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Despite things like high gas prices, environmental concerns and the supposed flexibility it gives, people remain largely uninterested in telecommuting. But following this weekend's gas-tanker accident that caused the collapse of a key overpass leading to the Bay Bridge near Oakland, officials are urging people to telecommute if they can to ease the expected months of traffic snarls. A significantly increased or more arduous commute could lead some people to decide to work from home, but pro-telecommuting groups are upset with what they see as a "telecommute only in case of emergency" message. Telecommuting itself isn't an objectively good or bad thing across the board, but if this situation prompts more employers to offer the flexibility of telecommuting to those employees who want it, that's great.

theodop writes "The USPTO has issued Amazon a brand spanking new patent for Determining Page Numbers of Page Images, a process which the e-tailer explains involves 'extracting all numbers that are exactly one different than a number found on an adjacent page'." Basically, they've figured out a way to look at pages in a book and see if some of the pages don't have numbers, and then use basic addition and subtraction to figure out what the actual number of those pages are. This isn't particularly complicated. Why should one company get a patent for it?

There's been a lot of debate about how today's IPO market compares to that of the last boom. This year's first quarter has seen a resurgence not only in total deal volume, but in highly speculative deals from companies that are in the red. The latter part is what has people worried, although there's no rule that says a company must be profitable before it goes public. One good sign is that while the deals are getting done, investors seem to be realistic about the prospects of some of these companies. Clearwire, which faces significant hurdles, has certainly not been a star performer on the market. Last week, Ocean Power Technologies, a company that turns ocean waves into energy, came public, hoping to capitalize on the hot green tech sector. But despite it being well-situated industry-wise, the company's off to a poor start, as investors recognize how weak the company is. This is definitely not how the market would've reacted seven years ago, when any company deemed to be in a hot space raced higher. In fact, the last bubble did have a green tech component, as several companies trying to capitalize on fuel cells saw their stocks explode. All in all, there's little suggest that speculative mania has returned to the market. Yes, investors seem optimistic, as both the spate of IPOs and the record market highs indicate, but they're not so much so that they're ignoring obvious problems with a company's fundamentals.

When news first broke that DoubleClick was a likely to be acquired, the story was that Microsoft had initially sought to buy the company, which prompted Google to step in and steal the deal. Just yesterday, Yahoo went and bought itself its own online advertising firm, in a move that shadowed the DoubleClick deal. Amidst all of this, several analysts started playing the "who's next" guessing game, as it seemed clear that Microsoft would be forced into making a deal of its own. Today there's a rumor that Microsoft is mulling a $1 billion bid for 24/7 Media, a publicly traded firm that's been at the center of much of the speculation, along with competing firm Aquantive. A possible wrinkle here is that 24/7 Media is also thought to be on the wish list of the WPP Group, a traditional advertising firm. If both rumors are true (and at this point, it's hard to gauge their validity), it could set up an interesting battle between two companies with vastly different agendas, and ideas about what they'd do with the company.

While it's not an offer from Yahoo, Dow Jones (publisher of The Wall Street Journal and other financial news outlets), has received an unsolicited takeover bid from News Corp. Rupert Murdoch and Co. are offering $5 billion for the company -- a premium of 65 percent over Dow Jones' closing share price Monday. Some of that premium has disappeared, though, as shares have shot up more than 50 percent today. The company says management and the Bancroft family, its controlling shareholder, are considering the offer, but it's hard to see how they could refuse it, though there's speculation it could set off a bidding war. A News Corp.-DJ tie-up could make a lot of sense, once you get over the disconnect between MySpace and the WSJ. News Corp.'s roots are in newspaper publishing, and its recent push to beef up its online offerings would be bolstered by the content Dow Jones generates, in addition to DJ's strong existing online properties. Another interesting issue the offer raises is how many newspaper companies' ownership structure may be holding them back. The Bancroft family essentially owns all of Dow Jones' class B shares, which carry ten times the voting power of ordinary share, giving them control of the company. The New York Times Company and The Washington Post Co. also have similar ownership structures, which are coming under fire from investors. Backers of such ownership schemes say they're necessary to ensure the companies' commitment to quality journalism, though at this point they seem more crucial to ensure the owners' healthy egos than anything else. The contention that "quality journalism" is at automatically at odds with traditional public ownership or profit-driven private ownership isn't true. In fact, it seems more likely that many newspapers' idea of what they should be doing is an anachronism that's fallen out of step with the market, hence their general lack of success in the internet age -- and a change in their old-style ownership and control structures may be necessary to change their fortunes. Update: Rather unsurprisingly, the Bancroft family says it won't support the offer. However, in after-hours trading, Dow Jones shares haven't pulled back too much, so the market must believe some sort of deal will still happen.

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As expected, Google has officially responded to Viacom's lawsuit. As you probably recall, Viacom has sued Google for $1 billion over the fact that its videos can be found on YouTube and Viacom doesn't like having to issue takedown notices (as per the DMCA). The filing from Google is pretty much exactly what you'd expect. It points out that Google is well within the law. When Viacom sends takedowns, Google complies -- even if Viacom screws up and demands non-Viacom videos get taken down. Google's lawyers also point out that Viacom was one of the companies that pushed for the DMCA and had a clear hand in shaping what was in it -- noting that it's a bit ridiculous for the company to now be complaining about the law it wanted put in place.

Viacom's response to Google's response is a little off. We've already seen Viacom take the case into the court of public opinion (which supports the idea that this is all a negotiation with Google), but the latest response doesn't even pass the most basic reality test. Viacom says that Google does not qualify for DMCA safe harbor protections: "It is obvious that YouTube has knowledge of infringing material on their site and they are profiting from it. It is simply not credible that a company whose mission is to organize the world's information claims that it can't find what's on YouTube."

The first sentence is specifically designed to show why Viacom believes the safe harbor provisions don't apply -- as they're not supposed to apply to content that the service provider knows is infringing or that the company directly profits from. However, neither point is actually true (and Viacom's lawyers should recognize this). While it's true that Google can search the site to see what content is there, since it's not the content owner it has no idea (1) who the actual content owner is or (2) if they want the content on YouTube or not (especially as Viacom's sister company CBS is thrilled with the free publicity it's received from YouTube). If (as Viacom implies) Google needed to take down all content on YouTube that is covered by copyright, that would mean that all content on YouTube would be taken down -- because all content is automatically covered by copyright, as per US copyright law. In other words, Viacom is wrong to imply that Google can somehow magically infer who owns the copyright and whether or not they approve of the use of the content.

The second point Viacom makes, concerning the fact that Google "profits" from the content, is also incorrect. Again, if Viacom were right, then it would render the DMCA's safe harbor provisions totally meaningless -- and we assume they were put in for a reason. Google is not profiting directly off the content. Google is profiting from providing a service for hosting, viewing, sharing and discussing videos. They're profiting off of that service -- not off the videos themselves. This is exactly the type of thing that the safe harbor provision was designed for. The example often used in discussing such a safe harbor provision is the ISP who is hosting infringing material in a user's web account. It's the user that's responsible for that content. However, the ISP is still "profiting" in providing the hosting service. That's no different than what Google is doing. If Google is considered to be profiting off the videos for providing the hosting service, then any ISP will likely fall under the same disqualification for getting paid for providing hosting services.

It seems like Google should be able to make both of these points in court and continue to keep themselves protected against such a ridiculous lawsuit (especially given how little traffic on YouTube actually comes from viewing Viacom content). However, the process will be long and expensive, and there's a decent (though unfortunate) chance that the two companies will simply decide to settle.

Over the weekend, the New York Times published a glowing story about Vudu, a new startup that's developing a set-top box for downloading movies. Yes, this is a plan you've heard before, from the spectacularly failed, Disney-backed Moviebeam to more recent efforts by Akimbo, along with the continued minimal impact of PC-based movie download sites. As Peter Rojas points out on Engadget, the Times story is "long on overblown claims and hyperbole and short on realistic analysis of how resistant consumers have been to paying to download movies over the internet". Vudu has signed up most of the major studios to supply content and says it's got technology that will make movies play immediately, without any waits or stutters. That's great and all, but when consumers have shown so little interest in these types of services before, it's hard to see things changing -- particularly when Vudu wants to make them buy a $300 single-purpose box, then pay per-movie charges on top of that -- in spite of the NYT's puff piece.

Following the latest webcasting rates that will likely put many webcasters out of business, one suggestion was that webcasters should simply play non-RIAA music. In theory this would help in multiple ways -- giving those independent musicians more publicity while avoiding the draconian webcasting rates. In practice... however, that won't work. Slashdot points us to an article dissecting the fine print, where you'll discover that SoundExchange, which is the RIAA's collection body, actually gets to collect money for non-RIAA members as well. In other words, even for independent artists who don't want webcasters to have to pay, webcasters will still need to pay up.

The story actually gets even worse. As we noted a few years ago, part of the deal is that SoundExchange and the RIAA get to keep any unclaimed money for themselves. Even better, SoundExchange can simply pretend not to be able to find the musicians (as they've done with a ton of big name musicians in the past). So, chances are, many independent artists have no idea that SoundExchange is hanging onto a bunch of money they didn't even want collected and there's almost no chance they'll claim it -- meaning that if you try to avoid the webcasting rates by playing non-RIAA music, there's a good chance you're actually enriching the RIAA even more.

Just for fun, why don't we compare two situations? The RIAA tells people that simply listening to music without paying for it is a terrible crime that people should be punished for. Yet... the RIAA getting money for non-RIAA music and not paying the deserving artists that money is perfectly legal? Damn, the RIAA lobbyists are good.

Tim Lee points us to an LA Times article on the growing success of The Pirate Bay's political movement, noting that its membership is growing in Sweden and is nearly equal to that of the country's Green Party. This is ironic for a few reasons -- most of all being that the entertainment industry was so proud over the raids on the Pirate Bay's servers last year, insisting that it had killed off the site. Instead, the site was back up in days, and the attention propelled what had been a fairly minor search engine for BitTorrent trackers into the limelight -- helping to get it many more users and to get the political movement some traction. In fact, we've now seen other political parties take on some of the Pirate Bay's platform. To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this. I don't support the Pirate Bay's position that unauthorized downloads are defensible. Instead, I think that copyright holders need to come to the realization that they're actually better off by letting people download content -- not that it needs to be forced upon them by users taking matters into their own hands. That said, by taking such an extreme position (and having it get some attention), perhaps it's more likely that content holders will come to this realization. They'll simply be forced to adapt and will start coming up with more successful business models that actually benefit from free downloads rather than trying to block them and sue their best customers.

With Vista having failed to ignite a boom in the computer industry, some analysts are starting to turn dour on the future of the PC. David Daoud, an analyst at IDC, thinks it's time for computer makers to rethink the traditional PC, and to work on developing more innovative products. He notes that the basic PC (with its big monitor and QWERTY keyboard) has basically been the same since its inception, and that things like ultra mobile PCs, tablets and other forms that have yet to be invented will come to play an important part role in the industry. Of course, people have been talking about all of these things before, and despite grandiose ambitions, nothing has made a dent in the market. The latest, the ultra mobile PC (UMPC) has pretty much been a dud, despite plenty of backing and hype. This isn't to say that manufacturers shouldn't be exploring alternatives, but as Apple has shown with its resurgent computer business, there's plenty of room for innovation and growth within the traditional confines of the PC.

Iran's Telecommunications Ministry has now announced that it plans to start filtering out any immoral video and audio messages sent via mobile phones. Of course, the key sentence in the article is: "It did not give details of the techniques it would use to filter such messages, when it would start or how it would define "immoral" messages." It's one of those things that may sound nice to overly paternalistic governments, but is impossible to accomplish in real life. Do they plan to have people actually reviewing every text and video message before it gets sent? That clearly will never work (or, will simply guarantee that the messaging becomes close to useless). Or, more likely, they'll buy some crappy filtering software to try to pick up on "naughty" words, which won't work very well and will probably just cause more problems than it solves (assuming you believe immoral messages are a problem in the first place). It's always amusing to see governments make claims like this when it's simply impossible for them to actually achieve what they claim.

It's not uncommon to see politicians blame gadgets for crimes, such as cameraphones for happy slapping, or white earphones for MP3 player theft, since it's far easier to blame faceless corporations and their products than to actually do something about the underlying crimes that occur. Now, in the UK, a government minister is taking things a step further by saying that gadget makers need to "design in features which reduce crimes". He also suggests that people buying new mobile phones should "ask how does this prevent people actually stealing it and selling it again, what are the anti-crime characteristics?" It's not entirely clear what he's after (apart from some political brownie points), but he cites the way mobile operators in the UK blacklist stolen phones so they can't be used, which means that stolen phones just end up getting sold overseas, not that they don't get stolen. It seems like this is just a way to shift some responsibility away from criminals, but particularly away from the police, and blame device manufacturers for making their products too attractive and too easy to steal. What's he want, anyway -- taser-equipped iPods and mobile phones with pepper spray?

We've seen stories of people getting arrested for posting incriminating evidence of themselves on MySpace as well as people losing jobs over info posted to a MySpace profile... but what about losing a degree? techguy83 writes in to let us know of a lawsuit by a woman who was apparently denied an education degree and teaching certificate after school officials found a photo of the woman on her MySpace page from a Halloween party. In the photo (remember, this was a Halloween party), the woman was dressed as a pirate and the photo was captioned "Drunken Pirate." The school claims that the woman was encouraging underage drinking -- but the woman is 27 now and the photo was from 2005, meaning she was 25 (or close to 25) at the time. That's hardly underage. It's not clear why school officials were viewing the woman's MySpace page in determining whether or not she qualified for a degree -- but if other schools start doing the same, I'd imagine we're going to have an awful lot of students who have completed their qualifications, but have no degrees due to incriminating MySpace photos.

Google is getting some press coverage for helping (at no cost) various state governments to put public records online and make them searchable. This seems to fit with Google's overall mission of making the world's information available. It's also noteworthy that Google isn't holding onto control of the content either -- meaning that other search engines are equally able to index the content. However, where the story is most interesting is that certain privacy advocates are complaining about this effort, while also taking side swipes at Google's own privacy efforts. This seems entirely misplaced. The documents that we're talking about here are public documents -- meaning they were already available to the public. All Google has done is improved the accessibility of those documents. In fact, one thing this might do is make people a lot more aware of what private info their local governments have incorrectly exposed. This should help people to better protect their privacy. While one state official complains that all state agencies now need to run around removing things like Social Security Numbers and other private info from these documents, a bigger question is why that information was already available on public documents? It's not Google to blame here for making it easier to access these public records, but the state agencies who simply assumed that they could leave the private info on those documents just because they were difficult (but not impossible) to access.

After Google's acquisition of DoubleClick, it was widely assumed that many smaller online advertising firms were "in play". The fact that Microsoft was also a DoubleClick suitor combined with the fact that Google's rivals couldn't afford to fall too far behind meant it was only a matter of time before another deal was made. Hoping to provide an alternative to the growing Google behemoth, Yahoo has announced the purchase of privately held Right Media, a company in which it already has a 20% stake. Yahoo says that it will create an open ad marketplace, which sounds a lot like the idea that DoubleClick had cooking up before the Google purchase was announced. This isn't likely to be the last deal. Microsoft's Steve Ballmer recently said that his biggest regret was that the company has come late to the online advertising game, which suggests that the company will probably make a deal to play catch up. Now that its two chief rivals have made these purchases, the pressure on Microsoft to get a similar deal done has been ratcheted up.

This morning the Supreme Court came down with two decisions about patent law that both take small, but extremely important, steps towards reigning in some of the worst abuses of the patent system. In both cases, it's disagreed with the position taken by the Appeals Court for the Federal Circuit (CAFC). This isn't a huge surprise, as many observers figured that the Supreme Court's recent interest in all sorts of patent cases meant that the justices weren't at all happy with the way CAFC was moving. This is a good thing, as the past twenty-five years or so of CAFC is a big part of why the patent system has veered out of control. For those who don't get into the details of these things, effectively CAFC was taken over by patent attorneys who pretty much felt that since patents were "good," more patents were "better." They continually expanded what could be patented and how much power patent holders had. This, in turn, meant that many more people and companies started filing for many more patents. While the Patent Office complains that it can't handle the load of patents, rather than hiring more examiners, the solution may simply be in reining in the overwhelming power handed to patent holders by CAFC. Today the Supreme Court took another step in that direction.

The first case was between AT&T and Microsoft, where it was already admitted that Microsoft had infringed on the patent in question. The legal question at stake was whether or not copies of Microsoft Windows outside the US should be counted when calculating the damages. While, normally, patent infringement rules only cover within a country, there is a rule against shipping the components outside the country to be assembled somewhere else just to get around patent infringement rules. So the real question was whether or not shipping a master copy of the software abroad was shipping the "components." The Supreme Court ruled 7 to 1 saying that it was not shipping components -- and that software was more closely related to a blueprint than actual components.

This ruling is likely to cause a number of things to happen. Back when this case was first being presented to the court, one of the amicus briefs tried to show that software shouldn't be patented at all. Since this wasn't the key argument in the case, it seemed like a wasted brief, but the ruling here actually may open up the possibility for a new case that argues exactly that. That is, the court has now made it clear that they consider software to be more of a blueprint than a component, and someone else can now make the argument that, based on this, software should not be patentable. This certainly could get interesting. However, the court did also suggest that Congress may want to clean up this "loophole" so watch out for someone in Congress to slip in a ruling keeping software patents in place before the court has a chance to make more of a statement on this. More immediately, this may help Microsoft lower the amount it needs to pay Alcatel-Lucent in the separate MP3 patent lawsuit -- since approximately half of the $1.5 billion award was based on overseas sales.

The second ruling may be even more important. It's the decision on the Teleflex v. KSR case concerning the obviousness test in patents. Once again, the Supreme Court has smacked down CAFC, saying that the lower court had gone too far in embracing an incredibly strict standard in determining obviousness. This is tremendously important, as the lower court's "test" for obviousness barely exists at all. Effectively, the only thing looked at is prior art, when the law is clear that patents need to be on processes that are both new and non-obvious. If this allows the courts and the patent office to start actually looking at the obviousness of patents, it could help get rid of plenty of really bad patents.

These two rulings, combined with last year's ruling that automatic injunctions don't always make sense for patent infringement are steps in the right direction. The Supreme Court is clearly recognizing that patent law has spiraled out of control and reached an unconstitutional level, where they're being used to hinder, rather than promote, innovation. It's great to see the court now reeling in these abuses, but there's still plenty more to be done before we've cleared out the problems of the patent system. The good news is that the Supreme Court is clearly looking at the issue and clearly recognizing that the constitutional purpose of patents is to promote innovation. As Justice Kennedy noted in that Teleflex ruling: "Granting patent protection to advances that would occur in the ordinary course without real innovation retards progress and may... deprive prior inventions of their value."

As the Vonage-Verizon patent spat winds its way through the courts, Vonage has decide to plead its case in a different court -- the court of public opinion. The company has been taking out ads explaining its position, and basically making the case that Verizon is simply trying to use its patents to stifle competition. Apparently, the Wall Street Journal didn't like a line in one of Vonage's ads, so readers were greeted to a full page ad with one sentence blacked out. It's not clear why the sentence, which read "Now, Verizon has chosen to attack Vonage in the courts. Why? Could it be all about the money?", set off the alarm bells, although presumably it was under some sort of pressure from Verizon. This doesn't really constitute censorship on the Journal's part, since it's a private company and can do whatever it wants, but it is odd that the company would make an editorial decision in this way, and just black out one line, rather than refuse the ad outright. What makes this story particularly odd is that the Journal ran its own article about Vonage's ad campaign, in which it specifically referenced the offending line, as though it were somehow explosive. Assuming that it did face some sort of (presumably legal) pressure from Verizon over the line, the episode is indicative of how high the stakes are for both companies.

Economist Austan Goolsbee had a column in the NY Times last week looking at the economic rationale for why reality TV programming has become so popular these days. It goes well beyond the simple answer that it's cheap to produce. As Goolsbee notes, if that were the case, it would have caught on much earlier. Instead, the argument is that with the rise of satellite and cable TV adding many more options for people's viewing time (and you could argue plenty of other entertainment options as well), the pool from which network TV operators can expect to get viewers is shrinking, forcing them to search out cheaper programming.

However, a separate NY Times article may offer another potential reason (whether on purpose or not). It looks at a new study of what programs people record on DVRs and finds that people are less likely to record "timely" programs on their DVRs, preferring to watch them live. This includes the obvious things like news and sports -- but also reality TV programming. That's because who gets kicked off American Idol is likely to be talked about the next morning at work, and people want to make sure they've seen the latest so they can talk about it. That creates fewer incentives to record the program and watch it later. So, whether or not TV programming execs recognize it, reality TV programming may actually get more people watching, rather than skipping, commercials.

Last month, news spread concerning a somewhat odd lawsuit involving the Internet Archive and the question as to whether or not a computer spider can enter into a contract just by indexing a website. The case involved a woman who ran a website and had put some text at the bottom claiming that just visiting the website was entering into a contract, and part of that contract included not copying or distributing the content. The Internet Archive's spider did what it does and archived the page, leading to the threat of a lawsuit. The Internet Archive preemptively went to court to have a judge say they were in the clear, at which point the woman countersued. Of course, she didn't just countersue for copyright infringement, but a range of charges including racketeering. Most of the discussion focused on whether or not a spider could enter into a contract, though an equally compelling question is whether or not you can automatically force someone to give up their fair use rights. Unfortunately, neither question is going to be decided in this case. WebProNews reports that the woman and the Internet Archive have settled the case out of court with both sides putting happy faces on the story. At the same time, however, WebProNews also reports that the woman in question is still going after some of her critics, including publishing all sorts of personal information about at least two of them, potentially violating some privacy laws (at least one of the critics she's revealing info on is a minor). So perhaps there will still be a lawsuit stemming from this situation after all.