I’m supposed to have my new MacBook Air tomorrow.  It’ll be running Vista.  If you care, Ross tells you how to set Vista up on the MacBook Air (and when to go get a cup of coffee.)  I feel like such a cross dresser.

I’m an abolitionist.  I believe software patents should be abolished.  I’ve started pounding the drum about this and am delighted to hear as many positive responses to my plea as I have.  While a few people argue with me about the validity of software patents, most nod their heads up and down in agreement with me.  I get plenty of skeptical looks when I say "software patents should be abolished" (as in – c’mon Brad, be realistic), but a guy needs to have goals, right?

Jason Haislmaier – an IP lawyer at Holme, Roberts & Owen – has written an relevant post titled So, Just How Patentable is Software Anyway?  While Congress spins its wheels over patent report, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) is holding an en banc review for the In Re Bilski case.  Jason does a nice job of covering the implications and the potential outcomes of this.  He also tosses in some fun court gossip that one of the judges is hinting that there will be significant discussion about the patentability of computer software that will go all the way to the Supreme Court.

These are potentially important events in the troubled history of software patents.

Philip Greenspun has an excellent essay up on the web titled Internet Software Patents.  He sets the tone by suggesting that "the natural progression of an industry is innovation, consolidation, then litigation."  Philip better be careful of he’s going to be spending a lot of time in East Marshall, Texas.

His decomposition of U.S. Patent 5367627 and analysis is straightforward and highlights the absurdity of this stuff.  Philip also asks "Are computer nerds smarter today than they were in the 1960’s" and provides a nice annotated timeline of Internet and e-commerce.

Does anyone know if the USPTO examiners are allowed to use Google Patent Search in their evaluation / review process?

Ross loves it.  I saw it yesterday and Vista looks great on it.  I’m getting one.

As I wander around in my own little virtual universe, I lovingly look for all the ways the various content I create gets wired together.  I have a twitter account, a blog (well – several), and am using Intense Debate for my comment system of my blog.

The Intense Debate guys just did a neat integration with Twitter.  I had already put my Twitter name (bfeld) into the Intense Debate profile information.  Now – my most recent tweet shows up when you mouse over my picture on an Intense Debate comment. 

You can also go directly to my blog, Facebook, profile, Linkedin profile, and Twitter account.  Now any comments I leave a on a blog using Intense Debate is subtly getting wired into my social network.

Next up – look for Lijit to start indexing this data also (hint to the gang on the third floor of 1050 Walnut.)

Starbucks announced that today that you can hang out, drink coffee, eat high calorie baked goods, and surf the web for "free" for two hours (assuming you are drinking coffee and eating high calorie baked goods.)  This is due to a very smart move on AT&T’s part where they have displaced T-Mobile as the WiFi provider at Starbucks stores. 

I’m really surprised that T-Mobile let this deal get away from them.  I happily pay $10 / month to T-Mobile for WiFi service – the two places I use it 99.4% of the time are Starbucks and the United Red Carpet Club.  If AT&T takes the Red Carpet Club deal, T-Mobile is going to lose that incremental $10 / month from me.  I realize that "free for two hours" at Starbucks might not have kept me paying this $10, but I probably wouldn’t have noticed (or done anything) for a while.

I’ve been wandering around telling people that 2008 is the year that all of the consumer Internet innovations we’ve been blessed with exposed to will be finding their way into the enterprise.  The Denver Post has a nice article titled Work, connected by social networking that describes (albeit at a high level) Alpine Access’ implementation of HiveLive.

Knowing HiveLive well (I’m an early personal investor), they are a great example of how this is going to play out.  One of our portfolio companies – Rally Software – has been using HiveLive to power their Agile Commons community for over a year (if you are a practitioner of Agile software development, take a look.)  HiveLive has taken many of the innovations of social networking and reconfigured them in a way that is ideally suited for collaboration inside and across enterprises – and has done it using a SaaS model that is easy to quickly and affordably implement.

Look for a lot more examples of this in 2008.

I got the following note from a friend at a big software company that was founded in the mid-1990’s.

Having worked at the big companies it has always amazed me the energy that goes into creating the stack of patents.  We have lawyers who we sit down with to go over new products and releases and they generate 10s or 100s of patent filings out of which a few actual patents will end up being granted in a few years.   I have around 40 patents for what I would consider innovative work but 99% of them are just for the things anyone would have to do in order to solve the actual problem.

I find this a disgusting waste of time and energy that runs counter to the notion that patents are supposed to be used to "help promote innovation."

Another practice that I find abhorrent is the BigCo "pay for patent application" approach where BigCo pays engineers a bonus (typical $1,000 to $5,000) for each patent filing.  Not for the patents, but for the patent filing.  This obviously encourages engineers to waste a bunch of their time not innovating but instead cranking out a bunch of stupid patent filings that clog the system.

I think this should be illegal.  It’s a complete abuse of the original intent of the patent system.  At the minimum, the patent filing should have to disclose whether any fee beyond normal compensation was paid to the "inventor."  Maybe we can get the 409A and 157 accounting weenies on this – that’d slow things down.

A day doesn’t go by without yet another stupid software patent appearing.  At least people are writing about them. 

Amazon (via A9.com) just received a patent for Error processing methods for providing responsive content to a user when a page load error occurs.  Prior art disclosure only goes back to 1999.  This one should be easy to gut if anyone feels like it.

The best part about this patent are all the entertaining comments on Slashdot about it!