The Netflix-backed Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) proposal, and recent revelations that requirements for DRM in HTML5 are confidential, have generated furor among advocates of the Open Web. Let's cut through the hyperbole.
After almost a decade of litigation, Google scored a victory last week over the Authors Guild, which had sued the company for copyright infringement over its Google Books search engine. But a few important chapters in the legal saga have yet to be written.
We are standing in a parking lot in the city of Malmö, southern Sweden, one of the many places Peter Sunde now calls home. The sky above us is grey, as usual at this time of year. Just as the parking meter spits out our ticket, a young man driving much too fast on a motorcycle roars up behind us. He is followed by a police car, sirens blaring and blue lights flashing.
Over the past year, patent battles have been fought by tech companies in courtrooms all over the world. The litigation is far from over though, however, and will continue throughout 2013. This is what's at stake on the patent battlefield in the near future.
Some of the most memorable IT-related quotes were uttered in courtrooms this year, which involved a steady stream of legal challenges about intellectual property. In no particular order, these are some of the comments that stuck with us as 2012 winds to a close.
The US presidential election result leaves President Barack Obama in the White House and maintains the balance of power in Congress. In many longstanding technology debates, policy experts see little movement forward, although lawmakers may look for compromises on a handful of issues.
Samsung took a step toward finding a kind of "pax tabletica" with arch-foe Apple in an Australian court last week, offering to remove features from its Galaxy Tab to avoid a court ban on sales of the device in that country. But what's really interesting about the case isn't the technical litigation, but the underlying attempt to define how much of a product's design is actually protected under existing, fragmented international laws.
Yet another survey is indicating that security is a big issue for those intending to take up cloud computing.
Imagine a world in which Microsoft wasn't allowed to sell Windows or Word, no one could use a Blackberry, Intel's chips were taken off the market and every company that wanted to deploy Linux had to pay an exorbitant fee to an obscure software vendor.