willy wonka’s ip policy

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Ran across the article “What’s Good for Willy Wonka is Good for America” while reading about the sad demise of a company called Miller & Kriesel, which I like (liked?) quite a bit. Ken Kriesel referred to this article in an intereview, so I thought it would be worth reading.

Not that I necessarily agree with what the article alludes to when it comes to policy for safeguarding one’s IP, but noneless an interesting take on IP lessons to be learned from the world’s most famous (albeit fictional) chocolatier:

When it came to internal IP theft, Willy Wonka did not mess around, and others can learn from his success.

Oh, BTW, in case you’re curious, M&K were the folks that invented the concept of the subwoofer and, I think, if not invented, at least helped pioneer surround sound. They’re also the folks that Lucasfilm (I guess perhaps until recently) used for all the speakers in all their studios. The story of their demise can be found relatively easily – suffice it to say, think twice before bringing your key IP over to China.

robert goddard, the fraud

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Don’t remember how I ran across this – I think this past week  it was Robert Goddard’s birthday or anniversary since he first invented the rocket. In any event, I ran across the article in the TIME 100 about him. I had no idea that, at the time he published his first paper on rocket technology, most of his colleagues did not believe it to be viable technology. Even worse, the New York Times, in a 1920 article, stated:

As anyone knew, the paper explained with an editorial eye roll, space travel was impossible, since without atmosphere to push against, a rocket could not move so much as an inch. Professor Goddard, it was clear, lacked “the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”

Needless to say, they were just a bit, shall we say, off the mark.

To me, the story serves as an interesting reminder to think carefully when you hear about someone’s “crazy” ideas. It reminds me of some of the harsh criticisms I’ve heard doled out by VCs against fledgeling companies. It reminds me of a story I heard about a very, very good lawyer turning down a couple of entrepreneurs as clients as they were kind of scruffy and had ideas that were a bit out there (only to see them sell their company for hundreds of millions just a couple of years later). It reminds me that in Canada, growth of fledgeling companies – real innovators and risk takers – just doesn’t seem to happen at the same level it does down in the US – not nearly the same. It reminds me that very few companies who start in Canada (assuming their founders don’t decide just to move to the US) stay to grow in Canada.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that there aren’t any silly, stupid and just plain crazy entrepreneurs out there who’s ideas aren’t worth a plug nickel and whose plans are doomed to failure. But even then, it makes me wonder whether here, in Canada, we have perhaps gotten too conservative, too critical and too quick to dismiss things that might, just might, work out very well. I wonder sometimes if Canada has become the New York Times circa 1920.

enterprise 2.0

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

One of the very interesting events that will be part of Toronto Tech Week is Enterprise 2.0. In the words of Thomas Purves, one of the organizers of the event:

The plan is to bring together the worlds of the leading minds from the technology and consulting side of Enterprise2.0 with business leaders (CxO’s, executives and IT/HR professionals) to bring a practical and real-world perspective to these ideas.

Sounds very interesting indeed. From what I can see in Wikipedia, the term Enterprise 2.0 was coined by someone from Harvard Business School and refers to the use of social networking stuff in the enterprise – i.e. Web 2.0 as applied to business – just to be clear, not as a business, but applied to business.

I was chatting with Mark Kuznicki who mentioned a great example of this described in Wikinomics – Goldcorp and how it took social networking and open-source type tactics to develop a very interesting approach (and very rewarding and profitable solution) to difficulties it had faced. I can’t do the topic justice here – check out the book or have a chat with Mark – its quite an interesting tale.

Similarly compelling tales can be found in a recent article in Wired on crowdsourcing, which I found very, very compelling. Take a look at Eli Lilly’s InnoCentive program or Marketocracy, both of which are mentioned in the Wired article – pretty tough to argue with the results.

So, if you’re a business person, this event would be well worth your time. So go. Then please try to convince the powers that be at my firm to adopt some of this stuff!

Just noted one quote from Wired that I thought captured one of the principles quite nicely:

4. The crowd produces mostly crap

Networks like InnoCentive, Mechanical Turk, and iStockphoto don’t increase the amount of talent – they make it possible to find and leverage that talent. Any open call for submissions – whether for scientific solutions, new product designs, or funny home videos – will elicit mostly junk. Smart companies install cheap, effective filters to separate the wheat from the chaff.

silly lawsuit of the week

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

OK. Short version of the story in InformationWeek: Woman puts up a website. She puts a “webwrap” agreement at the bottom – i.e. basically a contract that says if you use the site then you agree to the contract. Still some question as to whether such a mechanism is binding, but anyway…

So the Internet Archive of course comes along and indexes her site. Which apparently is a violation of the webwrap. So she sues, representing herself, I believe. The court throws out everything on a preliminary motion by IA except for the breach of contract.

InformationWork observes that “Her suit asserts that the Internet Archive’s programmatic visitation of her site constitutes acceptance of her terms, despite the obvious inability of a Web crawler to understand those terms and the absence of a robots.txt file to warn crawlers away.” (my emphasis). They then conclude with this statement:

If a notice such as Shell’s is ultimately construed to represent just such a “meaningful opportunity” to an illiterate computer, the opt-out era on the Net may have to change. Sites that rely on automated content gathering like the Internet Archive, not to mention Google, will have to convince publishers to opt in before indexing or otherwise capturing their content. Either that or they’ll have to teach their Web spiders how to read contracts.

(my emphasis).

They already have – sort of. It’s called robots.txt – the thing referred to above. For those of you who haven’t heard of this, its a little file that you put on the top level of your site and which is the equivalent of a “no soliciation” sign on your door. Its been around for at least a decade (probably longer) and most (if not all) search engines

From the Internet Archive’s FAQ:

How can I remove my site’s pages from the Wayback Machine?

The Internet Archive is not interested in preserving or offering access to Web sites or other Internet documents of persons who do not want their materials in the collection. By placing a simple robots.txt file on your Web server, you can exclude your site from being crawled as well as exclude any historical pages from the Wayback Machine.

Internet Archive uses the exclusion policy intended for use by both academic and non-academic digital repositories and archivists. See our exclusion policy.

You can find exclusion directions at exclude.php. If you cannot place the robots.txt file, opt not to, or have further questions, email us at info at archive dot org.

standardized methods of communications – privacy policies, etc. – more. Question is, will people be required to use it, or simply disregard and act dumb?

david johnston speech – not to be missed

Posted on by — 1 Comment ↓

Oddly enough there’s another presentation at the Toronto Board of Trade that isn’t in their events calendar. But that’s OK because you, loyal reader, can read it about it here and use the link above to register. Which I highly recommend, as the person who is speaking is none other than David Johnston, the President and Vice-Chancellor at Waterloo University.

I was trying to find a decent bio of him online but haven’t been able to – the one linked above to the WU site is OK but definitely does not do the man justice (because its too short and doesn’t really identify the relevance of all the roles he has played). In addition to being a brilliant academic, he literally wrote the book on securities regulation in Canada and played a key role in shaping Canada’s approach to the internet by chairing the Information Highway Advisory Council and the Blue Ribbon Panel on Smart Communities. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I had the good fortune of taking a course he instructed while he was teaching at McGill’s Faculty of Law. A remarkably good teacher and, surprisingly, with someone that has so much on his plate, very attentive to his students and always open, accessible and personable.

As you can probably tell from this post, I am extremely biased when it comes to Professor Johnston – I’m a big fan. The man is smart and is worth listening to. As an aside, I also understand that apparently a character in Erich Segal’s Love Story was based on him – a roommate or something if memory serves. Have no idea if true or not – never read the book myself. But there you go. Also have an interesting story about what he wears but will save that for another time.

Here’s the blurb:

Competitive advantage comes by engaging the brightest minds with the latest technology. Join David Johnston, President, University of Waterloo, as he shares ‘what’s in the water at Waterloo’ and illustrates how smart business leaders are successfully partnering with academia to stay on the forefront of the innovation curve.

At the Toronto Board of Trade, Downtown Centre, 1 First Canadian Place. Wednesday, March 28, 7:30 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. Go see him.

Thanks to the always excellent Wellington Financial blog, where I noted mention of this event.

bell’s chief brand officer to speak

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Again been a bit lackadaisical on events. Sorry.

Another in the Toronto Board of Trade’s excellent C-Series (as in CEO, CFO, CTO, COO…) tech series. This time its Wade Oosterman, President of Bell Mobility and also Bell’s Chief Brand Officer. Needless to say, he’s someone worth listening to. The nub:

Mr. Oosterman will share his point-of-view about new technologies and how to use them to improve business. He will also speak about his experiences in the technology industry and ways technology can be used to increase profits.

At the Toronto Board of Trade – Downtown Centre in 1 First Canadian Place. Friday, March 30, 2007, 7:30 a.m. – 9:00 a.m.

Not that expensive, and you also get a chance to mingle with other tech folks.

from the “another security headache” department

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Yes postings have been sparse lately – things getting busy so alas. Anyway, very short (but rather alarming) note from Wired about copiers. Though I knew most copiers now used digital technology of some sort, I had no idea they actually contained full-blown hard drives that store your copies. The exact reason why they need hard drives to copy documents, and why the data needs to remain on the drives, is a bit of a mystery to me, and something the article doesn’t go into. I’d had always just assumed that the image information was stored somewhere temporarily and disappeared when you finished copying. Apparently not. Anyway, here’s a brief excerpt:

most digital copiers manufactured in the past five years have disk drives – the same kind of data-storage mechanism found in computers – to reproduce documents. As a result, the seemingly innocuous machines that are commonly used to spit out copies of tax returns for millions of Americans can retain the data being scanned.

If the data on the copier’s disk aren’t protected with encryption or an overwrite mechanism, and if someone with malicious motives gets access to the machine, industry experts say sensitive information from original documents could get into the wrong hands.

I guess someone, somewhere, will be selling add-on kits for copiers relatively shortly…

canadian export controls now apply to quantum cryptography

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Well. Not like this is going to affect a huge number of companies in Canada, but one of my colleagues brought to my attention at an internal meeting the fact that the Canadian government has updated its export control list – i.e. the list of things that you can’t ship out of Canada without a permit. A brief release from the gov’t summarizes the additions, which now include quantum cryptography goods and technologies. D-Wave might want to be pay attention to this, though they’re not in the area of quantum cryptography per se. That being said, I’m a bit surprised that its only quantum cryptography that’s on the list. Given the potential impact that quantum computing technology may have on standard cryptographic protections (i.e. being able to render it more or less useless, assuming the predictions on its horsepower come to pass) I would have thought quantum computing would have also been added on in some form.

press neutrality and lawsuits

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Techcrunch (Mr. Arrington) has put up an article suggesting Digg sue Wired (that’s also the headline – “Digg Should Sue Wired”). Because Wired posted some negative reviews of Digg. And because Wired’s parent, Condé Nast, owns a competitor of Digg (reddit). The nub:

Digg can’t treat Wired like any other user that’s engaged in fraud. Wired is the press, and the press has tremendous power. Wired is putting Digg in an impossible situation, and they should be called on it. Reporting news is one thing (although they should note the conflict of interest there as well), but actively creating negative news about a competitor and then using the massive reach of Wired to promote that “news” is way over the line.

Very strog words indeed. I’m quite surprised by this comment, as I understand Mr. Arrington has legal training and in fact practiced as a lawyer for some time. Why surprised? Because, apart from the possibility that the reporter who wrote the second article to which he refers (who basically tried to see if Digg’s system of user rankings could be “gamed”) breached Digg’s terms of use (of course – because rightly so their terms would prohibit such gaming…), its really, really tough for me to see exactly what Digg should sue Wired for? What exactly is the cause of action? Surely he’s not accusing Digg of actually committing fraud, is he? It difficult for me to see how fraud has been committed – what exactly is fraudulent about the articles?

Sure, there is a conflict of interest situation here, the usual cure for which is full disclosure, but hardly the basis for a lawsuit. And if he thinks that Wired suffers from conflict of interest, well, I invite him to check out the ownership of most major media in the US and Canada, and see how many times they are taking a stab at competitors of other companies that their ultimate owners control. If this is as big a deal as Mr. Arrington suggests, the Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent should be considered a field manual to endless lawsuits against not only Condé Nast but also CBS, NBC, ABC, CanWest Global, etc. etc. etc.

But perhaps I took the words too seriously – perhaps he was just using the words “sue” and “fraud” figuratively or to illustrate his point. Or perhaps, given the more litigious nature of the US, and the somewhat kindler, gentler, less punitive (as in damages) environment in Canada, there is actually a basis for Digg suing the heck out of Wired.

Bit of a tempest in a teapot, I think…

And of course in the interest of full disclosure, I am a subscriber to Wired, and also hope someday to see one tiny link from their site to this little blog.

canadians – as bad as the chinese (almost)

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Well, this story certainly has got a lot of coverage. I was quite surprised to read in Wired that quite of bit of IP is stolen in Canada. To wit:

But — surprise, surprise — IIPA also wants Canada added to the list of the most egregious violators. That’s right. Canada. According to the IIPA, Canada was responsible for $551 million in lost revenue in 2006, all of it in the business software sector (numbers from other industries were not available). That makes Canada the fourth-worst offender. See the chart here.

I was also at a very interesting speech that Graham Henderson of CRIA gave on the proliferation of counterfeit goods in Canada. Again, though I knew of some counterfeiting of goods going on here, I was a bit surprised at the numbers that were presented and also the types of counterfeiting – everything from extension cords to batteries to pharmaceuticals.

Of course that’s one side of it. And like everything else there are always two side to a story. Michael Geist is quoted in the story as asserting that the IIPA is out of touch with the rest of the world by criticizing countries who have less stringent measures in place than US legislation, which he asserts to be the world’s toughest.

Its interesting to compare this with the MPAA’s position on proposals in the use on fair use, which I mentioned a bit earlier. Perhaps best described like this:

Geist on IP infringement issues in Canada: “Problem? What problem?”

The MPAA on fair use issues in the US: “Problem? What problem?”

And so it goes. <sigh>