each student personally invests two one-half-hour periods surfing the web. Students are asked to find material that might be of interest to the class as a whole, and might be relevant to the topic of the class.
The students click a special bookmarklet to capture pages. A simple click saves each contribution into a collective list fed by the selections of a hundred students! These selections are exhibited, most-recent-at-top, in an infinite scrolling list on a public web site.
After posting their contributions, students read through the listings and pick out three of most personal interest. In class and sections, students what moved them about their particular choices.
This exercise is hosted at OPML Workstation. The professor creates a “target folio” and writes a first paragraph to introduce the topic. The professor sets the access control to allow visitors to comment/edit the page. This is done with one click in the Writer, as the page is created. The entire time required is minimal.
Students are asked to visit the folio page. It is hosted at http://opmlworkstation.com/browse/theinternetandpresidentialpolitics
At the top of the page, just under the title, there is a drag-and-drop “Bookit” tag. Students drag this into their browser toolbar and it becomes a “bookmarklet.” As they subsequently surf the web, clicking the bookmarklet posts page references to the chosen folio.
Note, the bookmarklet is simple but powerful. Highlighted selections of text on the page are captured and posted. Comments can be added. YouTube or Google Video is automatically grabbed and is displayed.
Imagine the velocity of contributions that could be achieved with a dozen students, or a hundred! Lots of fun to see what is posted to the shared feed!
Let us know when you try this!
