The video is a remix by YouTube member damewse with the explanation “NASA is the most fascinating, adventurous, epic institution ever devised by human beings, and their media sucks.” The audio is the late, great Carl Sagan taken from one version of the audiobook version of Pale Blue Dot. See the YouTube page for full credits.

So, what is [Intellectual Ventures] actually doing? Buying up loads of patents and licensing them to companies who calculate it’s not worth the fight is patent trolling 101. Yet the scale they’re operating on puts them on new ground, and opens new opportunities. It seems obvious to get corporate investors on board by promising them immunity from patent claims. With enough patents you stop trying to license them one-by-one and just tax each industry at some non-negotiable rate. No doubt they have more tricks I haven’t even thought of, but these potential devices really do make them a new breed of Super Trolls.

…

Now, I don’t really care if one company leeches off the others. But if they want to tax software, they have to attack free software otherwise people will switch to avoid their patent licensing costs. And if you don’t believe some useful pieces of free software could be effectively banned due to patent violations, you don’t think on the same scale as these guys.

Rusty Russell, “Superfreakonomics; Superplug for Intellectual Ventures.“, July 7th, 2010

I’m also opposed to software patents.

Watching Patent Absurdity: how software patents broke the system is time well spent.

Related Posts:

• My own Great Artists Still Steal, March 4, 2010
• VC and principal of Union Square Ventures, Fred Wilson has a lot of great insights and updates on patents.

[U.S. Vice President Joe] Biden told reporters Thursday at a press conference in Washington, D.C. “But piracy is theft. Clean and simple. It’s smash and grab. It ain’t no different than smashing a window at Tiffany’s and grabbing [merchandise].”
Greg Sandoval, “Biden to file sharers: ‘Piracy is theft’“, cnet

What is “clean and simple” is

• That’s propaganda.
• Piracy happens on the high seas, or in Disney movies.
• Nothing smashed nor grabbed. Property is a physical concept. There is no loss of property from copyright violations.
• There is room for fair use.

I don’t recommend using or distributing works that you don’t have license to.

I do recommend getting involved in Free Culture and Open Source.

One of my great inspirations is Lawrence Lessig’s keynote presentation at the annual Open Source Convention (OSCON) made on July 24, 2002. My favorite parts are:

• Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
• The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
• Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
• Ours is less and less a free society.

‘…the ePub format, which is open and freely available for any device, unlike the Kindle’s proprietary format, which functions only for Kindle. The ePub format is used by every electronic reader except the Kindle, and promises to be a big selling point for Google Editions, the search firm’s planned Web-based electronic bookstore scheduled to launch this summer, which will allow buyers to read books and much else on any number of devices. (This may include, by year’s end, Google’s own tablet computer.) It’s through ePub that readers have instant access to millions of books in the public domain, that electronic publishing has a chance to become standardized, and that writers will have more options when it comes to disseminating and selling their books. …’
Sue Halpern, “The iPad Revolution“, The New York Review of Books, June 10, 2010 (future date)

Photo "Electronic Book" cc by-sa flickr user timonoko

e-text and e-books are topics I’ve been passionate about since ~1998 when Boris Mann tried to convince me that reading a book on a Palm Pilot could be an enjoyable experience — I never did get through more than a few chapters back then.

I’ve watched with fascination as audio, and then video, not text have migrated to digital. Although, writing has always been the main interface to computing, and digitization it is magnitudes smaller than the other medians, the reading experience has been much harder to improve upon than the listening and viewing experiences.

Fast forward to today and since Christmas (spoiled), I’ve read a half-dozen books on my Kindle 2. I’m already itching for better tech. I’m continuing to eye where publishing goes next, particularly the free culture implications

Sue Halpern’s whole article is excellent, and provides deep insights into e-reading, where the iPad fits in, and where e-books fit into Apple’s iPad business. Her essay is among the best I’ve read in a while: clear domain expertise, wide knowledge (open source shout out), objective, and excellent prose.

I emailed Sue, and she confirmed for me,

“DRM [(digital rights management) protected] books don’t go anywhere– yet. I think this will change when Google gets into the game. Right now epub on new books mainly benefits publishers, who don’t have to have books digitized in numerous formats in order to be read on various devices.”

This bug was pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. Probably not many people had ever run into it. But after hours of puzzling over those broken image tags, it felt darned good to find it, and — more importantly — squash it. And after the release of WordPress 3.0, nobody will have to scratch their heads over it again. Yay me!
Dougal Campbell, “Bug Chasing“, March 7th, 2010

“It turns out that the International Intellectual Property Alliance, an umbrella group for organisations including the MPAA and RIAA, has requested with the US Trade Representative to consider countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India for its “Special 301 watchlist” because they use open source software.”

By Bobbie Johnson, “When using open source makes you an enemy of the state“, guardian.co.uk, Feb 23rd, 2010.

Canada is already “special”. We, Canadians, welcome these innovative countries!