Here's yet another worrying example of that problem, this time involving the UK operator 3UK, pointed out by Nick Rothwell. Pride's Purge is a Web site described by its creator Tom Pride as "an irreverent look at UK politics". As he recently discovered, it's also blocked by 3UK's child protection filter. He contacted the company on Twitter, pointing out that Pride's Purge was not a porn site or anything similar, and this is what it replied:

We don't just block adult websites, websites with mature content may also be censored.

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

... in the pharmaceutical industry, there are approximately 46.8 patents per every 1,000 jobs, whereas in the computer and peripherals equipment sector, there are 277.5 patents per 1,000 jobs. Even the semiconductor industry, known for its highly complex products, has a patent/job ratio of 111.6 patents per 1,000 jobs -- approximately 40% the rate of patents to jobs as the computer and peripherals market.

"Patents are supposed to encourage innovation and we’re starting to be in a world where they might start to stifle innovation. Governments may need to look at the patent system and see if those laws need to be modified because I don’t think some of these battles are healthy for society. I love technology, I love invention, I like rapid change, and really it’s the golden age of wireless devices and mobile devices."

“Our responsibility is to follow the law,” said Lee Patch, a vice president at Nuance. “That’s what we do. It’s not our fault if some people don’t like the system.”

Soon, Apple’s engineers were asked to participate in monthly “invention disclosure sessions.” One day, a group of software engineers met with three patent lawyers, according to a former Apple patent lawyer who was at the meeting.

The first engineer discussed a piece of software that studied users’ preferences as they browsed the Web.

“That’s a patent,” a lawyer said, scribbling notes.

Another engineer described a slight modification to a popular application.

“That’s a patent,” the lawyer said.

Another engineer mentioned that his team had streamlined some software.

“That’s another one,” the lawyer said.

[....] The disclosure session had yielded more than a dozen potential patents when an engineer, an Apple veteran, spoke up. “I would like to decline to participate,” he said, according to the lawyer who was at the meeting. The engineer explained that he didn’t believe companies should be allowed to own basic software concepts.

"Think of the billions of dollars being flushed down the toilet... When patent lawyers become rock stars, it’s a bad sign for where an industry is heading,."

"If you give the same application to 10 different examiners, you'll get 10 different results..."

“front surfaces that are not rectangular, not flat, and without rounded corners; display screens that are more square than rectangular or not rectangular at all, display screens that are not centered on the front surface of the phone...”

and

“overall shapes that are not rectangular with four flat sides or that do not have four rounded corners; front surfaces that are not completely flat or clear... and profiles that are not thin”.

Of course. Surely consumers would happily hold a large, thick, bumpy, sharp-edged hexagonal thing up to their head. They’ll no doubt appreciate the different “ornamental” approach while reading through their opaque screen. No functional drawbacks there.

Does that even sound like an object you would willingly put in your pants? Having a device that is not an unwieldy weapon-like object is a functional feature, not an ornamental design choice. One is not going out on a limb in concluding that if the object design increases your likelihood of getting strip-searched at the airport, those are functional drawbacks, and foreclosing functional features is not the purpose of design protection.

As you may recall, last year Apple sued Samsung over earlier products in the Galaxy line, claiming infringement of all sorts of different rights, among them some broad trade dress registrations involving basic design choices like black borders and rectangles with rounded corners. Amadeo walks through the many notable aesthetic elements of the S3 (including the stark changes from previous Galaxy phones) and compares them to Apple's list of trade dress claims, noting how several aspects of the phone seem designed to counter specific complaints—and the case he makes is pretty compelling. These are just a few examples (bolded portions are quotes from the Apple trade dress complaint):

A rectangular product shape...
... A rectangle needs to have parallel sides; the GSIII sides aren't straight at all. The outmost part is about 1/3rd of the way down, with serious curves leading to the top and bottom. So it's very much not a rectangle, or a rounded rectangle, or even horizontally symmetrical. It's more of an amorphous blob.

...with all four corners uniformly rounded;
Nope. The top and bottom corners are not the same shape. Observe the outlines of the top-left and bottom-left corners. Note how they are different.

The front surface of the product dominated by a screen surface with black borders
Having a giant screen on the front is kind of unavoidable. The only colors available though, are white and dark blue. Neither of those colors are black. The lawyers can sleep easy.

Substantial black borders above and below the screen having roughly equal width
Apple's use of "roughly" is really obnoxious, but just in case they get into minutia (lawyers love minutia!), the top and bottom borders are not the same size. These to-scale measurements show the top bezel is about 16% smaller than the bottom. Also, they're not black!

In the past, some people have argued that this sort of thing is an example of intellectual property doing its job and encouraging innovation, because competitors come up with new and different ways of doing things—but, as we have pointed out, the innovation being encouraged is the wrong kind. Instead of letting market demands dictate what engineers and designers spend their time on, their effort is wasted reinventing the wheel over and over again. The result is often an inferior product that lacks overall vision, as some are saying about the S3, at least aesthetically speaking. If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, what's a horse designed by a committee of lawyers? Some horrific Darwinian accident from the deep ocean, I'd wager.

It was found that simply turning one's head to ignore video ads had far greater impact than DVR fast-forwarding is assumed to have. Magna Global estimates that 35% of U.S. households have DVRs and 10% of their total TV consumption is time shifted, within which 65% of ads are fast-forwarded, meaning 35% x 10% x 65% = 2% of total TV ad impressions are avoided through fast-forwarding. Our study found that 63% of TV impressions were avoided simply by not paying attention to the screen.

When participants did use the DVR to fast-forward TV ads, nearly half of them paid full attention to the screen during that process. Fast-forwarded ads had 12% more attention levels than non-fast-forwarded ads.

Color uses your iPhone's or Android phone's microphone to detect when people are in the same room. The data on ambient noise is combined with color and lighting information from the camera to figure out who's inside, who's outside, who's in one room, and who's in another, so the app can auto-generate spontaneous temporary social networks of people who are sharing the same experience.

At the District of Columbia federal courthouse, which is home to the lower courts and the U.S. Court of Appeals, I had to check my cellphone at the door two weeks ago. And in the Los Angeles federal courthouse, I was ordered, by a judge, to turn off the Wi-Fi signal emitted from my HTC Evo in December.

But in San Francisco, the judiciary allows Wi-Fi connected computing inside its courtrooms, from either a cellphone or a computer. Live blogging or tweeting is commonplace there.

That is the status quo with the ongoing Barry Bonds criminal trial in San Francisco. What’s more, the San Francisco federal courthouse even provides free Wi-Fi in many courtrooms.

For myself and my busking exploits, the iphone is now indespensible. I use mine as a wireless midi controller using an app called TouchOSC. When I arrive in a new city, looking for locations to busk, I make use of a gps enabled map app called MotionX GPS which allows me to download maps of an area before departing home, then drop map points of interest either from research at home, or from recommendations of people I meet in said city. It allows me to arrive in a new place and bike around, finding interesting locations as I go. When I find one that is viable based on the criteria to be covered in the next chapter, I drop a map point and location notes onto the map. This allows me to do recon on many areas of a new place, quickly and efficiently then when I am ready to play, I can focus on playing rather than pitch recon. If one potential pitch is occupied or in some way, undesirable, I can look at my map and go to the next closest potential pitch,without having to go into "recon" mode, which saves a lot of valuable time.

One of my favorite functions of such devices is as a portable press kit. I love busking as much as I love playing shows in venues. Many times people who book such venues, will see me on the street and hire me to play. But sometimes I happen upon a place or person and strike up a conversation and said person wants to see what I do. So, I whip out my trusted iphone, which i have preloaded with different types of videos. Some more "jazz" oriented for cafes and jazzier places, some more "dance oriented" for clubs and bars, and some live "street oriented" vids for farmers markets and street fairs. A picture may say 1000 words but a video says it all. The video quality on the iphone is extremely high and the volume is adequate. Very useful and powerful.

Selling merchandise? With a smartphone you can accept different forms of payment in different currencies. It is now easier than ever to accept credit cards with systems like square and/or you can use paypal, which has grown far beyond a simple method of making payments on E-bay.

First, companies scramble to get patents that can be included in the patent pool (rather than focusing on actually innovating in the market and understanding what the market wants). Once the pool is truly established, patenting decreases, because it's just not worth it to compete. After the patent pool dissolves, then others finally get back into the market. Second, because the patent pool locks in the effective "standard" early in the process, it might not actually be the best technology. In their research, Lampe and Moser found that this is exactly what happened with the first patent pool concerning the sewing machine. It "shifted the direction of innovation to an inferior technology... which was known to be significantly less robust, and unsuitable for mass production."

Then, once they're in the patent pool, they become anti-competitive: suing any upstart that tries to innovate and is not a member of the patent pool. So, effectively, rather than innovating, they use the patent pool to block any competition. Finally, once the patent pool is in place, the companies involved decrease their own pace of innovation, because they've basically just blocked out the competitors. Thus, they don't need to keep innovating at the same pace.