The partners of Union Square Ventures (Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham) recently had a “Union Square Session” on “Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Public Policy.”  In these sessions, they get together some of the smartest people they know around a topic to spend a day talking about a set of issues – in June, one of the […]

John Funk, an entrepreneur (I’m an investor in John’s newest company – Evergreen IP) and friend has a innovative proposal up concerning changing the rules on the current patent system.  I’ve been on both sides of the patent aisle with John – we like to joke that early on in our relationship John’s company sued […]

I spoke on a panel last week at the Silicon Flatirons Telecommunications Program titled “Re-examining The Patent System.”  My panel was the last one and came after a few hours of stimulating discussion about the problems with patents, the problems with patent reform, and the reason our government is struggling so much with what to […]

Yesterday Hillary Clinton announced her Initiative on Technology & Innovation at Galvanize in Denver. I skimmed it quickly and was pleased with how substantive it was. I pondered what Trump’s equivalent would be and decided it is likely to be a tweet that says “Technology loves me.” Fred Wilson had a more constructive suggestion this morning, […]

Over the weekend, Joi Ito (the director of the MIT Media Lab among a long list of other awesome things) announced that the MIT Media Lab Changes Software Default to FLOSS* As someone who disdains software patents and is appalled by universities, especially publicly funded ones, acting as patent trolls, I applaud the MIT Media Lab’s move. Eric […]

Five years ago, in August 2010, I asked the question Have We Reached The Software Patent Tipping Point? Oracle sued Google over a series of Java-related patents they got when they acquired Sun. My favorite line from the whole thing was James Gosling’s (who was one of the authors of one of the original patents and a […]

Fred Wilson beat me to it this morning with his post A Big Win For The Patent Reform Movement but he’s got a couple of hour time zone advantage over me. Regardless, I love Fred’s punch line: So it was with incredible joy that I read these words by Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla Motors […]

I’m going to start doing something new on my posts. Rather than having separate posts promoting stuff I’m up to, I’m going to begin including a short header in each post with either a thing I’m involved in or something I read recently that I think is particularly germane. For now, I’ll style these in […]

I’ve been railing about the evils of software patents – how they stifle and create a massive tax on innovation – since I wrote my first post about it in 2006 titled Abolish Software Patents. Seven years ago this was a borderline heretical point of view since it was widely asserted that VCs believed you […]