A recent article caught my eye, apparently Yahoo is suing Facebook over patent infringement, now this seems pretty major, one huge internet giant suing another but really this is a lot more common than you think. Samsung and Apple have had a notable set of lawsuits filed against each other recently, Samsung sued Apple in South Korea, Apple and Samsung sue each other in Germany but both get dismissed, and Apple trying to stop Samsung from selling their products through a lawsuit Apple and Samsung seem to constantly be in a series of lawsuits against each other over patent claims, a pretty disturbing trend if two big tech giants seem to have been infringing on each other so frequently. The patents over which the two are suing are also quite disturbing: Samsung suing Apple over issues with the 'Wideband Code Division Multiple Access' standard, battles over ownership of the 'slide-to-unlock' features found on iPhones and other devices, patent infringement of using a software keyboard with a stylus and a bizarre claim over using a reference time signal to display times in multiple cities.
Information technology patents seem to be in a very negative state, small but important elements like Amazon's '1-Click' ordering system or browser plugins are patented and held on to for years, tech giants are constantly suing one another in various regions over claims of infringement of their property, and companies are even created and run just for the sake of holding patents. This trend is quite unsettling as patents are meant to be a way to protect the creator's ability to control ideas that they have expended effort on to but in the digital world this seems to be abused by companies hoarding ideas that are crucial to the world we live in.
How is society supposed to progress when there is a system in place that prevents the use or enrichment of an idea because someone has patented it, stopping others from using it without paying a potentially impractical fee?. The even bigger danger is if another company just buys this patent for the sole purpose of hoarding it and profiting off lawsuits and preventing anyone from using this technology, while an entity that holds a patent and uses it at least puts that idea in to application an entity that hoards a patent can stop all progress from that invention just to profit off preventing that idea from being used.
However there is another viewpoint in this, those ideas which cannot be used (because of intellectual property and patents) will be replaced by other ideas that could be even better. People will not stop inventing and improving and if one path is closed another one will be taken. This viewpoint holds that patents can prevent ideas from being used but that those ideas could fall by the wayside as people circumvent them and provide new opportunities for invention.
Where I stand on this is that patents are very useful and are no doubt crucial to progress however abuse of the patent system is quite evident and needs to be stopped, there should not be some way to transfer patents as they are not out to protect whoever has the power to hold that entity but instead those who created it and any other potential holder of that patent has no claim to be the sole person to profit off of it. The current patent system just needs to be changed, so that it is restored to its original basis of protecting inventors and away from its current application fo preventing progress and allowing people to profit off of the abuse of invention.
Friday, 9 March 2012
Saturday, 3 March 2012
Google Street View and privacy
Among the odd lawsuits and tribulations going on in the world this week is one that really caught my eye, the story of a frenchman that was caught peeing in his yard by Google Street View and became the object of ridicule in his small village. This is certainly not the first issue raised about Google's popular service, some of the other incidents include a man climbing in to the trunk of his car naked and a married couple, coincidentally with the last name Boring, who had resented Google allowing anyone to see the front of their house on street view.
Inmost of these cases it is easy to see why they would like these photos taken down, in two of the incidents I mentioned, it is likely that people all over the world saw their unfortunate embarrassing side. Google already tries to keep people's identity hidden on Street View, faces are automatically detected by a computer and blurred, and although this measure does work a lot of the time it is not always foolproof as in the case of the frenchman caught peeing, who was identified because he was caught on his own property in a small village in France.
Being photographed in public is not so much of a issue as identification and recording of oneself is to be expected in public, but the prevalence of these actions in the digital age is an issue that is quite scary. Will people become so accustomed to having more and more of their public movements recorded that the more controversial privacy issues will go unnoticed? Google Street View just offers a snapshot stuck in a point in time, the only time you can be recorded by it is if you happen to be around one of their camera cars at the right moment of the right day and never else but this isn't the only way people are being recorded in public, around England the government has set up CCTV cameras in a lot of public areas under the guise of stopping crime, who knows what is to come in the future.
Privacy is an important subject, no one can ever dismiss the immense danger in people's private information becoming public without their willingness, but the line between what hurts privacy and what doesn't is becoming ever more so blurred. Google Street View is a simple idea, drive a car around in public snapping pictures as they go, but it has drawn a lot of controversy in certain cases where people have been captured doing what they didn't want anyone seeing or have had photos of their private property potentially taken from outside the public areas uploaded and publicly accessible on the site.
Is this purely Google's fault or is there some element that the public needs to get involved with? Does Street View's benefits outweigh the risks in privacy? Do you know the answer?
Inmost of these cases it is easy to see why they would like these photos taken down, in two of the incidents I mentioned, it is likely that people all over the world saw their unfortunate embarrassing side. Google already tries to keep people's identity hidden on Street View, faces are automatically detected by a computer and blurred, and although this measure does work a lot of the time it is not always foolproof as in the case of the frenchman caught peeing, who was identified because he was caught on his own property in a small village in France.
Being photographed in public is not so much of a issue as identification and recording of oneself is to be expected in public, but the prevalence of these actions in the digital age is an issue that is quite scary. Will people become so accustomed to having more and more of their public movements recorded that the more controversial privacy issues will go unnoticed? Google Street View just offers a snapshot stuck in a point in time, the only time you can be recorded by it is if you happen to be around one of their camera cars at the right moment of the right day and never else but this isn't the only way people are being recorded in public, around England the government has set up CCTV cameras in a lot of public areas under the guise of stopping crime, who knows what is to come in the future.
Privacy is an important subject, no one can ever dismiss the immense danger in people's private information becoming public without their willingness, but the line between what hurts privacy and what doesn't is becoming ever more so blurred. Google Street View is a simple idea, drive a car around in public snapping pictures as they go, but it has drawn a lot of controversy in certain cases where people have been captured doing what they didn't want anyone seeing or have had photos of their private property potentially taken from outside the public areas uploaded and publicly accessible on the site.
Is this purely Google's fault or is there some element that the public needs to get involved with? Does Street View's benefits outweigh the risks in privacy? Do you know the answer?
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