This website is a personal blog maintained by Steve Glista, who is a licensed attorney in the states of Michigan and Oregon. Steve is a lawyer at Honigman, Miller, Schwartz and Cohn, LLP. Opinions or comments expressed on this site belong to the commenter or the author and do not represent legal advice from or the official position of the Honigman firm.
This website does not offer legal advice. No person should act or refrain from acting solely as a result of the information presented here. Your use of this website does not create an attorney-client or other confidential relationship. If you make an initial contact seeking legal advice, please do not send confidential information.
Contact us here:
contact@rationallaw.com
269.389.0385 | Kalamazoo
503.406.8651 | Portland
|
By steve, on January 23rd, 2013%
I can only think that we’ll start seeing a lot more of this sort of thing. It doesn’t really cost the OEM anything extra to release the .stl files to the public, and it buys them a lot of goodwill with nerds like me who like to hack their own stuff.
Nokia has just released a “3D-printing Development Kit” with all the documentation you’ll need to create a custom backing for yourself. It’s available for download from the source links below, and contains “3D templates, case specs, recommended materials and . . . → Read More: 3D Printed Phone Cases? Why Not?
By steve, on November 8th, 2012%
The good news is that the jailbreak exception for phones was extended in this most recent review period. The bad news is that, inexplicably, it wasn’t extended to cover tablets… . . . → Read More: Jailbreak Exemption to DMCA renewed by US Copyright Office
By steve, on October 1st, 2012%
The ACLU has filed a Freedom of Information Act complaint against several US Federal Government agencies, requesting more information about how those agencies collect and use data from automated license-plate tracking camera systems.
“When agencies retain data about people not suspected of wrongdoing and pool data from discrete ALPR systems into state, regional, and national databases, ALPRs raise the prospect of pervasive and prolonged surveillance of innocent Americans’ movements and start to pose a serious threat to Americans’ privacy,” the complaint states.
Despite this risk, there is allegedly very little information about the system and use of the technology remains highly unregulated nationwide, the . . . → Read More: ACLU Demands License-Plate Tracking Records From FBI, DEA
By steve, on September 27th, 2012%
In a move that should surprise absolutely no one (except, maybe, the loud-mouthed jury foreman who botched the job in the first place), Samsung has filed a motion for a judgment as a matter of law and alternately for a new trial of the patent claims in the case where Apple recently won a billion-dollar infringement verdict.
Because the jury foreman gave interviews after the fact, wherein he admitted that he relied on his own extraneous experience and knowledge of electrical engineering to inform his deliberations, and he shared his “expertise” with the other members of the jury, I would not be surprised if the judge granted . . . → Read More: Samsung moves for JMOL, new trial in Apple patent case
By steve, on September 27th, 2012%
I don’t see how new models will help Blackberry.
Research In Motion’s developer powwow this week delivered a small dose of good news as the company touted 80 million subscribers and kept its BlackBerry 10 timelines, but the bad news is on deck later today: fiscal second-quarter financial results.
To say expectations for RIM’s second quarter are low would be a major understatement. Wall Street is expecting RIM to report a loss of 47 cents a share on revenue of $2.5 billion for the fiscal second quarter, and a miss wouldn’t . . . → Read More: Unless they’re running Android
By steve, on August 24th, 2012%
a war over who will control our computers. It’s a long read but essential for anyone thinking about technology and its applications over the next hundred years.
Back in 2006, a 314-car Robotic Parking model RPS1000 garage in Hoboken, New Jersey, took all the cars in its guts hostage, locking down the software until the garage’s owners paid a licensing bill that they disputed.
They had to pay it, even as they maintained that they didn’t owe anything. What the hell else were they going to do?
And what will
you
do when your dispute with a vendor means that you go blind, or deaf, or lose the ability to . . . → Read More: Cory Doctorow forecasts a civil war
By steve, on August 20th, 2012%
If you’re new to this series, you may want to start at Part 1. The purpose of this series is to help entrepreneurs consider licensing strategy from a university’s perspective, so that you can be more successful in planning the future of your business. I’ll break these posts up into the following topics: Skin in the Game, Equity Give and Take, Royalties vs. Upfront Fees, Options and Contingent Licenses, Keeping the Inventors On Board, and Owning Future Inventions. Today I will discuss Equity Give And Take:
Many universities (not all, but many) take pre-valuation equity in exchange for granting a license to university techology. Our research suggests that at the Friends-and-Family stage, universities commonly take 5-10% stakes in a new venture, and that anything over 25% is unusual. There are good policy and practical control arguments for keeping the university’s ownership stake relatively low.
Some universities have revenue-sharing agreements in favor of professors who are technology innovators. For an example, read the University of Florida’s revenue-sharing policy here. These revenue sharing agreements tend to make equity ownership into a complicated issue for the university. Such universities may want to negotiate a grant of a separate equity stake for the . . . → Read More: Strategy For Start-ups: Technology Licensing (Part 2)
By steve, on August 17th, 2012%
At O’Reilly publishing, Alistair Croll makes the argument that it’s a fight we can’t avoid any longer:
In the old, data-is-scarce model, companies had to decide what to collect first, and then collect it. A traditional enterprise data warehouse might have tracked sales of widgets by color, region, and size. This act of deciding what to store and how to store it is called designing the schema, and in many ways, it’s the moment where someone decides what the data is about. [...]
With the new, data-is-abundant model, we collect first and ask questions later. The schema comes after the collection. Indeed, big data success stories like Splunk, Palantir, and others are prized because of their ability to make sense of content well after it’s been collected — sometimes called a schema-less query. This means we collect information long before we decide what it’s for.
And this is a dangerous thing.
Go read the whole thing. Because in light of stories like this one, about Minnesota police collecting and storing data indiscriminately for all vehicles they pass on public roads, and this one about Tiburon, California which records the plates of every single car entering and leaving the city, makes you wonder . . . → Read More: Is the Right to be Deleted the coming civil rights battle of our times?
By steve, on August 15th, 2012%
EFF says yes, urges a district court in the 9th Circuit to agree.
“Location data is extraordinarily sensitive. It can reveal where you worship, where your family and friends live, what sort of doctors you visit, and what meetings and activities you attend,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann. “Whether this information is collected by a GPS device or a mobile phone company, the government should only be able to get it with a warrant based on probable cause that’s approved by a judge.”
6th Circuit says… not so much.
The question in the case was whether Mr. Skinner had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the data his phone emitted. It’s a question that several courts are wrestling with. Federal law enforcement authorities, as in this case, say that investigators don’t need search warrants to gather such information.
Justice Department lawyers argued in a court brief that “a suspect’s presence in a publicly observable place is not information subject to Fourth Amendment protection.”
Judge John M. Rogers, writing for the majority, agreed…
Of course the WSJ helpfully suggests that only drug dealers and other criminals should be worried that it is possible to obtain detailed location records from cell phone companies, for any reason whatsoever, without a warrant or . . . → Read More: GPS Data From Cell Phones: Does the 4th Amendment Apply?
By steve, on July 25th, 2012%
If not explicitly, then at least practically speaking:
This week, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the City Council are expected to pass a law that will allow the city to choose where we operate instead of allowing us to serve our customers wherever our customers want us to operate. The proposed ordinance says we will have to stay 200 feet away from restaurants, unless we park in spots selected by the local alderman.
If you can’t operate a truck within 200 feet of a brick-and-mortar restaurant, there’s going to be pretty fierce competition for the spaces that are left. Unless city officials designate large central parking areas as legal for carts, (And where would those lots be located? And who gets to collect rent/parking fees? And who will set rent- the lot owners, or the city, or…?) it’s hard to see how this doesn’t end up excluding food carts from all . . . → Read More: Chicago To Outlaw Food Trucks Inside The Loop?
|
|
