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OpenPatents.org Home Moving at the Speed of Creativity » Blog Archive » IP, the Inf <div class="greet_block wpgb_cornered"><div class="greet_text"><div class="greet_image"><a href=" rel="nofollow"><img src=" alt="WP Greet Box icon"/></a></div>Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to <a href=" rel="nofollow"><strong>subscribe to the RSS feed</strong></a> for updates on this topic.<div style="clear:both"></div></div></div> Today’s NPR segment, “On YouTube, Popularity Can Be a Curse” discussed intellectual property issues in our era of YouTube-posted videos and antiquated copyright laws. Jason Fry, assistant managing editor for WSJ.com, asserts in the piece that YouTube is revolutionary because it makes “something that used to be hideously difficult” (posting video to the web, viewing video on the web, and embedding web video in other webpages) relatively easy. Sharing ideas.

esp@cenet &amp; Home page The Economy of Ideas The Economy of Ideas A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Age. (Everything you know about intellectual property is wrong.) By John Perry Barlow "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. Throughout the time I've been groping around cyberspace, an immense, unsolved conundrum has remained at the root of nearly every legal, ethical, governmental, and social vexation to be found in the Virtual World. Most of the people who actually create soft property - the programmers, hackers, and Net surfers - already know this. From Swords to Writs to Bits

Copyrights Important note: The Wikimedia Foundation does not own copyright on Wikipedia article texts and illustrations. It is therefore pointless to email our contact addresses asking for permission to reproduce articles or images, even if rules at your company or school or organization mandate that you ask web site operators before copying their content. The only Wikipedia content you should contact the Wikimedia Foundation about is the trademarked Wikipedia/Wikimedia logos, which are not freely usable without permission. Permission to reproduce and modify text on Wikipedia has already been granted to anyone anywhere by the authors of individual articles as long as such reproduction and modification complies with licensing terms (see below and Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks for specific terms). If you wish to reuse content from Wikipedia, first read the Reusers' rights and obligations section. To this end, Contributors' rights and obligations Using copyrighted work from others Copyright violations

Google Blatantly Copies Yahoo!? I'm not sure if this is stupidity, laziness, or a mix of both, but check this out. Back when IE7 launched, Yahoo! created a customized version and began to market it to our existing IE users. The "splash page" looked like this: Today it seems that Google has similar intentions. So similar, that they decided to basically copy our page and slightly Googlify it. WTF is that about? Was some product marketing person so uninspired that he or she decided it was "good enough" to just copy us? Seriously, click those images and look at the full-sized versions. Yikes. Update (10:45pm): Google appears to have updated the page so that it looks far less like Yahoo's page now. Posted by jzawodn at December 11, 2006 01:57 PM Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone. Privacy: I do not share or publish the email addresses or IP addresses of anyone posting a comment here without consent.

Peer to Patent By JOELLE TESSLER, AP Technology Writer Some of the biggest players in the technology industry complain that the U.S. patent system is broken — putting too many patents of dubious merit in the hands of people who can use them to drag companies and other inventors to court. And Blaise Mouttet, a small inventor in Alexandria, Va., thinks he knows why. The problem, he said, is that "there are too many lawyers and not enough inventors involved with the patent system." So Mouttet is taking part in an experimental program launched in June 2007 with the U.S. The concept behind the program, called Peer-to-Patent, is straightforward: Publish patent applications on the Web for all to see and let anyone with relevant expertise — academics, colleagues, even potential rivals — offer input to be passed along to the Patent Office. Peer-to-Patent has attracted financial support from a cross-section of the technology sector and foundations and is in its second pilot year.

Suit exposes flaws in Creative Commons | Tech news blog - CNET N When Creative Commons first surfaced, it was heralded as a means to share media without being ensnared by the complications accompanying traditional copyright. With six different licenses available, media creators were provided the opportunity to dial in the exact rights they wanted. Or at least that was the plan. In reality, this bevy of choices has led to significant confusion and as CNN reports, 16 year-old Alison Chang recently learned her picture is being used for a Virgin Mobile ad campaign in Australia. On April 21, 2007, during a church camp, Chang's counselor snapped a photo of her and uploaded it to his Flickr account. In less than two months, the photo had been cropped and repurposed to promote Virgin Mobile in Australia. Upon learning of the ad, Chang wrote on a Flickr page, "hey that's me! It's unclear whether Virgin coughed up any loot, but Chang's family has taken legal action against the company for not obtaining proper permission for the use of her likeness.

Flickr user sues Virgin Mobile over &#039;derogatory&#039; ad | A TEXAS family is suing Australia's Virgin Mobile phone company over an advertisement they claim caused their teenage daughter grief and humiliation. Alison Chang's photograph was used as part of a Virgin Mobile Australia campaign called "Are You With Us Or What?". It featured pictures downloaded from photo-sharing website Flickr superimposed with the company's ad slogans. In the ad featuring Ms Chang, a photograph of the 16-year-old flashing the peace sign appeared with the text "Dump your pen friend" on top. The ad also said "Free text virgin to virgin" at the bottom. The original photograph, which can be seen here, was taken in April by a youth counsellor who posted it on his Flickr page. On another Flickr page, the user who uploaded the original photo and a user who claims to be the teenage girl in it can be seen discussing the advertisement. Ms Chang's family claim the experience damaged Ms Chang's reputation and exposed her to ridicule from her peers and people who can now Google her.

EndOfIntellectualProperty &lt; Main &lt; Reprap Adrian Bowyer "Intellectual property is dead." Eric von Hippel, Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, in his keynote address to the World Conference on Mass Customization and Personalization, MIT, October 2007. Go up to a stranger in the street and ask them to give you the keys to their car, and you will receive an abrupt and unhelpful reply. Go up to a stranger in the street and ask them to give you their most interesting idea, and fifteen minutes later you will be glancing at your watch and inventing fictitious dentist's appointments. This prompts a profound biological question: if information is such valuable property, what is the Darwinian selective advantage in the ubiquitous impulse to give it away? Parts of the human mind are there for the same reasons. "But hang on," you say. True, normally: it is the peacocks that have to drag around the tail and the stags that have to hold the antlers aloft. But creativity doesn't fade with it.

What is Location Prominence?%20%C2%BB%20Understanding%20Google%2 In the local space a number of us have reported on and studied factors that affect ranking in Google Maps. One factor that has been difficult for us to qualify, much less quantify, is that of “Location Prominence.” In the organic world all are familiar with the concept of PageRank, a reiterative view of the web that ranks a website based on the strength of the links coming into a site. Google wanted to fundamentally change how local had been done in the 2004-5 timeframe and looked to create a similar system to evaluate and rank business listings in the Maps index. Whereas PageRank is a heuristic number used to rank websites, in the system that Google engineers came up with, they termed the analogous collection of Local data points the “Location Prominence Score” to rank local business listings. In some ways it is perhaps a more robust deployment of the PageRank concept into the geo spatial world of business listings. Google, however, didn’t limit themselves to these five above factors.

Yahoo Obtains U.S. Patent For Human-Aided Search Ranking Method Remember when Yahoo was nothing more than a directory of the best links on the Web as determined by human editors? The Web is too vast for any humans to keep track of, but what if you could combine the heavy lifting of computers with the smarts and expert knowledge of humans? Well, Yahoo now has a patent for that. Yahoo today was awarded a U.S. patent for a “Method and apparatus for search ranking using human input and automated ranking”, which was originally filed more than 7 years ago. The patented method described in the documents calculates search rankings based on a combination of automated algorithms and human editor input. In the description, Yahoo admits there are disadvantages to human editors (mainly caused by the sheer volume of information available on the Web), but says the benefits are clear: I wonder about two things.

Google Revisits Historical Data Ranking Factors One of the biggest stirs of 2005 in the search marketing field was caused by the release of a patent application from Google titled Information retrieval based on historical data. It introduced time as a dimension of ranking pages, with changes in content and linking and advertising and topics as factors to be considered, as well as rates of change. It discussed signals that might send warnings to search engines that some sites might be engaged in spamming the search engine. Two years later, the Historic Data patent application seems to have re-emerged, and cloned itself under a number of names, with expanded claim sections that detail different aspects of the processes described in the original. There doesn’t really seem to be much that is new in these documents when held up to the original from 2005. Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Patents | Google: SEO