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The Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) of the European Parliament is preparing these days in view of the discussion on unitary patent on 17 and 18 September 2012. The issue of interest is whether these discussions will bring back the return of software patents as it seems to be the case, having in view the recent patent wars in the US (like that of Apple against Samsung). There is also the threat of letting companies monopolize the market thus preventing innovation and the introduction of new products.
Several groups, like April and FSFE, call for a general mobilisation to contact all MEPs, so that the European Parliament finally tackles the issue of the software patentability.
Gérald Sédrati-Dinet, April's patent advisor:
"Software patents are a real scourge for companies and software developers. They do not contribute to innovation whatsoever, but prevent us from developing new products while exposing us to ever increasing legal uncertainty."
Although European laws prohibit software patents, the European Patent Office (EPO) has been trying for years to legalize software patents and, under the new proposal to be discussed, the power and control on the law on patentability would be left to an organisation, without any democratic control or the opinion to go before an independent court.
Under the current proposal, the European Patent Office has the right to award a patent, but also takes the final decision on whether it remains valid when someone complains.
After a one year and a half battle with the US authorities, the sports streaming and download Spanish site Rojadirecta has succeeded in winning back its domain names, after the authorities dropped the lawsuit against it on 29 August 2012.
The .org and .com domains of Rojadirecta were seized in January 2011 as part of operation Operation In Our Sites, on a very questionable basis of intellectual property rights violation, and without any court order. The site had already been considered as legally operating in Spain by two Spanish courts.
This is not the first case of this type. In 2010 music blog Dajaz1 had its domain name seized which was returned after more than 12 months. It turned out that the seizure, initiated by the RIAA, was a mistake.
This webinar will cover the 3 main options available to the B2B online marketer and discuss the critical considerations you need to be aware of before engaging in one of these programs.
Presenter: Hartland Ross
Facebook is not like other companies that have hard assets and an established user base that will be there even when the company disappears. Facebook is not Apple nor Microsoft nor IBM nor Google nor GE nor Samsung. Those companies have hard assets and an established user base.
Just one day of bad trading, could easily set up a domino effect for more bad days with Facebook stock, and soon thereafter, it would be in its deathbed. Companies such as RIM and Nokia, would take a lot longer to dwindle down to nothing. A Microsoft or an Apple or a Google, would take a long longer, and, their death spirals would have triggered by some very huge mistakes in management.
You may like Facebook and so do many millions of people, but, what Facebook offers, is not a critical product or service that people couldn't live without, and that's what most people fail to realize. Facebook's core business is not its social networking platform. It's the sale of advertising space to advertisers. The millions of Facebook users are not Facebook's clients. The advertisers are. The social networking platform is a MEANS to gather viewers and information about those viewers so those eyeballs can be sold to advertisers. And that's where the problem lies. So far, Facebook has been good at attracting visitors, but they fail at keeping their real clients, the advertisers, happy. And a client who isn't happy is a client who won't be back and will spend his money elsewhere.
Facebook has no steady stream of income and has maneuvered itself in such a position where it has to be extremely careful about how it plans to force more ads on its visitors... or it might end up being the next MySpace.
BayTSP and Peer Media, two prominent anti-piracy companies that are expected to participate in the U.S. six-strikes anti-piracy scheme are already monitoring thousands of torrent files. Statistics obtained by TorrentFreak show that BayTSP and Peer Media have been increasing their activities in recent months.
The BitTorrent activity of these two companies is three times greater than that generated by all customers of a smaller ISP such as Sonic.net
For years BayTSP and Peer Media have been hired by movie studios and record labels to track the IP-addresses of file-sharers so these can be reported to their Internet providers.
In the U.S. this process is about to change as it will soon be formalized with the upcoming six-strikes anti-piracy scheme. Under this mechanism customers of five large ISPs will receive so-called copyright alerts. Besides being warned, repeat infringers face a variety of punishments under the new regime including temporary Internet disconnections. The MPAA and RIAA may eventually use the collected data to sue file-sharers even though New York Judge Gary Brown has already ruled that an IP-address alone is not sufficient evidence to identify copyright infringers.
Last Thursday and Friday, Facebook Inc director Peter Thiel sold roughly $400 million worth of Facebook shares, according to a regulatory filing. Thiel sold his shares at average prices ranging between $19.27 and $20.69 per share after the end of the first lockup, which barred early investors and insiders from selling shares following the IPO.
Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and was among Facebook's earliest backers, still owns roughly 5.6 million shares of Facebook.
Thiel, the libertarian entrepreneur who pays students $100,000 each to drop out of school and pursue business ideas, is one of Silicon Valley's more prolific investors. After selling his then-startup PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion, Thiel bankrolled Facebook in its early days.
