The central idea of the patent system is to encourage people to invest in the research necessary in order to create new, better processes. I don’t know a whole lot about patents outside of software, but it makes sense that if a company has to spend millions of dollars creating a new process, then the security of a 20 year patent would make a company feel a lot better about shelling out on a risky research project. For the past couple decades, patents are also applied to software. Software processes rarely take millions of dollars to create, and much of the innovation that happens in software is created small groups or even a single person working for some time, usually with no thoughts of patents in their mind at all. The Linux kernel was a huge innovation started by a college kid in his spare time, and now is a major source of economic activity. Bittorrent was invented by Bram Cohen while he was unemployed and couchsurfing, and now is something like 25% of internet traffic, give or take. Both Linux and Bittorrent not only forgoe patents, but even copyright, in effect, since they are both Free Software. The insanity of software patents is massively compounded by the fact that the USPTO issues patents on really trivial software features. For example, take this patent awarded to IBM (from Patently Absurd):

“To turn a thin line on a computer screen into a broad line, you go up and down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points. You probably learned this technique for turning a line into a rectangle in seventh-grade geometry, and, doubtless, you believe it was devised by Euclid or some such 3,000-year-old thinker. Not according to the examiners of the USPTO, who awarded IBM a patent on the process.”

This is all very relevant now because of the wars over software patents related to mobile phones. Apple has been on the war path recently, doing things like trying to prevent non-Apple software from having things like “multi-touch gestures” (which didn’t even invent, they just bought a startup that create one set of ideas on that topic). Apple wants to prevent HTC from selling Android phones in the US altogether, they don’t even seem willing to license the patents to HTC, they just want to block them from the market. Microsoft is making fives times more money by suing companies shipping Android devices that they do selling their Windows Mobile software. A lot of the big software companies do this, this is not anything new. Then there are the software patent troll shell companies that exist purely to sue based on their patent portfolio. And the sad fact of the whole thing is that the big companies are really only using software patents to either defend against software patent lawsuits or bully other companies into paying them. Small companies doing innovative work are forced to patent their software so that they can survive patent lawsuits from big companies. But often a small companies patent portfolio is just too small to matter, like in this classic story of when IBM shook down Sun for money in the 80s.

The whole thing is becoming farcical, with companies like Google patenting lots of software even though Google has expressly and repeatedly come out against software patents altogether. They need them to survive the patent lawsuits with less damage.

And it is worst in the US, since the US allows far more software patents than anywhere else. Places like the European Union and New Zealand pulling back on software patents and many countries in the world never allowed software patents in the first place.

I like the Forbes guy’s way of putting it: “software patents are becoming a tax on innovation”.

One thing that greatly saddens me about digital media and communicating via the internet or other technology is that we then start choosing which people we communicate the most with based on the technology they happen to use. Like if you use Facebook mostly, you’re probably going to communicate a lot less with people who don’t use facebook. Same goes with SMS, IRC, etc.

I think that digital tools should make it easier to choose who we want to communicate with, not dictate part of that decision. A big way to fascilitate that is to allow different media to interoperate. If you used email before say 1998, then you might recall it was very common for email systems to not work with other email systems. There isn’t really an easy way to do this these days, and then we have companies built on business models that rely on trying to get you to only communicate using their medium (Facebook is a good current example, AOL is a old and dead example).

I’ve been trying to do this for good long while, so that people can communicate with me using their chosen medium, no matter which medium I happen to like. Here are some examples of things I’ve done to help further this goal:

• having Google Voice number as my “mobile” number, which forwards to:
  • my Vonage home VoIP line
  • a free IPKall phone number which connects to an antisip free SIP account, which runs on:
    • Ekiga on Ubuntu
    • Telephone.app on Mac OS X
    • built-in VoIP support on Nokia N810 running Maemo
• using Google Voice for SMS, which gives me
  • a web interface for sending and receiving SMS
  • an method for sending and receiving SMS via email
  • plus my custom procmail script, which forwards SMS to my Jabber IM account
• having my Skype account forward to my home phone when I’m offline on that service
• Using Adium and Pidgin to sign into AIM, Jabber, Gtalk, Facebook Chat, Yahoo IM, Twitter, Bonjour XMPP Chat, and IRC

So that gives me two main interfaces to deal with: email for voicemail, SMS, email, and Facebook messages; and IM for the whole range of chat/instant messaging platforms including SMS. I do a lot of emailing, so I usually SMS from my normal inbox, and I get voicemail there too, so I can quickly reply back. Then as long as my laptop has internet, which is almost any time I’m sitting in front of it, then you can reach me via the telephone. No more missed calls because my house or office doesn’t have standard cell/mobile service. This stuff is getting easier and easier, there is no good reason to accept being pidgeoned-holed because of some company’s bad business model.

There is a struggle on the internet to fight against its very nature. The internet is really good at freely spreading bits, but media companies want to control the bits as much as possible. We can see one aspect of this struggle in the arms race between tools for downloading from video sites like Vimeo, YouTube, etc. and the efforts that those companies put into preventing people from downloading the video.

For a long time, I was using a javascript bookmarklet, which was really nice and easy to use. But that stopped working, so then I started using online services like http://savevid.com and http://keepvid.com, which work pretty well. I was recently introduced to Download Helper, which is the best video download tool yet. Its a Firefox plugin that will download the video after its been fully played. So just press play on the video, then go to Download Helper on the toolbar and select download, and wait for it to come down.