DailyDirt: Space Exploration - The Next Generation

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Plenty of space geeks complain about the seemingly stalled progress in manned space missions, pointing out that plans to go back to the moon (or to Mars or to an asteroid) sound unlikely to happen within a Baby Boomer's lifetime. Sure, there might be some touristy flights to the near edge of space with Virgin Galactic, but really inspiring never-been-done-before space walks on another planet aren't coming any time soon (unless you count some suicide missions). Here are just a few links on the future of space transportation.

• SpaceX wants to compete with larger aerospace companies to provide its launch systems for the US Air Force. Elon Musk says, "Frankly, if our rockets are good enough for NASA, why are they not good enough for the Air Force?" [url]
• NASA's Project Morpheus is making progress in developing an autonomous landing vehicle for a variety of terrains. A recent successful flight makes it look easy to get a vehicle to land on a rocky surface. [url]
• NASA is also looking for some commercial partners to help it develop robotic lunar landers. NASA will be accepting proposals for the next couple weeks, and these potential partnerships could bring up the legality of lunar property rights if commercial companies want to mine the moon's resources. [url]

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

Filed Under: elon musk, exploration, lunar lander, manned missions, mars, moon, morpheus, space
Companies: nasa, spacex, virgin galactic

DailyDirt: Space Race 2.0

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Space exploration is starting a new era. With more and more commercial ventures taking over low earth orbit missions, government space programs can focus on more long-term missions to increasingly distant places in our solar system. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be many collaborative international efforts for missions to other planets, so it's looking like a new nationalistic space race is emerging. Here are just a few space projects aimed beyond our planet.

• NASA is about to announce ambitious plans for manned space outposts on the moon and at a Lagrangian point. There are only a handful of Earth-moon Lagrangian points, so if NASA gets to the better ones first, the US will occupy some of the best space real estate. [url]
• China is planning to land a probe on the moon sometime in 2013. China ultimately wants to have a manned mission to the moon, but it hasn't set a timeframe for that goal. [url]
• If you want to keep score, the Soviets have landed spacecraft on two other planets (Venus and Mars), while the US has only landed equipment on Mars. But if we're counting quality, not quantity, then the US has gathered far more information on Mars than any other space program. [url]
• NASA's Morpheus lander is designed to touch down on other planets, moons and even asteroids. Morpheus runs on methane and oxygen so that it could potentially re-fuel on extra-terrestrial bodies, and it could handle a variety of payloads such as robots, laboratories and even astronauts. [url]

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

Filed Under: exploration, lagrangian point, mars, moon, morpheus, solar system, space, venus
Companies: nasa

Ex-Morpheus & Kazaa Execs Team Up To Become Patent Trolls

from the the-lessons-of-copyright-and-patents dept

Well, well. While their names may be fading into history, Morpheus and Kazaa were the two big file sharing apps after Napster was shut down. They were both built on the same basic platform (which came from Kazaa), and at some point the two actually got into a fight, leading Kazaa to shut off Morpheus, and years later there were still some lawsuits going on. However, it appears that two former execs associated with those two file sharing systems have teamed up... to become patent trolls who are now suing Google, Amazon and others for infringement.

Kevin Bermeister is being described in the article linked above as a "founder" of Kazaa, but I'm pretty sure that's not true at all. Bermeister, instead, founded Brilliant Digital Entertainment, which was an attempt to build a questionable business model into Kazaa, which originally looked a lot like adware. Brilliant Digital ended up buying Kazaa much later in the process. He's teamed up with Michael Weiss, who was the CEO of Streamcast, in this patent trolling adventure that they're calling PersonalWeb Technologies (based in -- you guessed it -- East Texas). While some are making it out like it's a big deal that these former "pirates" are now trying to enforce patent claims, it's really not new or surprising. Bermeister has been doing this for a while. In fact, all the way back in 2003, he claimed a patent on identifying files with a hash and threatened to sue every other file sharing company. In 2004, he even sued the RIAA for violating the patent. In 2006 he... sued Weiss' Streamcast for patent infringement. I'm not sure how that lawsuit turned out, but apparently the former adversaries are now on the same side of things.

The folks over at M-CAM have taken a look at the patents that PersonalWeb is now using to sue, and has found them lacking. Turns out that a bunch of them are continuations -- the sneaky trick of patent holders to change an earlier patent application later, such that the eventual patent still has the earlier priority date, even if the invention wasn't really described until much later. This has been used repeatedly in the past by companies to see what others are doing, patent it, and then be able to pretend they came up with it first. The M-CAM analysis is not kind, especially to the examiner who approved some of the patents, Khanh B. Pham. They declare:

After reviewing PersonalWeb's patents, we propose that the USPTO indeed mold a "Pham" award to best commemorate the ultimate, the outrageous, the most horrifically unacceptable patent examination performance of the current patent system.

So there's that.

If you're interested, here are the patents in question:

• 8,001,096: Computer file system using content‐dependent file identifiers
• 7,949,662: De‐duplication of data in a data processing system
• 7,945,544: Similarity‐based access control of data in a data processing system
• 7,945,539: Distributing and accessing data in a data processing system
• 7,802,310: Controlling access to data in a data processing system
• 6,928,442: Enforcement and policing of licensed content using content‐based identifiers
• 6,415,280: Identifying and requesting data in network using identifiers which are based on contents of data
• 5,978,791: Data processing system using substantially unique identifiers to identify data items, whereby identical data items have the same identifiers

Filed Under: kazaa, morpheus, patent trolls, patents
Companies: amazon, brilliant digital, google, personalweb, streamcast