Yes, Public Radio Shows Can Do Cool CwF+RtB Experiments Too

from the keep-it-up dept

One of my favorite radio programs/podcasts is Radiolab. They do absolutely amazing storytelling on really interesting things. I don't think I've ever listened to a Radiolab program and then not gone off to talk to someone about it. Their most recent full episode (they also do "shorts") is a really fascinating exploration of color. The final section, on why Homer (of Iliad & Odyssey fame, not the Simpsons character) never mentioned the color blue is simply brilliant.

That said, it's also been interesting in the last month or so to watch the Radiolab crew start to embrace some of the ideas that we've been exploring for some time, concerning CwF+RtB (Connecting with Fans and giving them a Reason to Buy). I first noticed this about a month ago, when Radiolab announced its Lab Partners premium offering. Just as we've seen with artists who offer up content for free, but give people "subscription" style offering for premium features (sorta like our own Crystal Ball offering), Radiolab is giving people a ton of extras if they subscribe.

Some will argue, of course, that this is nothing more than a modern update to the traditional patronage model of public radio -- wherein they beg for pledges every so often and you might get a tote bag if you spend enough. And, clearly, the ideas come from the same general place. But there are some key differences -- mainly that the premium features aren't worthless tote bags, but are actually related to the show, and include things like access. So, for example, you can join an editorial chat with the Radiolab team, or, my favorite:

Toss Your Name in the Hat: Enter your first name to a pool of names that we’ll draw from whenever we need to use a made-up character name in a story.

Like many of these kinds of offerings, Radiolabs has a couple tiers to let fans self-select. My one quibble is that I think there aren't enough tiers -- and there isn't a really low entry-level tier. In watching these kinds of experiments, at least having a very low level of support as an option can really help get more people involved and build up the buzz for a program. But, either way, it's neat.

Of course, that's not all Radiolab is doing. They really are doing a lot on the "CwF" side of things too. They've done a number of touring live shows (where they often bring along great musicians, like Zoe Keating). But they've also just launched a remix contest for the show. Remix contests are nothing new in the music world, but I've never heard of one for a radio show/podcast before. But they're doing the same basic thing -- releasing the stems, allowing you to re-score the music, etc.

If you've never listened to a Radiolab production, you might not understand why it would ever make sense to remix a radio show. But, the level of production that goes into every Radiolab episode is astounding. And they do a great job with how they reveal stories and plots. I'm honestly not sure that anyone could actually do a better job editing together an episode of Radiolab than host Jad Abumrad, but I'm actually really curious to hear what other fans can come up with.

As a brief aside, last fall, another great radio/podcast story teller, Ira Glass, from This American Life, did a thorough writeup of why Radiolab is so amazing, and it goes into some amount of detail about how Jad and Robert put together an episode. I think anyone seeking to remix an episode of Radiolab might learn a bunch of useful things from reading it.

Either way, I always think it's great to see more and more people in various areas start embracing these basic concepts and doing really cool things with them. At this stage, it's really just a bunch of experiments, but that's how amazing new things happen.

Filed Under: connect with fans, contest, ira glass, patronage, radiolab, reason to buy, remix

Google Drive Barely Launched... And Google's Already Hit With Patent Infringement Lawsuit

from the but,-of-course dept

It's almost becoming a rule in the tech industry, that actually doing something that people want to use absolutely guarantees that you're going to get sued for patent infringement. It's pretty clear that the current patent system is acting as a massive tax/tollbooth on innovation. The latest in a long line of examples: just as Google has been rolling out its Google Drive offering to users, it's been hit with a patent infringement lawsuit from a company with a patent (5,918,244) that covers a "method and system for coherently caching I/O devices across a network." As the lawsuit notes, the technology behind the patent is to enable the ability of "multiple computers [to] all communicate with each other and... all access data from the same data storage device or devices, such as hard disk." Basically, the patent describes a system of RAM caching. Because I'm sure no one ever would have figured out how to do that without the patent system... So, rather than just allowing the technology to progress in the market as new products are developed, we're left with legal fights and a tollbooth on innovation.

Filed Under: caching, google drive, patent troll
Companies: google

Shouldn't We See It As A Problem When Patents Are The Product Itself?

from the just-basic-common-sense-here... dept

Forbes has given some space to Alan Minsk, a patent lawyer who was in-house patent counsel for Openwave -- a company that we recently noted had decided to become a patent troll after failing in the marketplace -- as well as with Intellectual Ventures, perhaps the world's largest patent troll. In his column, he talks up how simply wonderful it is that companies have realized that patents aren't just about protecting products, but have become key products themselves. He seems positively gleeful at the idea of writing patents so broad that they cover entirely unrelated industries:

My own approach was to identify potentially patentable innovations (i.e., those that were not clearly unpatentable) that had a well-defined strategic value proposition, and then proceeding to seek patent protection for a broad-based interpretation of the underlying concept of those innovations.

Since many innovations represent a solution to a technical problem, this approach often involved determining other industries (or other situations within the same industry) in which a similar problem arose, and then generalizing the description of the innovation so that it could be used in those other industries or situations. This typically required developing a description of the underlying concept of the innovation in generic functional terms instead of implementation specific terms (a process I termed “functional deconstruction.”)

And, because the strategic value propositions (or use cases) for a patent often changed as a company developed and competed with others, my approach was an iterative one that was re-visited regularly in case a decision that was appropriate at one time was no longer appropriate because of new information. This applied both to patent application filing decisions and to those made during negotiations with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as part of the process of obtaining a patent.

In other words, not only did he try to patent things as broadly as possible to cover other industries, he would regularly try to broaden the patent as the market changed, even though the application was already ongoing. The whole thing seems to be bragging about the exact process of how to destroy competition and innovation in a market by locking it up in some vague piece of paper.

If we are to believe that the patent system was designed to "promote the progress" then it needs to be admitted that patents are never an end, but always a means -- a means to develop actual products that genuinely represent progress. And yet, that's not what they've been for quite some time, and it's highlighted by the idea that they should ever be considered primary products in and of themselves. That's a sign of a totally broken system. It may be one where patent lawyers like Minsk make out nicely, but it shows a failure of the system as a whole -- and when that happens we have a system that hinders, rather than aids, innovation.

Filed Under: alan minsk, patent troll, promote the progress
Companies: intellectual ventures, openwave

'Hack The Real World And Share The Results'

from the just-wow dept

Eben Moglen has been battling to defend key digital rights for the last two decades. A lawyer by training, he helped Phil Zimmerman fight off the US government's attack on the use of the Pretty Good Privacy encryption program in the early 1990s, in what became known as the Crypto Wars. That brought him to the attention of Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project, and together they produced version 3 of the GNU GPL, finally released after 12 years' work in 2006.

Today, he's Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, Founding Director of the Software Freedom Law Center and the motive force behind the FreedomBox project to produce a distributed communication system, including social networking that is fully under the user's control.

He's also a great orator, as he demonstrated once again at the F2C: Freedom to Connect conference last week. Introducing the discussion that followed Moglen's talk, Doc Searls said: "that was not just one of the best speeches I've heard, it's one of the most important," and said that it felt like an "I have a dream" moment.

Moglen's keynote was entitled "Innovation under austerity", and tackled a range of big themes: the effects of disintermediation brought about by the Internet; the global financial crisis; the imposition of austerity; the increasing levels of youth unemployment in parts of the Eurozone; and the desperate need for innovative ideas to get us out of this mess. He tied all these together by observing that the multi-trillion dollar economy created by e-commerce had been made possible by innovation born of the passion and curiosity of mostly young people hacking on open systems. As Moglen said, transcribed here by Stephen Bloch:

That curiosity of young people could be harnessed because all of the computing devices in ordinary day-to-day use were hackable, and so young people could actually hack on what everybody used. That made it possible for innovation to occur where it can occur without friction, which is at the bottom of the pyramid of capital. Hundreds of thousands of young people around the world hacking on laptops, hacking on servers, hacking on general purpose hardware available to allow them to scratch their individual itches -- technical, career, and just plain ludic itches ("I wanna do this; it would be neat") -- which is the primary source of the innovation which drove all of the world's great economic expansion in the past ten years. The way innovation really happens is that you provide young people with opportunities to create on an infrastructure which allows them to hack the real world and share the results.

From this central observation, Moglen noted that such open innovation offered a possible way out of the current economic crisis, since, uniquely, it thrived in conditions of austerity (think of Linus Torvalds writing the Linux kernel in his Helsinki bedroom on a PC bought partly thanks to a student loan from the Finnish government.)

Where the banking institutions of our day have failed spectacularly, and shown themselves to be forces for wealth destruction, open innovation as practised by free software and Wikipedia and all the other collaborative endeavors around the world, has been quietly creating real value on an unprecedented scale and in an extremely short time. Moglen suggested that open innovation was fuelled by the energy of the young -- precisely the part of society that is paying the price for the older generation's mistakes. To help pull ourselves out of the current crisis, he urged the world to tap into that youthful potential by making knowledge as widely available as possible -- through open content -- and by providing young people with open tools to explore and invent with.

He concluded by warning that the rise of the digital behemoths like Apple and Facebook were exactly the wrong solution, offering closed hardware and something just as bad on the software side. As Moglen put it:

The browser made the Web very easy to read. We did not make the Web easy to write. So a little thug in a hooded sweatshirt made the Web easy to write, and created a man-in-the-middle attack on human civilization.

The whole speech is pretty much at that level of sharp analysis combined with sharp-tongued wit. Watch it below -- it lasts around 45 mniutes -- and decide for yourself whether this will go down in history as one of the key moments of the early digital age.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: eben moglen, gnu gpl, pgp, phil zimmerman

NYTimes Draws Connection Between Beastie Boys Lawsuit & Patent Trolls, Realizes IP Hinders Innovation

from the about-time dept

Following the unfortunately-timed sampling lawsuit against the Beastie Boys, I expressed hope that the high-publicity situation would call more attention to serious issues in copyright law as it pertains to sampling and other forms of art that directly build on what came before—though I haven't exactly been holding my breath. To my surprise, though, it seems like the story has had an even more profound effect over at the New York Times: a recent piece uses the Beastie Boys lawsuit as a starting point to talk about oppressive copyright laws, tech patent trolls, and the fact that more intellectual property does not automatically mean more innovation.

Most of the article won't be anything new to Techdirt readers, but it's great to see these essential topics getting more attention in mainstream news sources—especially coming from a journalist who has previously espoused the RIAA/MPAA's bogus piracy stats:

Patents on inventions, like copyrights on songs, are not granted to be fair to their creators. Their purpose is to encourage innovation, a broad social good, by granting creators a limited monopoly to profit from their creations. While companies like Apple may believe they are insufficiently compensated for their inventions, the evidence often suggests otherwise. The belief that stronger intellectual property protection inevitably leads to more innovation appears to be broadly wrong.

...

Like “Paul’s Boutique,” the software that drives smartphones is composed of a vast array of ideas from multiple sources. Everybody infringes to some extent on everybody else. Overly strong intellectual property laws that stop creators from using earlier innovations could slow creation over all and become a barrier for new technologies to reach the market.

There are a few oddities to the piece—it's not always clear on the distinction between copyright and patents, and it also makes the assertion that "software patents will never be banned, of course"—despite the very real possibility that software patents will be massively restricted in the future. But what's really great to see is the understanding from NYTimes that these issues are connected: an anti-competitive attitude and the "ownership mentality" are endemic to intellectual property as a whole, not just the specifics of certain areas of law, and the problem really does need to be addressed at that basic level, starting with the incorrect assumption that more IP equals more innovation. Now if only lawmakers would start listening.

Filed Under: beastie boys, intellectual property, new york times, patent troll, smartphone
Companies: apple, tuf america

Programmers Needed: Take Part In A Quick Study On Creativity & Innovation

from the please-help-out dept

Researchers from NYU and the University of Virginia are looking for computer programmers to participate in a study of creativity and innovation. The study involves a creativity contest that will take about 5-10 minutes. The winner will receive a $500 prize. The researchers are looking for professional and serious amateur computer programmers to participate. You can access the study here.

Filed Under: contest, creativity, nyu, programming, university of virginia

Patent Judges Completely Out Of Touch With How Much Patents Hinder Technology Innovation

from the and-that's-sad dept

Last year, we were quite disappointed (but not surprised) to see former CAFC Judge Paul Michel argue publicly that we need many more patents to encourage innovation. He went so far as to suggest a tax credit for getting patents. He also argued that more patents would mean more technology jobs -- ignoring pretty much all of the research out there. CAFC, of course, is the appeals court that handles most patent appeals cases, and since its establishment has been a major part of the problem. You can trace the massive expansion of bogus patents to CAFC's views on patenting, expanding what was thought to be patentable, and generally doing tremendous harm to the important limits on such government granted monopolies.

Tim Lee recently got to talk to Michel following a talk he gave, and what becomes clear is that Michel is completely out of touch with how much of a problem patents are in the tech world today. Lee knows this subject better than probably anyone else, and when he tried to dig in on key points, it was obvious that Michel's knowledge of what actually is happening in the industry is based on myths and imagination, rather than reality. For example, when Michel pointed out that he's "a facts and figures guy" rather than one who focuses on "anecdotes and assumptions," Lee quickly points to James Bessen and Michael Meurer's comprehensive book on why patents hurt the tech industry. Michel does not appear to have actually read the book:

Some scholars have collected facts and figures. For example, a 2008 book by James Bessen and Michael Meurer attempted to compute the costs and benefits of the patent system to various industries. They found that benefits significantly exceeded costs for the pharmaceutical industry, but the costs of litigation exceeded the benefits of holding patents in many other industries. Their work suggests that the patent system has become a net disincentive to innovation in those industries. The problem was particularly severe in software.

Strangely, Michel singled out Bessen and Meurer's book as an example of a text that relied too much on anecdotes and not enough on data, declaring it "very disappointing." We pressed him on this. Michel conceded the problem was less that it was too anecdotal and more that he disagreed with the book's premise—that high litigation costs were a sign the patent system wasn't working.

Indeed, anyone who claims that the Bessen and Meurer book is about anecdotes either hasn't read it or is lying. It goes through so much data and so much evidence that, at times, it's a daunting read. But what Lee's discussion with Michel shows is that, while he insists he's not about "anecdotes and assumptions," that appears to be what he's entirely about. This comes to light quite clearly when Michel finally suggests that if software patents are so bad for innovation, that software companies can just "opt out":

Judge Michel seemed unaware of the depth of the software industry's dissatisfaction with the patent system. He suggested the patent system's critics were relatively marginal figures not representative of the views of the broader technology industry. And he didn't seem to understand the dynamics of the patent arms race currently affecting the software industry.

"If software is less dependent on patents, fine then. Let software use patents less as they choose," Michel said. "If other industries are terribly dependent on patents, then let's not wreck the system just because software people are unhappy."

I don't know if Michel has ever spent any time around the startup community, but the vast majority of entrepreneurs I talk to would absolutely love to "use patents less." But they can't. Because there are all sorts of patent lawyers and trolls who get patents on all sorts of crap and then sue these companies. You can't just opt out. How the hell do you opt out of getting sued by a bogus patent troll?

Lee notes that current CAFC chief judge Randall Rader was at the same event and complained about how unfortunate it was that "the patent system [is] coming under attack." We've written about Judge Rader before, and he seems equally out of touch -- simply refusing to believe that there are significant problems with the patent system. As Lee notes, these judges don't actually have the slightest clue what actually happens in the world of technology and innovation. Instead, their worldview is filtered through the very distorting lens of patent attorneys who profit off of the system:

Rader and Michel's perspectives are likely skewed by the fact they spent their time on the bench surrounded by patent lawyers (who by definition work with firms that have the resources to hire patent attorneys). For the typical software-producing firm, patent lawyers are simply too expensive. Most firms never get patents, and they typically settle patent claims rather than taking them to court. As a result, Judges Michel and Rader rarely hear from smaller firms for whom the patent system is nothing but a burden.

It would be nice if there were some way to teach judges about what's actually happening out in the world, rather than the very, very distorted view they get on the bench.

Filed Under: cafc, jim bessen, michael meurer, paul michel, randall rader, tech industry

Can You Patent How You Cut Your Meat?

from the make-it-stop dept

How long will it be until your entire dinner is covered by patents? A few months ago, we covered the unfortunate rise of vegetable patents, and now we need to worry about how we cut our meat as well? Kaden alerts us to a report about how some "meat processing specialists" have figured out a "new" way to cut a beef carcass to create a different cut of steak, which they're calling the Vegas Strip Steak. Not regularly reading about meat cuts, I have to admit that the article is somewhat amusing, concerning the vast enthusiasm about a different way to chop up a dead cow:

“Initially, the cut was labeled as undervalued,” Mata said. “Whenever we can take a muscle and turn it into a steak rather than grinding it or selling it as a roast, we are adding value to the carcass.”

In the research and development phase, the Vegas Strip Steak was compared against the New York Strip, Petite Filet and Flat Iron Steak.

“This muscle produces a steak that is on par with or better than today’s most popular steaks,” Mata said.

Vegas Strip Steak attributes of tenderness, flavor and appearance appeal to consumers.

Of course, the actual details of how this particular steak is cut, however, are not revealed. Instead, the report notes that the folks behind it are awaiting a patent. A cursory glance over at the patent office suggests that the application was likely filed less than 18 months ago, as it has not yet been published (applications are only made public after 18 months). Thus, there is still a chance that the patent will be rejected for not being patentable subject matter. However, these days, you never know. All I do know is that it seems fairly ridiculous that the food on my dinner plate might violate a bunch of patents.

Filed Under: beef, steak, vegas strip steak