Dept. of Justice Blesses IEEE Rules on Injunctions and Reasonability
Following almost two years of debate, public posting of five drafts, and consideration of 680 comments, IEEE-SA preliminarily approved amendments to its Patent Policy to address these and other questions. IEEE-SA is the developer of the Wi-Fi standards (and thousands of other specifications). It is one of the major standards development venues in the information and communications technology industry, and thus a venue within which the question bears great weight. However, final approval of the amendments was made contingent upon receiving a favorable “Business Review” letter from the U.S. Department of Justice.
In a business review letter, the regulator responds to a detailed explanation and rationale for a proposed action, and indicates whether it would, or would not, be likely to challenge that action if implemented. In this case the DoJ expressed its belief that the proposed actions would be procompetitive rather than restricting competition, and that it would therefore not be inclined to challenge the final approval and implementation of the policy changes. That approval will occur later this month when the proposed policy updates are approved by the IEEE-SA Board of Directors.
It's become fashionable for content producers to rail against the concept of “curation” in the Age of the Internet. Why? Because the guidelines of those terrible people, the “traditional publishers,” are supposedly keeping authors from the global audience that certainly must be their birthright. True, the balance can (and in the recent past certainly has) swung too far in the direction of permitting far too few good books to gain access to traditional distribution channels. 
One of the most incredible phenomena I’ve witnessed since I’ve become interested in self-publishing has been the propensity for many authors to lionize Amazon as if Jeff Bezos’s sole purpose in life was to help avenge the author class against the evil patriarchs of traditional publishing. Well, guess what? The realization has finally begun to dawn that facilitating self-publishing has been a means to an end for Amazon, and not the end itself.
Heaven help us all, they’re doing it again. The “who” are the venture capitalists, and the “what” is super-inflating another start-up company bubble. Consider the following valuations, as summarized by Steven Davidoff-Solomon in 
Scientists and philosophers have struggled for years to define our relation to reality, or even to decide what “reality” might be. The rest of us mostly muddle through the daily experience of our existence. For a writer, perceptions of reality are also important, as it’s easier to write about what we have perceived than what we have persuaded ourselves to imagine.
It was only two weeks ago that I wrote here about the launch of a new Linux Foundation consortium, ca
It would be easy, and even no surprise, to spend a year in Washington, D.C. and never hear the word "open" used during a high level policy discussion. That wasn't as true at the beginning of the first term of President Obama, when open source software and open data were mentioned frequently on the White House web site, at least. But that was then, and this is now.
The Linux Foundation this morning announced the latest addition to a rapidly expanding list of ambitious open source initiatives that are seeking to transform the way the world does business. The newest project on the block is called the 
Mention the letters "DRM" and you're likely to immediately evoke two opposing and emotional reactions. The battle lines have become so fixed, in fact that you almost don't hear those letters debated at all any more. That's also because the war has already been fought, and largely lost, when it comes to music. 
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