Google
 

Input Needed for a Story on Mozilla’s RSS Icon and Licensing

Tuesday, June 13th, 2006

I am currently writing an follow-up full length article for OperaWatch on the Mozilla's RSS icon and its licensing. Unlike the previous OperaWatch story, this story is focused less on the Opera/Mozilla interaction and more on the actual RSS icon, its history, licensing issues and opinions of different communities involved. ...

Mozilla Trademarks Their RSS Icon?

Monday, June 12th, 2006

My good friend Daniel Goldman posted an interesting story at OperaWatch regarding the fact that Mozilla required a singed agreement from Opera Software before allowing them to use their RSS icon. It appears that Mozilla filed for trademarks on this icon and is planning on enforcing a licensing policy. More ...

Forgent JPEG Patent Thrown Out by the Patent Office

Friday, May 26th, 2006

A while back I wrote about the Forgent JPEG patent and how they are sending demand letters to small companies (I posted a copy here). Now comes word from GrokLaw that most of the patent has been thrown out by the Patent Office as invalid. No word on whether any of ...

InfoCard: Sender-ID All over again?

Friday, March 10th, 2006

Wired ran an article today by Lawrence Lessing singing the praises of a new Microsoft protocol called "InfoCard". I took a quick look at the technical reference and it seems very straight forward AND is all build on a bunch of OASIS and W3C standards for web services. So far, ...

The Forgent Demand Letters for JPEG Royalties

Tuesday, May 31st, 2005

(This post was part of a separate "Standards Blog" which has been merged into my main blog) About a month ago I wrote about the Forgent JPEG Patent saga. Recently a faithful reader sent me a copy of a demand letter sent on behalf of Forgent (to a company that shall ...

The New OpenDocument Standard

Wednesday, May 4th, 2005

(This post was part of a separate "Standards Blog" which has been merged into my main blog) Slashdot posted a story about the approval of the new OpenDocument standard by OASIS. The actual standard is available in PDF and OpenOffice formats. The obvious focus of this activity is against Microsoft and ...

The Never Ending JPEG Patent Saga

Wednesday, April 27th, 2005

(This post was part of a separate "Standards Blog" which has been merged into my main blog) Last April a company called Forgent Networks initiated 31 lawsuits against various companies using the JPEG format based on an old US Patent # 4,698,672 which Forgent acquired by buying up some other company. ...

FOSS and OASIS

Tuesday, February 22nd, 2005

Groklaw just published an open letter from representatives of the FOSS community directed against a new IPR policy at OASIS. However, I do wonder if there was any discussion behind the scenes at first before taking this step. The IETF just might be next...

Patenting Autofill

Thursday, January 13th, 2005

Do you like the Opera form autofill feature? What about FireFox's or Google Toolbar's? IANAL, but it might be patented ... by Microsoft, Apple and Intel. Take a look at the following three patents: 6,651,217 - "System and method for populating forms with previously used data values" 6,192,380 -"Automatic web based form ...

2004: The Year That Promised Email Authentication

Saturday, December 25th, 2004

(This article was published at Circle-ID) As the year comes to a close, it is important to reflect on what has been one of the major actions in the anti-spam arena this year: the quest for email authentication. With email often called the "killer app" of the Internet, it is important ...