Eight Corporations May be Learning the Hard Way about Patent Infringement
A patent troll has launched an action against eight LMS companies. IPLearn holds US Patent 5,967,793, 'Relationship-Based Computer-Aided-Educational System', which describes a way for students to learn a new subject based on its relationship to subjects they already know (in other words, what we generally call 'adaptive learning'). More...

Kodak wins Java patent suit
Could Kodak own object oriented programming? That's apparently what a U.S. judge thinks as he awarded an absolutely outrageous victory to the photography company in a lawsuit against Sun. Kodak maintained that the core technology used in Java - "the method where an application 'asked for help' from another application" - violated a patent it bought from Wang in 1997, several years aftr Java was created. More...

Group: Linux Potentially Infringes 283 Patents
It's discomforting to see the two sides gear up for what may become an all-out patent war against open source. Can't say I didn't see it coming, though. More...

Postini Antispam Patent Could Cause Headaches
So how would you feel if you could not block spam because some company received a wide-rranging patent for email filtering. Such a possibility is in the cards after the U.S. patent office granted (as usual, well after such systems were widely deployed) just such a patent. More...

Schools Targeted in Streaming Video Patent Claim
Don't bother reading the full article (you'll see what I mean). Everything you need is in the first paragraph, with the exception of two strategically deleted words: streaming video. More...

Pattern Recognition
"Google is disintermediating the library." This is one of the observations that led the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) to take a new look at the landscape and reassess its vision accordingly. More...

Patent Bending
This brief article gets at what's wrong with the current patent environment in a few sentences. Imagine a world in which you had to pay royalties if you sold advertising in newspapers, fast food, delivered packages overnight, or threw a forkball. Patents hinder the competition from copying your invention, which by most accounts is fine. But today's regime crushes entire industries. More...

Strands of Standards is an Anti-Pattern
Tom Hoffman, Tuttle SVC, February 3, 2014
Although Liping Ma's article is a critique of the reorganization of mathematics instruction, it offers lessons applicable to the redefinition of learning into the acquisition of competencies in general. Tom Hoffman summarizes it nicely: "Ma's argument is that American elementary school mathematics was profoundly but nearly imperceptibly transformed by the switch from what she calls a 'core-subject model' to a 'strand' model. The difference to Ma is that a 'core-subject' '...is a collection of skills or a self-contained subject with principles similar to those of the discipline of mathematics." Now a strand isn't the same as a competency, but the problem is the same. More...

IE Patent Endgame Detailed
If you use plug-ins on your website, prepare for some changes as Microsoft continues to lose appeals to a verdict declaring that a small holding company actually "invented" plug-ins, and that Microsoft and presumably other browsers, are in violation. More...

A Stroll Through Patent History
"Developing countries like India, which is scheduled to come into full compliance with an international patent treaty in 2005, may be better off without strong patent laws." Many people have been saying this for a while, but this author has come up with some proof. More...