Nick Coghlan 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Boston Transit Authority Sued For Patent Infringement… For Letting You Know Your Train Is Running Late

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 24 Mar, 2010 @ 05:58am

    Obviousness

    "Unique" is not the criteria. The requirement is that the item being patented not be obvious to someone skilled in the state of the art.

    There will generally be someone who is "first" even for obvious things, simply because they were the ones who encountered the problem that the solution solves first. However, for a lot of things in engineering, just defining the problem clearly enough will often let the solution fall into your lap.

    For example, I found out this week that there is probably some kind of patent on storing a directed acyclic graph in an SQL database. I didn't read it because I don't really want to know, but the search where that URL came up was one I conducted *after* solving the problem just to check if I had missed anything obvious when it came to one specific issue that makes the solution rather untidy. This is a pretty heavily constrained problem due to the nature of SQL and the data structure being recorded, so unsurprisingly the articles I found all documented pretty much the same approach I had already taken. I'd be very surprised if the patent said anything different (although, as noted, I have no intention of reading it to find out).

  • On the post: ACS:Law Keeps Sending Out More Threat Letters — Condemned By Politicians, ISPs And General Common Sense

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 18 Mar, 2010 @ 05:56am

    Enquiry and compromise

    Dear sir,

    It has come to the attention of myself and the interests I represent that you are the proprietor of a property containing many items of a flammable and/or breakable nature. Are you aware that this region has an unfortunate history of problems with accidental outbreaks of fire and other incidents which have caused severe damage to properties in the area?

    However, I'm also happy to advise that I and my associates are able to offer our expertise in ensuring your facility is appropriately secured against such difficulties. We will be visiting your establishment tomorrow evening to discuss ways in which we may assist.

    Regards,
    Aifam Bom

  • On the post: E-Commerce Sites Realizing They're Media Properties Too

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 16 Mar, 2010 @ 06:05am

    CwF+RtB

    Speaking of that... can we expect to see more shirts anytime soon? All the tangible goodies below the $1000 mark are sold-out.

  • On the post: South Australia Attorney General Demands $20,000 From Web Commenter Who Called Him A Crook

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 05 Mar, 2010 @ 05:20am

    Re: Re:

    "...sell his own mother for a 20 cent piece..."

    We don't have quarters :)

  • On the post: Free Is Not An Aberration; It's Basic Economics

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 02 Mar, 2010 @ 01:19pm

    Ad-supported and subscriber-supported

    Both models can work. I can think of 4 free physical papers/magazines I encounter on a regular basis (2 dropped on my driveway every week, 1 weekly handed out in the city to people heading to work, 1 afternoon daily handed out to people heading home from work). The last one is actually provided by News Limited (as "mX", an arm of the Courier Mail, Brisbane's regular daily newspaper).

    The subscriber-supported newsletter I pay for is an investment one (one which I regularly bring up when this advertiser vs subscriber supported content discussion comes up). In that case, we're paying for the knowledge that the analysts aren't beholden to anyone for their paycheck except us, the subscribers. That independence and alignment of incentives is a valuable scarcity that is worth paying for. They aren't always right (nobody is), but when they screw up they're honest about it with their readers and try to figure out how to learn from it. It's much better than "free" (or lower cost) advice which is designed to benefit the advisor more so than the client.

  • On the post: Startup Visa Act Introduced In The Senate

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 25 Feb, 2010 @ 04:46am

    Re: You all don't know how it is like to be an immigrant, apparently.

    I should note that my comments were only looking at the issue from a political expediency point of view.

    From a humanitarian point of view the whole immigration process across most of the world is so fundamentally broken (as your blog describes in the specific case of Australia) that a requirement to have VC funding already established seems like a fairly minor symptom of an endemic disease.

  • On the post: Startup Visa Act Introduced In The Senate

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 24 Feb, 2010 @ 10:47pm

    Bootstrapped startups

    Bootstrapped startups usually take a long time to start creating significant numbers of jobs - only startups boosted by VC funding can afford to hire a lot of people early on.

    So from a job creation point of view, the VC funding condition makes sense, while also making this a lot easier to sell politically.

    Immigration in general is a tricky area politically, as it a case of concentrated harm (for example, the poster above me) balanced by generalised benefits (for example, the customers, clients, shareholders and creditors of the company involved, as well as their customers, clients, etc, recursing indefinitely). Members of the first group are very vocal because the harm to them is obvious and severe, while the individual benefit to members of the huge latter group is usually small, despite the aggregate benefit being large).

  • On the post: Microsoft Exec Calls For 'Driver's License For The Internet'

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 06 Feb, 2010 @ 08:34am

    Re:

    You can see why the analogy doesn't actually work when you think about the enforcement aspect.

    How is the requirement to have a driver's license when driving a car enforced? Easy: police have the power to pull someone over and ask to see their license. Depending on country, people may be required to have their license with them whenever they're driving, or they may have a period of time after being pulled over to present their license at a police station (with the registered owner of the vehicle being notified that this is the case). You can drive without a licence, but you risk getting busted for it.

    How would any similar enforcement regime work for the internet? A digital license wouldn't work since it couldn't be tied to a specific person. And hopefully people can see the rather obvious flaws in the idea of giving the police permission to enter houses in order to check internet licenses.

    Without a viable enforcement mechanism, any kind of internet license would be useful (and I don't believe a viable enforcement mechanism is possible in a modern democratic nation).

  • On the post: New South Australian Law Forbids Anonymous Political Commentary During Election Season

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 03 Feb, 2010 @ 12:56pm

    Re: Re:

    Although I will grant Atkinson and Conroy make a fine pair, odds are still decent that the ongoing "internet filter" rumblings are just political grandstanding to try to keep Fielding onside in the Senate (not that it always works, but you get that).

  • On the post: New South Australian Law Forbids Anonymous Political Commentary During Election Season

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 03 Feb, 2010 @ 12:54pm

    Re:

    Michael Atkinson is the AG of one of the less populated states rather than the Ayatollah of the whole country :)

  • On the post: Bad Web Experience: This Article Removed Because Of Copyright?

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 01 Feb, 2010 @ 10:48pm

    Copyright reverted to author?

    Depending on the style of article, the copyright may revert to the author after a period of time (or the article may only have been licensed in the first place), so if the paper doesn't have an ongoing licensing agreement for web publication, they may have to take the article down. This wouldn't happen for the Guardian's own staff writers, but I could see it happening for some columnists and opinion piece writers.

    I know this can happen in the book world if a project doesn't go ahead or goes out of print (I've seen that from the author's side in getting the copyright back for the manuscript on a project that was never published), so it doesn't surprise to hear it happens in other forms of publishing as well.

  • On the post: New Data Shows No Decrease In Crashes After Driving While Yakking Laws Were Implemented

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 29 Jan, 2010 @ 07:51pm

    Holding the phone isn't the distraction

    As you said, using an earpiece doesn't make the conversation any less distracting.

  • On the post: Can You Fairly Distinguish Commercial vs. Non-Commercial Use In Copyright?

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 29 Jan, 2010 @ 07:05pm

    Bounding the grey area

    Laws wouldn't be able to eliminate the grey area, but the could definitely put bounds on it.

    If you're past "this line" you are definitely infringing
    If you're past "that line" you are not doing anything wrong
    If you're between those two lines, tell it to the judge (assuming anyone bothers to sue you)

    That said, the copyright monopolists still have too much power for anyone to shut off their gravy train just yet. It is going to take a generational shift to fix this one. Given current retirement ages, we're probably still looking at another 20+ years before the reins of power are held predominantly by "digital natives" that see current copyright laws for the anachronism they are.

  • On the post: Debunking The Silly Complaints From People Who Don't Like Social Networks

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 16 Jan, 2010 @ 07:08am

    Re: A Little Bit

    One of my favourite buttons on Facebook is the "Hide" button. As soon as an application puts anything in my news feed and hit that button and will never see a message from that application ever again.

    It means my feed is generally a collection of status updates, photos and links my friends have posted, which generally makes for interesting reading.

  • On the post: The Killer Feature I Would Design Into An Apple Tablet

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 16 Jan, 2010 @ 06:51am

    Re: Re: Re:

    One key thing to remember about the iPhone (and similar devices) is that people often don't want or need a general purpose computer.

    If I want or need a general purpose computer, I have access to several - the Linux box I'm typing on right now, the Windows gaming box sitting to me right, or any one of the 3 computers I have at work. I don't need my phone to be a general purpose computer - the iPhone features/apps I use regularly are fairly limited (phone, calendar, maps, camera, music player, calculator, weather forecast, web browser, eBook reader and a couple of other minor apps). At the time I got it, the iPhone was the only phone that offered all those things with a decent UI (including multi-touch zoom for maps and non-phone friendly web pages), both 3G and wi-fi and with an integrated web store. These days I'd be more inclined to pick up one of the marginally more open Android handsets instead, but even there I believe the app store is policed fairly heavily (since it doesn't want to act as a vector for virus distribution).

    If Apple design a tablet that is essentially an iPhone or iPod Touch with a much bigger screen, then they aren't targeting the computer enthusiast market. Instead, they will be targeting those people that:
    a) Just want their computer to work; and
    b) Are happy using online services for most of their computing needs

    Expect such a tablet to offer good photo synchronisation so it can be easily used to transfer photos from a camera to online services like Flickr. It would come with iTunes builtin so you could use it as a management station for your iPhone and iPods. Integration of Google Docs would also make a lot of sense (and while the Google/Apple relationship may not be as close as it once was, they still have a common opponent in Microsoft).

    Hooking up to the existing app store itself may be problematic - scaling iPhone apps up to a netbook size screen could easily be ludicrous, since the size of many iPhone controls are driven by the size of a human finger rather than the size of the screen. Deciding which controls should scale with the screen size and which shouldn't may not be a decision the OS can make on its own - the apps may need to change as well.

    However, an iPhone style tablet makes far more sense as a business move than becoming an also-ran entrant into the highly crowded general purpose PC based netbook market.

  • On the post: The Killer Feature I Would Design Into An Apple Tablet

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 16 Jan, 2010 @ 06:27am

    Re:

    Pronouncing Qi as Chee isn't a made up word - it's one of the accepted transliterations of a specific Chinese word into English. While that word is often transliterated as "chi" instead (for obvious reasons), the "qi" version is still legitimate (and doesn't change the pronunciation).

    Given the meaning of the word Qi, "PixelQi" would refer to the heart/soul/essence/inherent energy of pixels, which is a decent name for a screen technology company.

    (The PixelQi folks actually give the pronunciation and meaning of Qi at the bottom of their home page)

  • On the post: Debunking The Silly Complaints From People Who Don't Like Social Networks

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 15 Jan, 2010 @ 12:46am

    Ambient Awareness

    Reading this NY Times article marked a significant shift in the way I personally thought about the various social networking sites.

    It bears some relation to intelligence gathering - the individual pieces may be trivial, but the aggregation of them creates a perspective that you would otherwise be missing.

  • On the post: Another Battle: Can Teachers Sell Lesson Plans?

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 16 Dec, 2009 @ 01:06pm

    Lesson plans distributed for free

    A personally interesting case on the "posting them publicly for free" front for me is that the IPT program at my old school predates the existence of a formal state syllabus. The school IPT teachers essentially wrote their own text book, which has been freely available online since the Web started back in the early 90's.

  • On the post: Can You Copyright An SQL Query?

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 08 Dec, 2009 @ 12:59pm

    Re:

    I was going to write an "It depends" comment (since I hadn't seen a good one aside from the brief FSF quote), but fortunately I read as far as this comment from "Doctor Strange" first. It covers the different possible situations really well.

    In other contexts (usually free speech ones with companies attempting to ban distribution of things like DeCSS), you will see the idea of "code is speech". Just as some written speech is too trivial to be effectively copyrighted, so it is with code. But once the complexity and originality reaches a certain level, then claiming copyright is justifiable.

    The difference between this and patents (and the reason it doesn't outrage most programmers anywhere near as much) is that with copyright, independent invention *is* permitted, so onerous licensing terms (such as these) are vulnerable to being undercut by a "clean room" reimplementation. As Dr Strange notes though, it may be a bit legally questionable getting someone that has seen the original query to do the reimplementation - from a legal point of view, it would be safer to get an untainted programmer to do it (although $500 a year isn't enough money to justify much of a lawsuit, so it may not be worth worrying about that).

  • On the post: Reuters, AP Refuse To Cover Cricket Matches Over Restrictive Press Accreditation Rules

    Nick Coghlan ( profile ), 25 Nov, 2009 @ 03:35am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: What's big in the US isn't always big worldwide and vice-versa

    It hasn't seemed too so far... given the number of columns written by current and former Australian players at least in News Ltd papers, methinks they're quite cosy with Cricket Australia and won't really care what AAP and Reuters do.

    Sure, AAP and Reuters are big newswires, but print media journalists are perfectly capable of finding alternate sources if those two aren't covering things a paper wants to include.

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