The Innovator’s Patent Agreement, developed by Twitter attorney Ben Lee in conjunction with Twitter engineers and outside stakeholders, limits how Twitter can use patents in litigation. While it’s broader than its elevator pitch makes it sound - “Twitter can only use patents defensively” - it’s a brilliant way to rein in the onerous patent litigation miring much of modern technology, and particularly software.
There is plenty of Google news today coming out of their annual I/O conference, but this looks far more important and big-picture, if it actually gets used.
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Number twelve and counting; this looks to be a big year for marriage equality in the United States.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has published data on what hospitals charge for the most common procedures. There is much to look at, and other have done good reporting on it, notably Sarah Kliff and Dan Keating at the Washington Post and Barry Meier, Jo Craven McGinty and Julie Creswell at the New York Times.
The bottom line is that hospital pricing practices appear from this data to be arbitray. I wouldn’t be surprised if pricing flucutated from year to year based on what revenue each hospital brings in. That’s unconscionable, and a failure of the free market in arguably the most important industry. Hospitals would do well to get together and establish transparent and ethical best practices for pricing, because the alternative is onerous regluation to ensure they are not gouging insurance companies, government agencies, and individual patients without regard to actual costs.
This article by Daniela Hernandez at Wired is well-done and fascinating. However, this bit most caught my eye:
Half of the $100 million in federal funding allotted to this program will come from Darpa — more than the amount coming from the National Institutes of Health — and the Defense Department’s research arm hopes the project will “inspire new information processing architectures or new computing approaches.”
Make no mistake: the US military wants intelligent killing machines.
And the steady march continues, as Delaware joins their ten predecessors in granting gay couples the basic American right to marry.
or Charlie Savage of The New York Times:
the new proposal focuses on strengthening wiretap orders issued by judges. Currently, such orders instruct recipients to provide technical assistance to law enforcement agencies, leaving wiggle room for companies to say they tried but could not make the technology work. Under the new proposal, providers could be ordered to comply, and judges could impose fines if they did not.
Concerns that this would prompt similar measures from repressive governments abroad are not overblown. If we expect foreign companies to submit to these procedures, their governments will expect US companies to do the same. I’m surprised this article doesn’t mention anything about what the Obama administration’s diplomats and international law folks think about all of this.
Disgusting. Anything less than dishonorable discharge and jail time will be an insult to victims and to this country.
or Andy Greenberg at Forbes:
Once the file is online, anyone will be able to download and print the gun in the privacy of their garage, legally or not, with no serial number, background check, or other regulatory hurdles. “You can print a lethal device,” Wilson told me last summer. “It’s kind of scary, but that’s what we’re aiming to show.”
Law student Cody Wilson has added some steel to make it detectable and lawful, and gotten the appropriate firearms manufacturing license. But that doesn’t mean the world at large will do the same when Wilson uploads the files needed to print the gun to the internet.
I often write about how technology has made the cost of copying trivial, while the laws on the books still hail from a time when the cost of copying was non-trivial. When it comes to audio and video copyright, that triviality can be economically disruptive at best, and can disturb entire industries at worst. But when it comes to weapons, that triviality to copy is downright dangerous.
Joe Hanlon of TechRadar:
Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos says that there is a correlation between the Netflix launching in a country and BitTorrent traffic slowing down in the same region.
If you stream it, they will pay.
This is a good piece on how hard Facebook tries to keep the social juices flowing. Alexis Madrigal, commenting on Facebook’s designer-hiring spree:
As all these designers vanish into the bowels of the company, so, too, does their work. Facebook wants to create design that both allows and guides behavior without calling attention to itself. And what works in the Deep South must also work in southern India and South America. It must work for 16-year-olds and 86-year-olds.
I think this is the primary reason Facebook makes me uncomfortable: it’s too generic. Sometimes I want a service to be just a little in my way. I realize that you can’t generalize my preferences to hundreds of millions of people, but that just means I’ll never really feel awesome about using Facebook.
It feels like it’s been crafted as simply the most efficient way for me to send targeting data to advertisers…
…because it has.
If you’re a Path user, consider, er, reconsidering. This is apparently the best they can do in response.
CNET’s Jennifer Van Grove was told that he #1 request from users is to find friends on Path, hence the aggressive “new-user flow.”
Why does “find my friends on Path” translate to the app’s creators as “invite everyone in my phone’s address book to use Path, without explaining that the message is automated and being sent because I opted in” ?
I would be happy to advise Path on acceptable, reasonable on-boarding and invitation flows for a modest fee. I can be reached at JoeHelpsPath ( @ ) joeross ( . ) me.
I don’t usually cover sports here, but Collins’ coming out is a very important moment in a broader and permanent change in what it means to be and to accept LGBTQ folks. It’s a well-expressed and bold piece, and I applaud him.
or Marco Arment has turned control of his read-it-later service, Instapaper, over to incubator-turned-company-in-its-own-right Betaworks:
I’m happy to announce that I’ve sold a majority stake in Instapaper to Betaworks. We’ve structured the deal with Instapaper’s health and longevity as the top priority, with incentives to keep it going well into the future. I will continue advising the project indefinitely, while Betaworks will take over its operations, expand its staff, and develop it further.
What’s really intriguing about this is that the Betaworks website includes the following teaser:
Want early access to the new Instapaper and other products we build and invest in? Join Openbeta.
I wonder whether the “new Instapaper” is already in the works, or this is just a clever marketing ploy to get Instapaper fans signed up for Betaworks’ Openbeta mailing list.
All in all, Instapaper is an amazing product, and if Betaworks’ reanimation of Digg is any indication, they’re a good custodian.
or Marco Arment, he of Instapaper, and of excellent commentary:
If you sell a 99-cent app to just 1% of the people who bought new iOS devices in the 2012 holiday quarter alone, you’ll clear about $519,750. Not a bad quarter.
Not bad indeed.
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