The bounty hunter is a staple character of fiction (see, e.g., Steve McQueen’s last film), fascinating because of the inherent moral ambiguity. He, or in this post-masculine era, she, enforces the law but is also rather outside of it, often suspected of freely crossing the legal line according to the advantages dictated by a flexible [...]

There’s an old saying that you never know how deep a puddle is until you step in it. Well, the lobbying groups favoring “net neutrality” regulations stepped in a puddle last week, and they’re going to have trouble coming up for air. The “puddle” was deciding to include the “retransmission consent” battle going on between Cablevision and Fox in the “net neutrality” rhetoric. The classic “just hold your nose and jump” line came from Public Knowledge, when they opined that Fox’s blocking of online access to their programs on Cablevision’s broadband connection was one of the “the grossest violations of the open Internet committed by a U.S. company.”

ESPN has been blocking ISPs from ESPN360 for the last 4 years unless the ISP pays a per subscriber fee to ESPN and Net Neutrality supporters have always said that was legal. Now that News Corp tried the same thing as ESPN, Net Neutrality advocates want to make that illegal.

BoxTop’s free broadband platform might just be the ticket to reaching unconnected homes without any government entitlements. It seems to have revenue potential for the carrier and the content/application provider and the consumer gets a free computer and free broadband connectivity.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court granted cert in Global-Tech Appliances, Inc. v. SEB to address the standard necessary for a court to find that a defendant has induced patent infringment.  The Federal Circuit had ruled that “Deliberate Indifference” is enough, and the question on which cert was granted was: Whether the legal standard for the “state [...]

Since I am fresh from the Nashville Music Conference, my eye was caught by news that the Broadband Breakfast Club is putting on a panel called Finding Solutions to Problems of Copyright Infringement — Oct. 12 from 8-10 a.m. (Details/Registration.) The blurb: Almost all parties agree that piracy in all of its varieties (P2P services, [...]

Something odd is going on in the world of high tech patents. Microsoft, which used to boast that it simply did not bring patent infringement cases, preferring to work things out among gentlemen and ladies, has shifted to an aggressive posture, with a 243 page Complaint against Motorola over its use of Android (the patents [...]

The Nashville Summit was indeed interesting. Nashville is a pleasant city, especially for someone (moi) who enjoys the combination of country music and Civil War history. (While effete Easterners focus on the Army of the Potomac and its sideshow in Virginia, it was in the West that the Union won the war, and came close [...]

I am off to Nashville tomorrow for the Next Big Nashville/Leadership Music Digital Summit, on Wed & Thurs, a conference combined with a Music Festival in the evenings, plus Fri & Sat. A major sponsor is Arts+Labs, “a collaboration between technology and creative communities that have embraced today’s rich Internet environment to deliver innovative and [...]

In Vernor v. Autodesk, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Autodesk’s software licensing agreement (SWA) trumps the copyright doctrine of “first sale.” (Thanks to Broadband Breakfast for the link, and for a summary of the case.)