Bayosphere

Readers keep sending more examples of work that appears to show SBC’s patents on framing and other Web technology are questionable.

Here are their observations.

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Will Femia is showing the MSNBC weblogs he has been instrumental in creating. I’m posting this from the stage at a conference organized by the Newspaper Association of America, as a quick demonstration of the technology.

Will just cautioned about the perils of chat rooms and other online postings, noting that the bloggers tend to keep an eye on each other and have a running conversation.

David Reed from the Arizona Daily Star in Tuscon describes the blogs his staff has been creating. One experiment has been live blogging from university basketball games. Smartly, the Star sends out an RSS feed of its headlines.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a Web form you can fill out to help the Librarian of Congress come up with needed exceptions to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (The law needs outright repeal, but let’s do this one step at a time.)

Here’s the page with instructions.

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I’m on my way to Orlando for the Newspaper Association of America conference called “Connections,” where I”ll be speaking on a panel about weblogs. I hope to convince newspaper executives that this is part of their future.

But I won’t be watching the Stupid Bowl, which is my name for the football extravaganza that almost everyone else in America, it seems, holds in such fascination. Unfortunately, I’ll miss a party today that a friend is having. He’s going to record the game on his TiVo, and fast forward through the football, slowing down to real-time speed only to watch the commercials. Now that makes some sense.

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If the CDMA technology ends up at the heart of all wireless communication one of these days, and it might, Qualcomm will have what you might call an unbeatable business model.

More in my Sunday column.

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New York Times: Senate votes to head off security sweeps. The Senate has voted to bar deployment of a Pentagon project to search for terrorists by scanning information in Internet mail and in the commercial databases of health, financial and travel companies in the United States and abroad.

The U.S. Senate has found its spine, or part of it, by questioning an especially big-brotherish Bush administration project.

The initiative, with the Orwellian name of Total Information Awareness (TIA), is a Pentagon-sponsored assimilation of just about every database, public and private, containing information on all of us — everything from financial, medical, travel and other kinds of stored records. TIA was only the latest Bush assault on our basic freedoms, but it promised to the most invasive yet.

The Senate’s action wasn’t as strong as it might have been, but it was a welcome walk back from the brink. If the Pentagon can’t explain why TIA is vital and how it would work — and Bush officials have stonewalled just about everyone on these core questions — then funding would stop.

Of course, the lawmakers used some weasel words. If Bush says it’s essential for national security, further research on TIA could continue — but in any event Congress would have to specifically approve the deployment and comprehensive use of the system.

The chances that this ban will become law, meanwhile, aren’t all that great. First of all, we can assume that there will be more terrorist attacks in the U.S., and when they occur, the Congress will undoubtedly stampede to remove what’s left of our civil liberties.

Second, the Senate vote has to be echoed by the House of Representatives. This is far from certain. And if the proposed ban goes to a conference committee, you can guess that it won’t stay in the final bill.

Still, let’s celebrate the Senate action. Maybe it’s the start of something more promising — such as genuine oversight by Congress, and some modest attention to that quaint notion called liberty.

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The patent fiascos continue to roll in. Now SCO is waving around alleged Unix “intellectual property” against a variety of other operating systems including Linux.

I’ve been assuming Microsoft would be the patent-wielding attacker of open-source software, and I’m still sure our favorite monopolist will pull this weapon out of its arsenal at some point. But I didn’t expect a company that claims to support Linux to do this. Go figure.

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Reuters: Obesity Suit Against McDonald’s Dismissed. U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet said the plaintiffs — including a 400-pound teenager who said he eats at McDonald’s every day — failed to show that customers of the world’s largest fast-food chain were unaware that eating too much McDonald’s fare could be unhealthy.

This won’t stop the lawyers, but maybe it’ll slow them down. This lawsuit is absurd.

Anyone who doesn’t know that too much fast food is going to make you fat and unhealthy is just not paying attention. I’m no fan of McDonald’s tactics — they make it easier to buy too much fatty garbage instead of something healthier — but the legal system is not the place to stop this.

The legal profession is going to sue itself out of business one of these days. That would be a real shame, because we need liability suits for the issues that really matter.

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Doc Searls says Hollywood won the Eldred case, allowing for essentially unlimited copyright terms, in part because the entertainment companies have gotten the rest of us to frame the debate on their inaccurate and loaded terms — copyright equals property.

“So the work we have cut out for us isn’t just legal and political.” Doc says. “It’s conceptual. Until we find a way to win that one, we’ll keep losing in Congress as well as the courts.”

How do we prevent the entertainment cartel from torturing language and logic? We can’t. But the rest of us have to be more forceful in challenging the lies and misrepresentations. (I talked about these issues in this column last summer.)

It would be useful, for example, if people wrote letters to newspapers, commenting on slanted articles that take Hollywood’s word that any form of copying is piracy. It’s not, usually.

Turning this around will take years. Let’s get started.

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This is the 20th anniversary of a technology development that gets little attention outside its relatively small area. Two decades ago, companies shipped the first musical instruments using the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) standard.

I stopped by a huge trade show in southern California last week, and was dazzled by how far we’ve come in bringing excellent capabilities to the average person.

More in my Sunday column.

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