The Economist This Week Features "Time to Fix Patents"

The Economist this week features the subject of Time to fix patents.

Patent Law and the European Union (EU): Software-Related and Business-Method Patents Limited by U.S. Supreme Court Decision in Alice and Other Cases

Patent-happy lawmakers in the European Union (EU) should be paying particular attention to what is happening in the United States in terms of patent law developments regarding software-related and business-method patents.

We missed this earlier due to our massive work on the ancient land survey of Native America by astronomy, but we were gratified to read a perspicacious article by Steven Seidenberg at the ABA Journal in Business-method and software patents may go through the looking glass after Alice decision.

We were light-years ahead of the competition -- i.e the rest of the legal community --  in our inexorable assessment more than 10 years ago and in years thereafter that patents had gotten totally out of hand and that something had to be done by the legal system to avert the economy being totally clogged by patent trolls and patents that had no business being granted.

The Alice case decision by the U.S. Supreme Court and several other patent decisions by SCOTUS have finally led to some long-needed reform of the patent monolith, although much more still needs to be done in the future to stop the pervasively negative influence that patent practices have had on technological innovation in recent years.

As Seidenberg writes:

“It’s a new world order in the aftermath of Alice,” says Dale S. Lazar, a partner in DLA Piper’s Reston, Virginia, office.

... and well it should be.

Read the whole thing here.

European Union Cookie Law Implementation is a Colossal Waste of User Time and Otherwise Valuable Webmaster Resources, Plugging the Networks Uselessly and Slowing Down Browsing

The wheels of law turn slowly and one would think that something sensible is being done in the interim by the powers that be, but it is difficult in the present case to discover what that might have been.

We posted about the impending and in many regards superfluously invasive effects of the European Union Cookie Law more than three years ago, see e.g.:

• EU Internet Cookie Law One-Year Grace Period Ends May 26, 2012 and Confronts Websites and Blogs with Compliance Problems
  
  
• European Union Cookie Law Compliance Solution: A Free Open Source Plugin at Silktide together with a Definitive Guide to the Cookie Law

How surprised we were then as a "publishing" blogger to receive an email today, July 27, 2015, from Google and the Google Ads Policy Team regarding "Important information regarding the user consent policy" which reads as follows:

"Dear Publisher,

We want to let you know about a new policy about obtaining EU end-users’ consent that reflects regulatory and best practice guidance. It clarifies your duty to obtain end-user consent when you use products like Google AdSense, DoubleClick for Publishers, and DoubleClick Ad Exchange.

Please review our new EU user consent policy as soon as possible. This requires that you obtain EU end users’ consent to the storing and accessing of cookies and other information, and to the data collection, sharing, and usage that takes place when you use Google products. It does not affect any provisions on data ownership in your contract.

Please ensure that you comply with this policy as soon as possible, and not later than 30th September 2015.

If your site or app does not have a compliant consent mechanism, you should implement one now. To make this process easier for you, we have compiled some helpful resources at cookiechoices.org.

This policy change is being made in response to best practice and regulatory requirements issued by the European data protection authorities. These requirements are reflected in changes recently made on Google’s own websites.

Thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation.

Regards,
The Google Policy Team

© 2015 Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043

As a publisher using a Google ads product, you are receiving this email to inform you of an important policy change." 

We were gratified to see among the "EU cookie law solution choices" at cookiechoices.org that the solution we recommended more than three years ago, Cookie Consent by SilkTide, has emerged as the most popular solution. That is the good news.

The bad news is that the lawmakers at the European Union (EU) appear in the intervening years to have made little or no progress in adopting a user-friendly and webmaster-friendly set of rules and solutions regarding opt-ins and opt-outs for cookies.

Quite the contrary, they are contributing to a massive bloating and absolutely useless boilerplate bottlenecking of the Internet, thereby costing users valuable time by demanding even more superfluous clicks via the consenting process for every cookie-using web presence. A ridiculous state of affairs.

Opting in or out of cookies can be better and faster done simply by making the appropriate changes to the cookie options in modern browsers. The EU law is a colossal waste of time for webmasters, bloggers and users. WHO is responsible for this nonsense? They should not be in Brussels.

When one takes a look at the Cookie Consent Kit that the EU has developed, one really must ask for whom it was designed. Code-savvy webmasters need little coding assistance of this kind, whereas coding novices who run blogs or websites via the many portals and services offered, can do nothing with that overly complex, virtually useless kit. We will be surprised if anyone uses it.

We ourselves, as already stated more than 3 years ago, rely on the simple solution that SilkTide presents. Thank you.

The Wisdom ? of Parliaments and the Case of Weather Forecast Pioneer Admiral Robert FitzRoy

How misled can your average politician or scientist be in thinking what is right?
today and yesterday?

Consider the story of the fate of weather forecast pioneer
Admiral Robert FitzRoy,
captain of the HMS Beagle for Charles Darwin's famous voyage.

Peter Moore at BBC News relates that story to us in
The Birth of the Weather Forecast
where we read informatively that:

"When one MP suggested in the [House of] Commons in 1854 that recent advances in scientific theory might soon allow them to know the weather in London "twenty-four hours beforehand", the House roared with laughter."

As amazing as it may appear to us in our modern world today, the idea of the possibility of "weather forecasting" was considered a lunacy by most people in mainstream politics and science as late as the 19th century.

Indeed, weather forecast pioneer Admiral Robert FitzRoy, "the father of weather forecasting", met with vast resistance in his era, but as Moore tells us:

"[T]oday his vision of a public forecasting service, funded by government for the benefit of all, is fundamental to our way of life. 

His department, which began with a staff of three, now employs more than 1,500 people and has an annual budget of more than £80m.... 

Dame Julia Slingo, the Met Office's current chief scientist explains: "FitzRoy was really ahead of his time. He was not mistaken or eccentric, he was just at the start of a very long journey, one that continues today in the Met Office."

Little has changed in people, politics or science in the intervening 161 years.

Mankind remains as difficult to teach to rise above its biases, ignorance and superstitions as it was in the Commons of 1854 where weather forecasting was literally laughed out of the House -- by the unfit.

Paradoxically, Darwin is famous
but who knows about FitzRoy?

And yet we all should daily thank FitzRoy, and not Darwin.

FitzRoy was right -- weather can be forecasted.
Not perfectly, but enough to be of a very big help to mankind.

Darwin on the other hand told us that the "fittest" survive.
When we view the daily news, however, we are not sure about that.

Things appear to be more chance than merit,
and probabilities seem to guide survival outcomes more than fitness.

Massive Eurozone Lending by Strong EU and Other Nations to Weak Economies as a Clever Long Term Plan of Indirect Currency Devaluation?

The Economist has a piece on the Greek debt crisis.

Here is our question for the pundits.

Let's say for purposes of calculation that there are ca. 10000000 Greeks (it is actually more like 11 million) with a government debt of ca. €300000000000 (some say 320 billion). Reduce both by 7 zeros and you get ca. €30000 per Greek. The question then becomes why it was permitted to loan out that kind of money to a basically non-industrial 3rd world nation that has no structural basis to ever repay that kind of exorbitant debt.

Is the indirect devaluation of the Euro over time actually a clever long-term financial plan instituted by strong nations via absurdly exorbitant lending to weak borrower nations? What other rational explanation is there?

Greece and the Debt Crisis: A Basic Analysis of Options

Zachary Goldfarb at the Washington Post Wonkblog sizes up the debt crisis in Greece.

Greece: Where Some of the Money Owed Went: The 2004 Athens Olympics Venue and its Now Abandoned Building Infrastructure

We don't know what percentage of the 2004 Athens Olympics total building infrastructure this involves, but the linked article gives some idea of where at least some of the money now owed by Greece arguably went. What the 2004 Athens Olympics venues look like today