This has been a busy week for issues that have been simmering for some time to come to a boil. There are three that I'm trying to understand, hoping to get some insight into what their separate and combined effects might be.
Eolas, who claims that any use of the browser as a platform for interactivity violates its patents (both old and new) has decided to sue a number of Internet players for damages and continuing royalties. It's a star-studded list including Adobe, Amazon, Apple, eBay, Google (and its subsidiary YouTube), Sun, and Yahoo as well as a number of media and web site holders including Staples, Citigroup, and Playboy. Microsoft has alread been sued by Eolas and settled.The Patent Office has examined the Eolas patent twice(the 1998 one) and has decided to let it stand in spite of warnings of dire consequences from Internet notables, including the net's founder, Tim Berners-Lee.
Eolas wants the court to issue an injunction (unlikely, since they can always be compensated with money and that's what they want anyway). Of course, they're in that same Texas court that i4i sued Microsoft in recently and they are known to be extremely plaintiff friendly, so it may take a run to an appeals court to delay an injunction. After that, given all the players involved, it could take years to sort it all out.
In the meantime, there are lots of possibilities:
(1) The Patent Office could change its mind again, with so many companies' ability to continue to deliver products and information at stake. Expect dozens of companies and Internet experts filing amicus curiae petitions.
(2) A clever company could think of a way around the Eolas patents, using new or reinvented technology and obsoleting what Eolas thinks it has.
(3) Someone could buy Eolas -- if it were to win, it would be presumably a huge company, but that will take time and they are simply not worth as much right now, with the risk and time factored in.
THE FTC decided to announce new guidelines for the relationships between bloggers and advertisers, requiring bloggers to reveal any payment for their endorsements (or positive reviews), iincluding free products and payments. (They also tightened up the rules for celebrity endorsers and untypical claims in advertising, but we denizens of the Internet are less interested in that.)
The new guidelines. which are effective December 1, seem to apply mainly to blogs directed to consumers. We are not certain where that leaves people like me who use the blogging mechanism to distribute their opinions but who are not writing for consumers, but rather for business people interested in particular concepts and technology topics.
We are trying to figure out what we should put on our blog sites to comply with the FTC Guidelines (we don't publish product reviews, but we do sometimes favorably comment on products.) We wonder if they want us to tell the reader every time we mention a book whether we got a review copy or bought it? More to the point we write mainly about trends and vendors who are doing things illustrative of those trends. Inevitably, some of those vendors are past, present, or potential future clients. No one pays anything for what we blog but they might be clients, sometimes with confidential relationships.
We wonder if the FTC understood how many different kinds of bloggers there are? What happens to the journalists who write for print magazines and also blog for that magazine (de rigeur these days). Do they get to say nothing about the publication's advertising relationships in print, but will be forced to comment on them in their blogs?
IBM is being preliminarily investigated by the Justice Department in charges that it has abused its mainframe monopoly (one that exists largely because other mainframe players have left the marketplace). The issue is whether IBM keeps start-ups who want to run IBM mainframe software, especially operating systems, on less expensive hardware, from licensing these operating systems. The main basis for the investigation is a white paper from the Computer and Communications Industry Association claiming lock-in. Again, this is likely to drag on for a long time; these investigations and any cases which might ensue are complex and strenuously argued.
I'm mentioning it here mainly because IBM's mainframes not only provide computing power to almost every large organization on the planet, they are also a major force in providing power for large firm's Internet sites. So an investigation which interfered with their ability (or even a perception of that future ability) to continue to provide ongoing research for those mainframes and their future would consititute yet another Internet bump.
I think I'll write all three of these things occuring in one week off to coincidence -- I'm not a conspiracy theorist. It's more a matter of how central and important the Internet has become to what we do. Anything that tries to change the direction and growth of the Internet is bound to have unintentional consequences. consequences that we may not be prepared to accept. That suggests that we may need to look at Internet policy (and externalities that affect the Internet) in a different way.
Comments