Connecting the Dots - Michael Rice’s Blog

I haven’t been spending much time downloading or even listening for anything new lately. Nevertheless, here are a few of my recent downloads:

• Emiliana Torrini, Me and Armini
• Keane, Spiralling
• My Morning Jacket, Just One Thing

I missed a chance to go to a My Morning Jacket show for free years ago in LA…long before they became The My Morning Jacket. I got free tickets from KCRW, but I was travelling. I’m very sorry I missed it because they are slowly, but surely, creeping up on my play counts.

The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008 cleared committee just a while ago. I think it’s safe to assume–without even looking–that the open source / free culture folks are probably apalled. Nevertheless, the IPR (intellectual property rights) holders demonstrate they have traction in Congress yet again. Why do you think that is?

This post is more for me than you. Deal with it. The following are some of the features I want in the new Coderights. Don’t think of this as a requirements doc; think of it as a wish list.

1. No lame posts.
2. Do a better job linking to the ip blogosphere, but do it smartly.
3. Cover stuff that matters to the Academy, but make sure the real world understands why it matters. See In re Bilski.
4. Cover the red meat the real world cares about in detail.
5. Stop trying to do it all by myself.
6. Do more for open source and more for startups.
7. Cover sexy technology–the open file format battle bored the technologists I know, if they tuned in at all.
8. Be more than Wordpress or Movabletype.

In a few weeks, when we get to open source licenses, I’m going to petulantly raise my hand and say, “how can a piece of software be ‘dual licensed’?” I’m playing around with GlassFish, the open source application server from Sun. I’m trying to decide what I think of it as compared to JBoss. Accordingly, I pulled the Wikipedia entry, and lo… I found this oblique statement:

“GlassFish is free software, dual-licensed under two free software licences: the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) and the GNU General Public License (GPL) with the classpath exception.”

Whaaaaaat? What does this mean? My law school issue spotting radar lit up like a Christmas tree in Guadalupe.

I just got an email that Patents.com finally launched.

I have a vague memory of the publicity around the service a long time ago. But what’s more interesting to me is that it must have taken close to a year to launch. I say this because I probably would have registered for an email update with the service when I was hot and heavy with Coderights: and that was in the early part of this year.

Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think. When I finish rebooting Coderights, I’ll probably cover it!

I’m seriously thinking about resurrecting Coderights (my old blog about software legal issues), but there are quite a few things I want to do a differently with it this time around. Foremost among them is that I need more technology behind it than just Wordpress or Movabletype.

For example, I probably will talk more about software licensing. In the past, I was frustrated when I was trying to highlight multiple pieces of text from a contract (or one court case, for that matter).

So this afternoon I’m working on a tool to help me do just that: highlight text and render rich information related to that highlight. It will use AJAX, and I will post it soon on labs.michaelrice.me.

For a little while there, I was thinking about doing it with Cappuccino, the new Objective-J based framework, but I think that will be overkill for what I’m trying to accomplish—for now, anyway.

I’m under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), so I can’t tell you as much as I want to you about the new native Brightkite iPhone application. Nevertheless, I think it’s not a breach to tell you the guys did a great job, and you’re going to like it when it’s ready for general use.

It had to be done. I downloaded Chrome.

The only thing can say in addition to the 37,633 other posts in the last 24 hours is I like it a lot better than IE 8. There. Obligatory geek post duly entered in my stream.

I was playing around with Eclipse tonight, when the application suddenly decided to tell me that it wanted to tell the Eclipse developers about how I use the application.

Of course I said yes, but I thought I’d share their terms of use because I was kind of surprised–and kind of pleased–by (a) the technology for giving me control over what feedback it submitted and (b) the forthrightness of the terms of use. Whether the terms are really going to make the privacy folks happy, I don’t know… but at least it’s direct.

I thought my contracts professor said courts hardly ever find contracts to be unconscionable. Well, one just showed up in my inbox from the Washington Supreme Court, no less. The case is McKee v. AT&T Corp. I haven’t read it yet, but here’s the first paragraph:

McKee filed this class action suit, alleging AT&T wrongly charged him (and others) city utility surcharges and usurious late fees. When the Chelan County Superior Court found the dispute resolution provision of AT&T’s Consumer Services Agreement unconscionable and denied its motion to compel arbitration, AT&T appealed. The Court of Appeals, Division Three, certified the case to this court. We affirm the trial court and remand for further proceedings.