October « 2007 « Luis Villa

October, 2007

openservice — 2 Comments
31
Oct 07

open is over-used, part CXXXIV (“Open Social”)

I’m thinking of calling my open services work ‘principled services’ going forward to split some of the difference between open and Free, and remove some of the ambiguity around the often-overloaded terms ‘open and ‘free’. In the meantime, we’re about to get a flood of discussion of open services, courtesy of Open Social, the new Google project.

I’m mocking them, a little bit, but it bears watching. The really interesting question, which I don’t see fully answered yet, is whether or not this is just about widgets/developer platform, or if this is about the broader (and much more important) open social graph. (Unfortunately, the news suggests the former.) Depending on the final form and how much control it gives to Google, it would almost certainly be better from an open/free/principled perspective than Facebook/Myspace. I look forward to seeing if/how mugshot will integrate.

Technorati search of the news; the actual press release¹; Techcrunch.

(Tangentially, I’m irritated that orkut doesn’t seem to let me integrate my old orkut account with my google account.)

best press release ever- search for XXXX and Website Partner A [↩]

gnome — 14 Comments
31
Oct 07

running for the GNOME Foundation Board

As I just announced on foundation-list, I’ll be running again for the Board this year. This will be an unusual candidacy. I will not be running to do various and sundry board tasks; I’ll be running to do exactly one thing:

legal work- a vote for me is a vote that says ‘Luis should be the coordinator of all GNOME-related legal issues.’

I also will volunteer for two other things, but if someone else wants to do them it won’t bother me:

secretarial services- I hate doing secretarial meeting bits, but this is often something organizations delegate to their lawyers, so I’d better get good at it.
occasional common sense- I stress occasional here because I don’t have the time or the energy to get into petty politics with anyone, so if that happens, I’ll pretty quickly retreat to lawyer-secretary.

I will not do:

anything non-legal that goes beyond common-sense advice giving.

Don’t vote for me if:

you think someone else should be the central coordinator for the board’s legal issues
you think board members should be jacks of all trades
you think it is crazy to hand legal issues over to a second-year law student (nb: you have to justify who should be doing it in that case :)

Do vote for me if:

You think issues like copyright, trademark, patents, legal status of web services, relationships with outside counsel and partners, etc., are important to GNOME’s future, and you’d like to see the board (led by me) be proactive in dealing with them.
you want someone on the board who is firmly committed to delegation and coordination.

I will almost certainly serve one term and only one term. I expect to have less time once I graduate from school, and the 18 month term will almost perfectly coincide with the rest of my time in law school. In addition, if I’m successful in reaching my goals, by the end of the term I’ll have built strong relationships with our outside counsel, and it will be less necessary to have a board member aggressively devoted to legal issues.

I’ll explain more of why I am doing this as we get closer to the election, but suffice to say that I think that the board could be much more proactive in dealing with these issues, and I’m putting my money where my mouth is by stepping up to do it myself.

misc. — 10 Comments
30
Oct 07

only in law

“business-school grading is … much more rational than law school grading because MBA students are graded on the strength of their actual work, not a single exam at the end of the semester.” (emphasis mine; quote from here)

Only in law could this be considered a radical and provocative statement. The field of law excites me; it is a shame the profession of law (including the teaching of the profession) is so broken.

misc. — No Comments
29
Oct 07

thanks, max

Thanks, max…

(1) for speaking well of me to Jamie (who probably very, very vaguely remembers me from various conversations we’ve had through the years at Berkman and Duke) – he’s one of the best at what he does, and I have a huge amount of respect for him.

(2) for that second paraphrase:

“On any law school examination, the right answer to a question is almost always whatever gives the client maximum control and maximum options. That is why it is sometimes difficult for lawyers who come in contact with open source and free culture ideas to understand why the client would want to *give up* control.”

I have a whole half-written post about this problem which I’m now going to scrap- this encapsulates it much better than I could.

personal — 5 Comments
24
Oct 07

deblois swinging through cali

My sister Deblois will be swinging through California through early November, including stops in Modesto, Fairfax, San Francisco, and (gulp) San Diego. full calendar here. Her shows tend to be low-key but fun little events; I highly recommend if you want an entertaining and enjoyable evening. And she’ll gush if you tell her I sent you ;)
If you want to listen to her latest album (or, you know, ‘buy it’ :) I have a host of links about it here.

forfacebook / personal — 1 Comment
24
Oct 07

sad

It is sad that my immediate reaction to this article was ‘at least Colbert is being up front about which corporations own his campaign.’ Overwhelmed, indeed.

misc. — 6 Comments
21
Oct 07

gmail-related research bleg

I saw a post some months ago (maybe a year ago?) in which the author had done some scans of debian list subscribers and found what percentage of list subscribers were using gmail. I can’t find the post now, though. Anyone remember who it was, and/or can point me to the post? Would be much appreciated. Thanks!

misc. — 1 Comment
17
Oct 07

good groklaw article on patent dates

I’ve been slagging groklaw a bit of late, but this is a solid, informative article on patent ‘dates’ (expiration, age of prior art, etc.) that corrects a mistake I made a couple times on Friday with regards to expiration dates. Might be worth reading for those of you curious about the age and validity of the IP Innovations patents.

law / misc. — 1 Comment
16
Oct 07

blogging elsewhere

Last week I helped write a long blog post (short article?) on some of the legal issues around BitTorrent as part of my work for the Science and Technology Law Review. After some editing and polish to integrate the work of the various co-authors, it has been posted at the law school’s Project On Law and Technology website. It is very un-bloggy in its length and style, I’ll admit, but was an interesting exercise for me- I’m very interested about the overlap between traditional long-form scholarship and short-form blogging, so getting to be involved in this was a pleasure.

[Speaking of journals, watch this space for more rants on bluebooking, with a particular focus on the complete inanity of bluebook's relationship with the web.]

law / software — 3 Comments
14
Oct 07

help is on the way, John!

John: I have on my desk a nearly final draft of the Software Freedom Law Center‘s new “Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects”. The final draft will apparently be made public very shortly, and I think it should answer a lot of your questions. One of the lawyers at the event, in partnership with a major tech publisher, will also be publishing an ‘IP for hackers’-type book in the near future as well.

I will note that the main difference in the particular question you ask (why you can wait to file a patent suit, but not a trademark suit) stems from the different goals of patent and trademark. Trademark’s goal is to be useful to consumers; if a bad trademark is out there, it is believed to harm/confuse all consumers, and must be pursued. Patent’s goal is (primarily) to incentivize inventors, so if inventors want to not pursue violators, that is their call. This is not a complete picture- there are a number of wrinkles on each side- but that is why you get the defaults you do.

Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.