Bayosphere

Intel grossly overreached when it sued a former employee who was sending e-mail to his ex-colleagues to complain about the company’s actions. Now the California Supreme Court has said so (San Jose Business Journal) in an important opinion. Here’s the ruling (PDF, 300k).

Question: Might this case be precedent at some point to help overturn a horrible federal-court ruling from a couple of years ago? In that case (Computerworld), eBay was able to block a now-defunct company called Bidder’s Edge from crawling its site, among other auction sites, to let people know what items were being auctioned and where the best deals could be found. That case was a travesty, and helped eBay gain what is looking more and more like a Microsoftian monopoly.

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The street performers here are almost as interesting as the architecture. The devilish character in the photo on the left saw me taking pictures, and motioned to the donation hat in front of him and his partner. When I snapped another picture, he gave me the finger; unfortunately I didn’t capture that move or I’d have posted it here. (I gave them a couple of Euros anyway, because they were good at their act.)

I’m here for the NetMedia 2003 conference and seminar, and am speaking at both. Milverton Wallace founded the NetMedia conference back in 1995 when he was teaching at City University in London. After a year hiatus in 2002, it’s back, and outside of the U.K. for the first time.

My topics here will be no surprise to regular readers. I’ll be discussing the intersection of technology and journalism, with a focus on how it’s affecting journalists. I’m still looking for good ideas…

(By the way, the Reboot folks have posted videos of all of our talks from the June 20 conference. Caution: These are BIG files.)

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I’m happy enough with my current mobile phone, but I keep looking for a device that will do everything. The industry is getting closer to solving the problem.

More in my Sunday column.

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Few posts for the next 24-36 hours, as I’m traveling.

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Here’s the ultimate way to waste your money: Attend the Internet Pundit Fantasy Camp — “Inspired by the Success of Rock and Roll Fantasy Camps, This New Venture Offers Web Enthusiasts a Way to Hang Out With Famous Internet Pundits.”

Note: This is a joke…

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Salon: The Google backlash. The king of search rules the Web — but now some of the natives are growing restless.

This is a healthy development. We should be skeptical, if not downright suspicious, of dominant entities in any field.

I’m suspicious of Big Government, Big Business, Big Labor, Big Media, Big Everything. Competition for customers and ideas is better than an overwhelming advantage for one player, an oligopoly or a cartel.

I don’t think Google is abusing its position, though it sometimes acts in secretive ways that seem unnecessary. But it has become so dominant that it bears close observation.

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A correspondent on Dave Farber’s mail list notes this “Preliminary ruling against Mailblocks” in a patent infringement case. This is good news.

Mailblocks has been claiming it owns the rights to “challenge-response” spam control. But there are many reasons to think the company’s patents are not as overarching as claimed.

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Eric Kidd: The Missing Future. But there’s one group we haven’t heard from yet: The small software developers. For 25 years, these people were the lifeblood of the personal computer revolution. Their old vision is still the sexiest: Build great, innovative software, sell it to the users at a reasonable price, make millions of dollars, benefit humanity, retire young. And if you mistreat your users, you’ll loose them, because you have a hundred competitors. The old Silicon Valley was built on this dream, and it worked for two decades.

Expand this lament to other fields where the forces of centralization are beating back innovation. All have to do with the ascendance of “intellectual property” and the decline of the public good.

We are giving too much power to a tiny number of corporations. We will regret it.

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I’m on the road and won’t be posting too much during the next several days, unless I find myself in a place where it’s easy (and not outrageously expensive) to do so.

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