Welcome to Gahtan’s Technology and Internet Law Blog

An edited version of the following appeared in my Bits and Bytes column in the December 12, 2005 issue of Law Times News:

A blog or weblog is an online journal or newsletter that is kept on the Internet and updated frequently (usually daily). Blogs may contain original articles on a particular topic or may include a quote or link to a news story along with the blogger’s commentary. There are currently over 20 million blogs on the Internet with about 70,000 new blogs being created every day.

Although many of the popular search engines can be used to search material posted in blogs, a numbr of blog specific search tools have also been developed in order to provide more timely results. One of the better tools is Google’s BlogSearch (blogsearch.google.com/). Yahoo has also a blog searching capability in its news search tool (news.yahoo.com/). In both cases, it is possible to read commentary on news almost as it happens.

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Linksysinfo has apparently found an FCC application filed by Linksys for a new, yet unannounced, wi-fi VOIP handset. No word yet on product availability. However, I’ve quickly reviewed the user manual as posted on the FCC website and what I am really excited about is that the phone appears to include a web browser. This address the problem have written about before (here and here) that all other current wi-fi voip handset cannot be used at most public hotspots since almost all either require a user to log in or require a user to at least click through a page referencing terms and conditions of use.

Congratulations Linksys!!!

I sometimes like to look for interesting stories on topics of interest using Technorati. However, the rising number of spam blogs is making the task more time consuming. Here’s a suggestion to Technorati - how about adding a “block this blog” button which can be used to prevent specified blogs from coming up on future searches made by that user. If enough regular users block a particular blog, Technorati could even block that blog for everyone (with or without a human review, depending on the threshold that’s set). How about it.

Business Week has a viewpoint article, written by a former scientist (who owns some 70 patents) and current VC, about how the current US patent system is hurting innovation. According to Greg Blonder:

The patent system was designed to encourage the free flow of ideas, in exchange for a temporary monopoly. Not all ideas, however, are worth pursuing, worth defending, or worth backing financially. And this gets to what, at bottom, is wrong with the patent system: We issue patents too easily for trivial ideas, thus diminishing protection for true breakthrough ideas.

According to the New York Times, the USPTO has notified both NTP and Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry wireless e-mail device, that the technology patents at the heart of an infringement lawsuit by NTP against RIM are likely to be struck down. The office has issued preliminary rejections of all five wireless e-mail patents in the past. The final rulings may come by mid-February, earlier than expected.

On the last episode of Security Now, Steve Gibson gave high marks to a product called Hamachi, a product that can be used to set up a very secure, easy to implement and “open” virtual private network (VPN) between two or more computers.

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Better keep those cell phones close at hand, and LOCKED. According to the Globe and Mail law professor Susan Drummond received a phone bill for $12,237.60 - 160 times larger than her normal bill - and which primarily consisted of calls to foreign countries that included Pakistan, Libya, Syria, India and Russia. As a result of researching the fraud, Drummond and her partner discovered that phones of senior Rogers executives, including Mr. Rogers himself, were repeatedly “cloned” by terrorist groups that used them to make thousands of overseas calls. Ms. Drummond is apparently pursuing legal action against the cellphone giant, charging that the company can easily spot a fraud-in-progress, yet “lets the meter run.”

Not too long ago, many universities started taking a more serious interest in the value of the collaborative research they conduct. Such interest however has been steadily slowing down the time it takes to negotiate new deals as each party tries to “protect” its intellectual property rights. To address this problem, a number of technology companies (I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Cisco) and American universities (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Georgia Institute of Technology and the universities of Stanford, California at Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Illinois and Texas) have agreed on principles for making software developed in collaborative projects freely available. The guidelines and framework for the agreement will posted this week at www.ibm.com/university, and at the Kauffman foundation’s site, www.kauffman.org.

From the New York Times.