DailyDirt: Styli Are Getting Better

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Microsoft's new tablet computer was announced with a bit of fanfare -- and curiously, a stylus. When Apple introduced its touchscreens (not counting the Newton), Steve Jobs dismissively tossed away the idea of using a stylus and said the finger is the best pointing device around. Well, stylus technology is getting better all the time, and here are just a few examples of some styluses/styli that might beat the finger.

• The Collusion iPad pen isn't just a piece of plastic in the shape of a pen. This pen-like device uses an ultrasound system instead of the iPad's built-in touchscreen to provide better accuracy. Plus it comes with collaboration software and handwriting recognition, so you can share your drawings and notes with other users. (NB: This Kickstarter project hasn't ended yet.) [url]
• The Cosmonaut is a big stylus that is designed to mimic a dry erase marker. This *was* a Kickstarter project, and now it's currently selling for about $25 (shipping not included). [url]
• The PressurePen is an open hardware stylus for the iPad (and Android platform) that gives users a pressure-sensitive way to draw on a touchscreen. Okay, so how many Kickstarter stylus projects are there?!? LOTS. At least this one is open source.... [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: collusion, cosmonaut, finger, hardware, hmi, input device, ipad, pen, pressurepen, steve jobs, stylus, tablet, touchscreen
Companies: apple, kickstarter, microsoft

Commerce Department's Own Study Debunks Commerce Department's Defense Of Said Study

from the *sigh* dept

So, back in April we wrote about a bizarre report from the US Commerce Department and the US Patent and Trademark Office, which tried to sum up the "jobs" in "IP-intensive" industries, as a measure of how important those laws were. As we noted last week, the White House reached out to us and offered up the experts behind the report for an interview -- but when we submitted some questions (as they asked us to do prior to setting up the final interview), they suddenly rescinded that offer and offered up this bizarre and nonsensical statement about how Steve Jobs had lots of patents and Steve Jobs created cool products, so patents are important. They did nothing to refute the insane methodology of the study that attributes all of the jobs of people working in grocery stores, insurance companies, clothing stores and more to "IP intensive industries." Nor do they explain why the report is useful in suggesting why we need more copyright laws to protect all those jobs -- when copyright really barely touches on any of the jobs in the list.

Instead... they focus on this bizarre Steve Jobs example.

All evidence suggests that patents continue to drive innovation in technology. At the time of his death, innovator Steve Jobs had more than 300 patents. Companies such as Apple have made transformative changes in our lives, made possible by massive investments made by intellectual property. But while such companies develop brand-new technologies and services, they also perform incremental innovation. Thus, IP conflicts arise as the byproducts of a very healthy overall innovation environment. The tech industry is characterized by extremely sharp drops in costs over time, extremely strong increases in performance, and multiple changes in market leads, with different companies leading at different points in time. That tremendously competitive marketplace is a sign of the critical role IP rights play in driving technology companies to invest, compete, create jobs, and drive exports.

Of course, as a friend pointed out, since the report covers trademarks, copyright and patents, it's a little strange that they focused solely on patents in their "defense" of the report. After all, as the "grocery store" discussion points out, the vast, vast majority of the "jobs" counted in the report are related to trademarks. And, so far, nearly all of the policy efforts that are highlighting the report are around copyright issues.

Oh, and then there's this: That's figure 2 from this very same report. And, as you might notice, it seems to show that, on an indexed basis, jobs in "patent intensive" industries have been on the decline relative to everything else. In fact, it seems to suggest that since about 1998 (hmmm... right at the point in which the Federal Circuit appeals court deemed software patentable in the infamous State Street case), relative employment in patent-intensive industries has gone down. Pretty massively.

Lets add to it another chart, one we published a year and a half ago, put together by the folks at Patently-O. Note the big jump in patents in 1998, and the continued growth all the while jobs in "patent-intensive industries" seemed to be on the decline? Yeah. Isn't that interesting?

Yes, these are also correlation figures, possibly not causal. But the correlation can be useful in showing that something doesn't add up from the story (it's not so useful for explaining causation, but rather just for indicating that a causal relationship doesn't appear to be present). So it seems even more bizarre and more questionable that the Commerce Department is waving around "Steve Jobs had patents" as the defense of the report -- when the data from their own report doesn't even seem to agree with their own conclusion.

Filed Under: commerce department, patents, steve jobs, uspto, white house

Commerce Dept: Steve Jobs Had Patents, Steve Jobs Made Cool Things; Thus Patents Are Great

from the seriously? dept

Yesterday, I wrote about the ridiculousness of the Department of Commerce/US Patent and Trademark Office "study" that claimed to show how many "jobs" there were in "IP-intensive" industries. Among the many problems with the report was how it defined IP-intensive industries, with the top one on the list being.... grocery stores. In fact, most of the "top employers" on the list are industries that -- while they may find IP laws useful to stop consumer confusion over trademarks -- are not at all dependent on intellectual property laws to exist. In fact, the only one of the "top" industries that you might normally think of as being "IP-intensive" was "computer systems and designs," which includes many of the companies and individuals who have been fighting hard against the expansion of copyright and patent laws.

And yet, the entertainment industry and government officials have been trotting out the massive "jobs" count in this report as proof that we need expansionist IP laws and agreements like SOPA and ACTA.

As I mentioned in the post yesterday, back before this report came out, the White House had reached out to say that they knew I was interested in this kind of information, and asked if I'd like to interview the "economic experts" behind the report. I said I'd love to interview their experts. I was passed along to a Department of Commerce spokesperson, who asked me to pre-submit questions before I could interview the "economic experts." I always find that sort of setup to be a little ridiculous. Either let me interview the people, or don't. Don't make me pre-submit questions.

Either way, I was in the middle of a heavy travel schedule, and it took me a few weeks to have the time to go through the report more carefully, and come up with a list of questions, which I eventually sent. The spokesperson seemed confused that I would still be interested in this report, even as it was being used repeatedly by entertainment industry execs and government officials as justification for bad policies. After I followed up a few times, I was told yesterday morning that they were "unable to accommodate an interview" (remember, they had reached out to me first), but provided me with the following "statement."

All evidence suggests that patents continue to drive innovation in technology. At the time of his death, innovator Steve Jobs had more than 300 patents. Companies such as Apple have made transformative changes in our lives, made possible by massive investments made by intellectual property. But while such companies develop brand-new technologies and services, they also perform incremental innovation. Thus, IP conflicts arise as the byproducts of a very healthy overall innovation environment. The tech industry is characterized by extremely sharp drops in costs over time, extremely strong increases in performance, and multiple changes in market leads, with different companies leading at different points in time. That tremendously competitive marketplace is a sign of the critical role IP rights play in driving technology companies to invest, compete, create jobs, and drive exports.

On methodological question:

The IP report focused on identifying “IP-intensive industries and examining their characteristics and contributions to the overall economy.” One measure of the contribution of these industries to the overall economy is the number of jobs in these industries; other measures we looked at are value-added; wages earned by workers in these industries; and exports.

As I said yesterday, this statement is so ridiculous that I emailed the spokesperson back and said that, while a statement like this one is a goldmine from the perspective of being able to write a story about just how clueless the Commerce Department is, I'd much prefer a substantive discussion in which they respond to the various criticisms and concerns about the report and the methodology. I pointed out that the statements above do not respond to the criticism, and instead appear to suggest that they don't have a substantive response to that criticism at all. And thus I hoped they would reconsider and actually respond to the questions.

Instead, they seem to double down on the exact things that sparked the initial criticism of the report: they don't even try to distinguish the fact that people get patents or copyrights from the question of whether or not those tools were needed for the innovation to occur. Instead, it's just "well, Steve Jobs had a bunch of patents, Steve Jobs made cool gadgets, thus patents are good." Correlation/causation fallacy, anyone? Of course, it's even worse than that. They talk about the natural state of innovation (competition, driving prices down) and then make the leap to the claim that this proves "the critical role IP rights play in driving technology companies to invest, compete, create jobs and drive exports," despite failing to mention how IP rights have anything whatsoever to do with any of those things.

As I told the Commerce Department, pointing to some correlation between Jobs having patents and Apple having cool products as proof that the patent system works is like standing on the deck of a sinking Titanic and saying that everything's fine because at least part of the boat is still above water.

At this point, I can only conclude that the government knows it put out a ridiculously misleading report... or the people involved are so clueless that they honestly think that correlation between companies getting patents honestly means those patents "drives" the innovation in that technology, contrary to plenty of actual studies on the impact of patents on innovation.

We should demand better of our government.

Filed Under: acta, department of commerce, ip-intensive industries, patents, sopa, steve jobs, uspto, white house

DailyDirt: Ads Gone Wild

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Advertising is a fascinating topic. When ads are done well, the content is usually good enough to stand alone without trying to market a product. Who wouldn't want to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony? But it's not easy to create really great and memorable ads. Maybe it's an ancient Chinese secret, huh?

• The science of a viral ad campaign is narrowing down the variables to factors like: congruency, emotive strength, network involvement and paired meme synergy. It's not just about combining a cute cat with a piano anymore. [url]
• Prof Jesse Schell envisions a future where video games would encourage consumers to buy stuff and behave a certain way. Would you like to play a game? Thermonuclear War Endless consumption. [url]
• Apple's Think Different campaign has a slightly different genesis story than the one from the Steve Jobs biography. Apparently, the slogan was related to "Think IBM" and was conceived by Craig Tanimoto...? [url]
• To discover more interesting advertising-related content, check out what's floating around on StumbleUpon. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: advertising, craig tanimoto, jesse schell, memes, steve jobs, video games, viral ads
Companies: apple, calgon, coca-cola, ibm

Complexity, Why Steve Jobs Got More Coverage Than Dennis Ritchie... And What That Says About The Patent System

from the layers-upon-layers dept

ComputerAddict points us to an interesting discussion of complexity of computer systems today, written by Jean-Baptiste Queru. The key point is that, at the user level, the various technologies we use today seem incredibly simple, but the amount of things happening under the hood is awe-inspiring. He starts out by digging into what actually happens when you visit Google's home page:

You just went to the Google home page.

Simple, isn't it?

What just actually happened?

Well, when you know a bit of about how browsers work, it's not quite that simple. You've just put into play HTTP, HTML, CSS, ECMAscript, and more. Those are actually such incredibly complex technologies that they'll make any engineer dizzy if they think about them too much, and such that no single company can deal with that entire complexity.

Let's simplify.

You just connected your computer to www.google.com.

Simple, isn't it?

What just actually happened?

Well, when you know a bit about how networks work, it's not quite that simple. You've just put into play DNS, TCP, UDP, IP, Wifi, Ethernet, DOCSIS, OC, SONET, and more. Those are actually such incredibly complex technologies that they'll make any engineer dizzy if they think about them too much, and such that no single company can deal with that entire complexity.

And, of course, that's not everything. From there, he describes what's happening in the operating system and the hardware as well, to demonstrate the complexity involved in the different levels of the technology stack. The key point is that there's an amazing number of things happening behind the scenes, just to do something simple like visit Google's website. And that's pretty awesome:

Once you start to understand how our modern devices work and how they're created, it's impossible to not be dizzy about the depth of everything that's involved, and to not be in awe about the fact that they work at all, when Murphy's law says that they simply shouldn't possibly work.

But, of course, most people only see the UI at the top of the stack. And that, Queru notes, is why Steve Jobs' untimely death got so much more attention that Dennis Ritchie's death the following week:

That is why the mainstream press and the general population has talked so much about Steve Jobs' death and comparatively so little about Dennis Ritchie's: Steve's influence was at a layer that most people could see, while Dennis' was much deeper. On the one hand, I can imagine where the computing world would be without the work that Jobs did and the people he inspired: probably a bit less shiny, a bit more beige, a bit more square. Deep inside, though, our devices would still work the same way and do the same things. On the other hand, I literally can't imagine where the computing world would be without the work that Ritchie did and the people he inspired. By the mid 80s, Ritchie's influence had taken over, and even back then very little remained of the pre-Ritchie world.

The fact is, both are important, but in different ways. We would live in an extremely different world without either of them. And, I actually have to disagree slightly about the idea that "deep inside" the devices would work the same way (if there were no Jobs). Perhaps at a superficial level, but I think it's worth noting that what Jobs made standard at the UI level certainly had some trickle-down effects in terms of what was happening underneath and what sort of technology developments were prioritized.

At the end of his post, Queru then points out how this multilevel complexity shows part of the problem of the patent system:

Finally, last but not least, that is why our patent system is broken: technology has done such an amazing job at hiding its complexity that the people regulating and running the patent system are barely even aware of the complexity of what they're regulating and running. That's the ultimate bikeshedding: just like the proverbial discussions in the town hall about a nuclear power plant end up being about the paint color for the plant's bike shed, the patent discussions about modern computing systems end up being about screen sizes and icon ordering, because in both cases those are the only aspect that the people involved in the discussion are capable of discussing, even though they are irrelevant to the actual function of the overall system being discussed.

I'm going to guess -- having had a few of these discussions -- that the patent system supporters in our comments (including patent lawyers and USPTO employees) are going to deny this. I think this is just a part of it. The patent system is definitely designed to look only at the twigs (not even branches or trees) instead of the forest. And that's why it almost always misses what's "obvious" to those skilled in the art, allowing the granting of patents on basic things that hinder innovation.

But the real issue is related, but deeper. When you look at the technology stack and the inherent complexity, the reason why it works is because you have all these different complex pieces working together with different experts focused on specialized pieces within the stack. That's what allows for massive complexity to occur. But the patent system isn't designed to handle such a system. It's designed to handle integrated systems where top-to-bottom is patented by a single party (or maybe a few parties). The idea that a huge number of players might come together and work together to, in a somewhat ad hoc fashion, build a much, much more complex system, and not seek to profit directly from the overall system but from the pieces and expertise, is antithetical to the entire structure and premise of the patent system.

Filed Under: complexity, dennis ritchie, layers, patents, steve jobs, tech stack, technology, ui

Copyright Fight Brewing Over Who 'Owns' Steve Jobs Silhouette Inside The Apple Logo

from the let-it-go,-guys dept

After Steve Jobs passed away last week, an image quickly went viral showing his silhouette inside the Apple logo, where the traditional "bite" mark once was: But, of course, knowing the times we live in, is it any wonder that there may be a copyright and trademark fight brewing over this tribute image? As the image went viral, many were crediting a Hong Kong design student by the name of Jonathan Mak -- who noted that because of the image he was getting questions about "buying the copyright" on the logo, as well as some job offers. Mak claimed he came up with the image in August, when Jobs retired, but it didn't get much attention at the time. Only after Jobs passed away was when the image suddenly went viral.

But, then, over the weekend, others started pointing out that a UK-based designer, who goes by the name Raid71, had apparently come up with a nearly identical image back in May. Mak claimed independent invention, insisting that he "didn't rip off" Raid71 and that he just came up with the same idea himself:

"I still arrived at the solution on my own, and my conscience is still clear, but I'm more than happy to acknowledge the fact that somebody did it before me."

So that's two people. Well, now we have a third. It seems that Farzin Adeli, based in California, isn't just claiming that he came up with the idea, but is trying to copyright and trademark the image. He says he came up with the image right after Jobs' death, and insists that the image that went viral -- while a negative version of the one he made, is "virtually identical" to the image he created. He registered for the copyright on Thursday and is "working with lawyers" on the trademark.

Of course, it's entirely possible that all three of these folks came up with the idea separately. And while it's rare, copyright law does actually allow an independent creation defense. But somehow I doubt that would prevent a potential legal battle.

Still, all three of these might not have any legitimate legal claim to the tribute logo either: I would imagine that Apple could quash any attempts to register the intellectual property claims of these guys. I can't see how any trademark claim gets anywhere, as Apple could obviously claim that it infringes on Apple's existing trademarks and there would be a serious likelihood of confusion. Separately, while I think publicity rights are pretty silly, you have to imagine Steve Jobs' estate could make a publicity rights claim under California law over the use of his likeness. I hope they don't go down that path -- as it is a nice tribute. But, if the others start fighting over who owns what, at the very least, it might be good to remind all of them that probably none of them really should have any IP over the image.

Filed Under: apple logo, copyright, steve jobs, tribute
Companies: apple

A Time To Reflect On Innovation

from the sad-news dept

When Steve Jobs retired, we didn't jump on the bandwagon and post yet another story about the retirement. And now that the news has come out that he has passed away (at age 56, way too young), I don't have much to say that won't be said a million times elsewhere. But the fact is that Steve Jobs has had such a huge influence on innovation across a variety of different industries that his passing shouldn't go unmentioned. It's very sad news. Whether or not you liked his products and/or agreed with his strategies, you cannot deny the massive way he ended up impacting innovation and the lives of millions of people. It's really worth the time to sit back and reflect on how different a world we might live in if it hadn't been for Steve Jobs, and also to regret how much more he might have accomplished. Truly a sad day.

Filed Under: steve jobs

DailyDirt: Some Inspiring Graduation Speeches...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

It's graduation time for a lot of students, and there are a lot of different commencement addresses being given in lot of different venues. Here are a few memorable ones, preserved by YouTube, for your enjoyment.

• Steve Jobs gave a pretty popular graduation speech a few years ago. Stay hungry... [insert your own inappropriate joke about Jobs' physical appearance here] [url]
• Denzel Washington advises grads to "fall forward"... But having something to "fall back on" doesn't seem like bad advice, either, though. [url]
• JK Rowling recounts her own failures and the inevitability of failure. Gay wizard joke, FTW. [url]
• To discover more stuff for possible self-improvement, check out what's currently floating around on StumbleUpon. [url]  

As always, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: commencement speeches, denzel washington, graduation, jk rowling, steve jobs