There has been a lot of controversy and debate over whether too many things are patentable, especially in the software and business method areas. 

Many thought the Amazon 1-click patent, which was under review, should not be valid.  The USPTO has, however, confirmed the patent.

Mike Masnick of Techdirt sums it up nicely, with links to further detail.  Mike says:

US Patent Office Decides That One Click Really Is Patentable

from the wow dept

Ladies and gentlemen, we now have confirmation that the USPTO is a joke. After years of back and forth, it has decided, once again, that Amazon’s one-click patent is perfectly valid. This, despite tons of prior art, and basic common sense. We were just wondering what was taking so long for the USPTO to reject the patent. But, of course, it seemed like the USPTO was willing to go out of its way to help keep this patent around. Of course, as some are pointing out, the end result of this patent surviving is that it may be used as example number one for patent reform.

That’s my Slaw post for today.   It reads as follows:

I was reading my usual RSS feeds this morning, partly to see if I could find some inspiration for my Slaw post for today, and found the following post on Techdirt. I couldn’t agree more – and since this is one of those “like he said” posts that I can’t really improve on – I’ve simply reproduced it below. I know the author, Mike Masnick, won’t mind so long as I don’t take credit for writing it.

The Rule Of Law Over The Rule Of Reason

from the stop-the-insanity dept

While not directly a tech/business related story, Jonny sent in this rather disturbing story of a grandmother arrested in Indiana for buying two whole boxes of cold medicine in less than a week. As you’re probably aware, most states have greatly limited the ability to buy cold medicine that contains pseudoephedrine, the ingredient that makes most cold medicines effective — but also a key ingredient used in making meth. So, rather than deal with the growing meth problem head on, many politicians sought to annoy pretty much anyone with a serious cold by making it quite difficult to get any drug that actually contains useful medicine.

Apparently, the Indiana law forbids buying more than 3.0 grams of the stuff in a single week, and the two boxes of cold medicine exceeded that amount. The end result? Police show up at the woman’s house and arrest her — and then keep defending the arrest, citing meth abuse, even as everyone admits that this woman was not making meth:

         “I feel for her, but if she could go to one of the area hospitals and see a baby born to a meth-addicted mother …”

It’s difficult to see what that has to do with anything considering that everyone knows this woman had no intention of making meth. The whole thing is ridiculous, but is symptomatic of a problem that we’re seeing all too often, where the focus is on enforcing poorly thought out laws, to ridiculous consequences, with no attempt to ever look at the negative consequences and seeing if the original law made any sense in the first place.

We’ve discussed this in the past with regards to other laws as well. In business, if you plan a new initiative, you have metrics and you check to see if you accomplish them, and you monitor negative effects of what you do as well. So why don’t politicians ever do this? When they pass a law to ban spam, increase copyright duration or take away privacy for some reason or another, why are politicians never asked to put in place benchmarks to see if the laws actually do what they promise? Why aren’t there any plans for a change or a removal of the law if it turns out to do more harm than good? Certainly, by this point in time, there’s a better process to creating regulations than simply saying what they’re intended to do without ever bothering to check to see if those goals are achieved?

A BC NDP candidate just dropped out of the election because of some racy photos on his Facebook page.

Mike Masnick of Techdirt points out that he had a post 3 years ago that suggested this might happen based on an article I wrote at the time.

Mike comments that we have not yet reached the point where such “youthful indiscretions” posted on the web are ignored.

The dividing line between “youthful indiscretions” and something serious enough to impair one’s career is very subjective.  It moves with the type of thing one is applying/running for, the entity one will be working for, and the person/people who are making the decision or evaluating the individual.

It might be interesting to track this over time to see if we become more tolerant of indiscretions posted on the web, and the nature of the indescretions that are tolerated and not tolerated.

Perhaps someone should start a wiki and track the “social network indiscretion index”, or “SNII”.  (Now there’s an acronym for a Wired magazine bit. )

We all hear about web sites that simply take the content of others and post it as if it is their own – usually to try to make money off ads.   They add no original comment or commentary.  They are commonly referred to as “scraper sites“.  Sometimes they give attribution to the original site and/or author – sometimes they don’t.   Those who publish blogs and use tools like Google persistent search to see where their names show up sometimes find parts of their material in odd places.

Here’s an example.   I wrote a few days ago about a Google adwords case.  Mike Masnick of Techdirt commented on my post in one of his.

Take a look at the comments on my post.  Note that the 2nd and 3rd ones are from sites that simply lifted Mike’s post off Techdirt. 

And yes, I do note the irony that by posting this I’m actually bringing more attention to those sites.

That’s the title of my Slaw post for today. It reads as follows:

I attended day 1 of the Mesh conference yesterday. (I had a conflict for today – but a colleague is going in my place.) Some video from the event is already on the Mesh site.

The highlight for me was the keynote by Mike Masnick of Techdirt. Anyone interested in changing business models and how to conduct business on the web should follow the Techdirt blog.

Microsoft had one of their Surface devices there. If you ever get a chance to play with one, you should. Multitouch technology will be included in Windows 7. That could lead to some interesting things – and may actually breathe life into tablet computers.

Many people in the audience for the keynote sessions sent their questions via Twitter rather than walking up to a microphone. One interesting result was that it enabled the moderator to combine the essence of more than 1 question together.