Software patents present significant challenges to app developers. Vague claims, product life cycles shorter than the PTO review process, trolls and general uncertainty threaten to stifle app industry innovation and growth.

Beginning in April, the Application Developers Alliance will host events nationwide for developers to learn about patents and share stories of Lodsys letters, legal strategies and litigation costs, and their ideas about software patent reform.

Each event will feature an expert presentation/overview, followed by a panel discussion between policymakers, app developers, attorneys, and other stakeholders. Events will include an open Q&A and a networking reception.

Disclosure: Techdirt and the App Developers Alliance are discussing a sponsorship/advertising deal. That promotion is separate from these events and, as always, this post is editorially independent.

Hi, I'm Sean! I'm one of the two guys who made Anodyne. It's neat that Anodyne's ehre and I'm glad that means more people can play it, though of course we'd love it if you bought the game! We're tryin' to get Greenlit on Steam so we'd really appreciate it if you and your friends gave us an upvote over at http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92921739.

Most importantly let us know what you think of the game and if you like it or if it fills you with burning rage! - we're on Twitter at @seagaia2 and @jonathankittaka.

"Yeah, piracy is inevitable so it's better to embrace it – plus, it gives lots of people who couldn't normally afford the game the opportunity to play it – and I think when you're a small group of developers (only my friend Jon and I made Anodyne), it's better to have lots of people able to experience your game," he wrote.

"The Trese brothers are so indie, they don't even know it. Their games are marketed through a simple Blogspot blog and unpretentious older brother Cory Trese routes all of his regular email correspondence through the address of his wedding photography business. Trese Brothers titles like Star Traders and Templar Assault might not feature cutting-edge graphics or revolutionary gameplay, but the ambitious scope of their games and steadfast dedication to constantly improving them has won them a small but loyal following. With a growing reputation for floating above the needs and desires of everyday people, Google's relationship with salt-of-the-earth devs like the the Trese Brothers are exactly the sort they ought to be cultivating. Instead, Google is about to chase the Treses off of their platform."

These are the good guys. The small-business types working overtime everyone likes to talk about. But when Google recently brought their app store under more strict control, allowing them to be more heavy-handed in what they allow on the platform, the Trese brothers began getting messages saying that they were somehow in violation and their apps would be dropped from the store.

"Cory Trese started receiving seemingly-automated emails from Google last week, informing him that he and his brother's games were violating the spam provisions of the new developer terms and conditions. Trese was dumbstruck.

"I was terrified, frankly," Trese told me. "I started trying to figure out how we got flagged. Maybe we update too often.""

It should be pointed out that the notion that frequent updates triggered the spam notice from Google is pure speculation...because as Google is now tasked with aggressively policing their app store, they're finding less time to respond to app developers questions via email or the support message board. The Trese brothers have been trying to get a response to no avail as of the time of this writing.

And this is the problem with a shotgun approach in responding to perceived issues with piracy on platforms: you end up taking out innocent bystanders in the process. We saw it with Megaupload, where artists and users used the service legitimately but were caught in the DOJ's ocean-spanning shotgun attack. We see it every time bit torrent technology is attacked, despite artists and users that also use it legitimately. Actions taken against perceived piracy problems need a scalpel approach, so that innocents like the Trese brothers don't have their creative output stifled.

Update: Commentors and Cory Trese himself stepped into the comments section to add some further clarification. It appears that the issue had to do with keywords in the description of Trese's games that still coincide with Google's tightening the ropes on their app store (thanks for the comments, guys!). Bottom line, it would appear that there is still some heavy-handedness and a lack of communication with app developers in this case, though Cory did say that Google reached out to them once news of this had got out.

"If the game gets pirated heavily, if it's a good game that people really like, they're going to either buy it eventually or they're going to tell other people about it. Either way it's just going to come back to a sale."

"When Meat Boy came out on PC and torrents started going up on Pirate Bay, I would check, I had a friend of mine who said, 'congratulations, I just saw your game in the top 50 on Pirate Bay for games,' and I checked and we were 30th and I was depressed because it wasn't higher, because that's a measure of success."

"The dinosaurs of marketing are really upset by piracy. They think it's literally stealing... They're old. That's really the reason. They're old and their ideas are old. They don't understand where we are now. They don't understand the mentality of people who are pirating things. They see them as thieves, the same people who go and shoplift. I don't f*@#ing shoplift but I have pirated sh@%-loads of stuff. Like it's just not the same, it's not the same thing at all."

Four members of the CyanogenMod software team on Monday received Galaxy S II smartphones in the mail, direct from the company at no charge.

“All four of us involved in the porting process for the first Galaxy S received a new phone,” CyanogenMod team member Kolja Dummann told Wired.com in an interview. “After the [Galaxy S II] launched in Europe, we just asked about getting some of those phones. Samsung agreed.”

The phones came with one simple directive — get CyanogenMod working on the phone.

Essentially, CyanogenMod replaces the stock operating system on your Android phone with a customized build, letting you make tweaks and adjustments that you wouldn’t have otherwise been able to before. Customizations range from changing visual details — like slapping a sleek new uniform skins onto the user interface — to under-the-hood boosts like overclocking the phone’s CPU.

Without the help of third-party apps like Tweetie and Tweetdeck, the company likely would not have been nearly as successful at building the network (and a ready-made client like Tweetie certainly wouldn’t have been sitting there waiting to be acquired). But the ecosystem didn’t just build demand for the network -- it also helped build and distribute the behavior that now makes Twitter so valuable: the @ mentions, the direct messages, re-Tweets and so on, none of which were Twitter’s idea originally. That created a huge amount of goodwill, and led to the (apparently mistaken) idea of an ecosystem.

It’s all very well for Twitter to claim ownership of all those things now, since it is their platform. And obviously there are businesses that can get away with being arbitrary or dictatorial -- Apple is well known for such behavior, after all, and it is one of the most valuable companies on the planet. But this only works over the longer term if your product is so unique and compelling that people will put up with it. Is Twitter in that category?

For game creators, lowering costs and making titles widely available may actually be the solution to stamping out piracy.

By making games more readily accessible, faster to skim and easier to pass along to friends, game makers may actually be doing more to combat piracy than any lawsuit or fancy technical countermeasure ever could.

There are a couple reasons they should care. One is that these users are the people they want as employees. If your company seems evil, the best programmers won't work for you. That hurt Microsoft a lot starting in the 90s. Programmers started to feel sheepish about working there. It seemed like selling out. When people from Microsoft were talking to other programmers and they mentioned where they worked, there were a lot of self-deprecating jokes about having gone over to the dark side. But the real problem for Microsoft wasn't the embarrassment of the people they hired. It was the people they never got. And you know who got them? Google and Apple. If Microsoft was the Empire, they were the Rebel Alliance. And it's largely because they got more of the best people that Google and Apple are doing so much better than Microsoft today.

They treat iPhone apps the way they treat the music they sell through iTunes. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to reach users, you do it on their terms. The record labels agreed, reluctantly. But this model doesn't work for software. It doesn't work for an intermediary to own the user. The software business learned that in the early 1980s, when companies like VisiCorp showed that although the words "software" and "publisher" fit together, the underlying concepts don't. Software isn't like music or books. It's too complicated for a third party to act as an intermediary between developer and user. And yet that's what Apple is trying to be with the App Store: a software publisher. And a particularly overreaching one at that, with fussy tastes and a rigidly enforced house style.

If software publishing didn't work in 1980, it works even less now that software development has evolved from a small number of big releases to a constant stream of small ones. But Apple doesn't understand that either. Their model of product development derives from hardware. They work on something till they think it's finished, then they release it. You have to do that with hardware, but because software is so easy to change, its design can benefit from evolution. The standard way to develop applications now is to launch fast and iterate. Which means it's a disaster to have long, random delays each time you release a new version.

We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don't steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.