The Value of Patents

by Nathan Myhrvold

Patents rarely make headlines, but they did this month when Nortel Networks Corp., the defunct Canadian telecommunications giant, auctioned off its patent portfolio and drew an astonishing winning bid of $4.5 billion from a group of companies that includes both Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)

The sale marks a watershed in the maturity of intellectual property markets and a dramatic shift in strategy for technology companies. Suddenly these companies are acknowledging that patents are a strategic asset worth billions.

Here’s an inside look at what happened -- and what’s at stake -- and remember, as you read this, that my company buys and licenses high-tech patents.

Most big tech companies inhabit winner-take-most markets, in which any company that gets out in front can develop an enormous lead. This is how Microsoft came to dominate in software, Intel Corp. in processors, Google Inc. (GOOG) in web search, Oracle Corp. in databases, Amazon.com Inc. in web retail, and so on.

As a result, the tech world has seen a series of mad scrambles by companies wanting to be king of the hill. In the late 1980s, the battle was for dominance of spreadsheet and word-processing software. In the late 1990s, it was about e- commerce on the emerging Internet. The latest whatever-it-takes struggle has been over social networks, with enough drama to script a Hollywood movie.

In each case, the recipe for success was to bring to market, at a furious pace, products that incorporate new features. Along the way, inconvenient intellectual property rights were ignored.

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Jan Bishop
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Utah Liquor Laws, as Mixed Up as Some Drinks

by Michael Cooper

DRAPER, Utah — When Vuz Restaurant and Vuda Bar opened here a couple of months ago, the idea was to bring a dash of dining chic to this corner of the Salt Lake Valley.

Diners can watch white-jacketed chefs prepare their risotto in the glass-enclosed kitchen. The lounge area is down a hall dominated by a glass wine cellar. Its centerpiece was to be a shiny bar, with high-end bottles arrayed on circular steel shelves bathed in red, blue and purple lights.

Then the concept ran into Utah’s famously strict liquor laws, which remain unusual even after they were relaxed in 2009 to bring the state more into line with the rest of the nation. Unable to get one of the state’s closely held licenses for its bar, Vuda is now run as a restaurant, which means under current Utah law that drinks can be served but not seen — at least until the customers get them.

So the wine cellar, upon closer inspection, is stacked with empty bottles.

Stools still line the shiny bar in the lounge, but they look straight at a wall of clouded white glass that rises from the middle of the counter, obscuring the bottles and bartenders on the other side.

“Without that license, the patrons cannot see the alcohol and they cannot see the bartenders,” explained James Ables, the restaurant’s manager. “Hence the ‘Zion Curtain.”

It is no longer true that you cannot get a drink in Utah, despite the shot glasses sold in souvenir shops that say “Eat, drink & be merry — tomorrow you may be in Utah.” But the state’s liquor laws — heavily influenced by the Mormon Church, which has its headquarters here and which frowns upon alcohol — are still among the most complex in the country.

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The Rape of Men

[ed.  Harrowing account of one of war's most secret atrocities.  Caution advised.]

by Will Storr

Of all the secrets of war, there is one that is so well kept that it exists mostly as a rumour. It is usually denied by the perpetrator and his victim. Governments, aid agencies and human rights defenders at the UN barely acknowledge its possibility. Yet every now and then someone gathers the courage to tell of it. This is just what happened on an ordinary afternoon in the office of a kind and careful counsellor in Kampala, Uganda. For four years Eunice Owiny had been employed by Makerere University's Refugee Law Project (RLP) to help displaced people from all over Africa work through their traumas. This particular case, though, was a puzzle. A female client was having marital difficulties. "My husband can't have sex," she complained. "He feels very bad about this. I'm sure there's something he's keeping from me."

Owiny invited the husband in. For a while they got nowhere. Then Owiny asked the wife to leave. The man then murmured cryptically: "It happened to me." Owiny frowned. He reached into his pocket and pulled out an old sanitary pad. "Mama Eunice," he said. "I am in pain. I have to use this."

Laying the pus-covered pad on the desk in front of him, he gave up his secret. During his escape from the civil war in neighbouring Congo, he had been separated from his wife and taken by rebels. His captors raped him, three times a day, every day for three years. And he wasn't the only one. He watched as man after man was taken and raped. The wounds of one were so grievous that he died in the cell in front of him.

"That was hard for me to take," Owiny tells me today. "There are certain things you just don't believe can happen to a man, you get me? But I know now that sexual violence against men is a huge problem. Everybody has heard the women's stories. But nobody has heard the men's."

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[ed.  Blogging vs. fishing.  hmmm...    We'll be back soon.]

Yellena James Aurelia
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Erik Rijssemus
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Time to End the War on Salt?

by Melinda Wenner Moyer

For decades, policy makers have tried and failed to get Americans to eat less salt. In April 2010 the Institute of Medicine urged the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to regulate the amount of salt that food manufacturers put into products; New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has already convinced 16 companies to do so voluntarily. But if the U.S. does conquer salt, what will we gain? Bland french fries, for sure. But a healthy nation? Not necessarily.

This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.

Fears over salt first surfaced more than a century ago. In 1904 French doctors reported that six of their subjects who had high blood pressure—a known risk factor for heart disease—were salt fiends. Worries escalated in the 1970s when Brookhaven National Laboratory's Lewis Dahl claimed that he had "unequivocal" evidence that salt causes hypertension: he induced high blood pressure in rats by feeding them the human equivalent of 500 grams of sodium a day. (Today the average American consumes 3.4 grams of sodium, or 8.5 grams of salt, a day.)

Dahl also discovered population trends that continue to be cited as strong evidence of a link between salt intake and high blood pressure. People living in countries with a high salt consumption—such as Japan—also tend to have high blood pressure and more strokes. But as a paper pointed out several years later in the American Journal of Hypertension, scientists had little luck finding such associations when they compared sodium intakes within populations, which suggested that genetics or other cultural factors might be the culprit. Nevertheless, in 1977 the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs released a report recommending that Americans cut their salt intake by 50 to 85 percent, based largely on Dahl's work.

Scientific tools have become much more precise since then, but the correlation between salt intake and poor health has remained tenuous. Intersalt, a large study published in 1988, compared sodium intake with blood pressure in subjects from 52 international research centers and found no relationship between sodium intake and the prevalence of hypertension. In fact, the population that ate the most salt, about 14 grams a day, had a lower median blood pressure than the population that ate the least, about 7.2 grams a day. In 2004 the Cochrane Collaboration, an international, independent, not-for-profit health care research organization funded in part by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, published a review of 11 salt-reduction trials. Over the long-term, low-salt diets, compared to normal diets, decreased systolic blood pressure (the top number in the blood pressure ratio) in healthy people by 1.1 millimeters of mercury (mmHg) and diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number) by 0.6 mmHg. That is like going from 120/80 to 119/79. The review concluded that "intensive interventions, unsuited to primary care or population prevention programs, provide only minimal reductions in blood pressure during long-term trials." A 2003 Cochrane review of 57 shorter-term trials similarly concluded that "there is little evidence for long-term benefit from reducing salt intake."

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The Pursuit of Happiness

by Andrew Sullivan

As a child, when I thought of the future, all I could see was black. I wasn’t miserable or depressed. I was a cheerful boy, as happy playing with my posse of male friends in elementary school as I was when I would occasionally take a day by myself in the woodlands that surrounded the small town I grew up in. But when I thought of the distant future, of what I would do and be as a grown-up, there was a blank. I simply didn’t know how I would live, where I would live, who I could live with. I knew one thing only: I couldn’t be like my dad. For some reason, I knew somewhere deep down that I couldn’t have a marriage like my parents.

It’s hard to convey what that feeling does to a child. In retrospect, it was a sharp, displacing wound to the psyche. At the very moment you become aware of sex and emotion, you simultaneously know that for you, there is no future coupling, no future family, no future home. In the future, I would be suddenly exiled from what I knew: my family, my friends, every household on television, every end to every romantic movie I’d ever seen. My grandmother crystallized it in classic and slightly cruel English fashion: “You’re not the marrying kind,” she said. It was one of those things that struck a chord of such pain, my pride forced me to embrace it. “No, I’m not,” I replied. “I like my freedom.”

This wasn’t a lie. But it was a dodge, and I knew it. And when puberty struck and I realized I might be “one of them,” I turned inward. It was a strange feeling—both the exhilaration of sexual desire and the simultaneous, soul-splintering panic that I was going to have to live alone my whole life, lying or euphemizing, concocting some public veneer to hide a private shame. It was like getting into an elevator you were expecting to go up, the doors closing, and then suddenly realizing you were headed down a few stories. And this was when the future went black for me, when suicide very occasionally entered my mind, when my only legitimate passion was getting A grades, because at that point it was all I knew how to do. I stayed away from parties; I didn’t learn to drive; I lost contact with those friends whose interest suddenly became girls; and somewhere in me, something began to die.

They call it the happiest day of your life for a reason. Getting married is often the hinge on which every family generation swings open. In my small-town life, it was far more important than money or a career or fame. And I could see my grandmother’s point: the very lack of any dating or interest in it, the absence of any intimate relationships, or of any normal teenage behavior, did indeed make me seem just a classic loner. But I wasn’t. Because nobody is. “In everyone there sleeps/A sense of life lived according to love,” as the poet Philip Larkin put it, as well as the fear of never being loved. That, as Larkin added, nothing cures. And I felt, for a time, incurable.

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Busted Watchdog

Is the Better Business Bureau a protection racket?

[ed.  I have business friends that say, emphatically, yes.]

by Timothy Noah

If you want to check up on the bona fides of your plumber or your electrician, you contact your local chapter of the Better Business Bureau. Lately, though, news organizations have been questioning the BBB's own bona fides. The BBB's rating system, they say, is at best uninformed and at worst corrupt.

Until recently, the BBB had a reputation on par with motherhood and apple pie. The Better Business Bureau is a national network of local nonprofit groups that evolved during the early years of the 20th century to expose fraud—initially mainly patent medicines and stock swindles—in America's burgeoning advertising industry. From the start businesses were encouraged to join, but the imperative was that honest businesses had an interest in cracking down on dishonest practices that gave unscrupulous competitors an unfair advantage.

In these early days, explains Kerry Ellen Pannell, associate professor of economics and dean of faculty at DePauw University (on whose 2002 paper "Origins of the Better Business Bureau: A Private Regulatory Institution in the Progressive Era" I rely here), BBBs spent most of their time either suing fraudulent businesses or lobbying state and local governments for stiffer consumer protections. Member businesses' names were made public in local BBBs' annual reports, but this information was not widely disseminated. Until the 1950s member businesses weren't permitted to publicize their BBB membership; BBB ratings ("satisfactory" or "unsatisfactory" and then, starting in 2009, letter grades) came later still. The BBBs recognized that such publicity might corrupt businesses into using their membership fees to bribe local BBBs. Worse still, it might corrupt local BBBs into using membership fees to shake down businesses, effectively turning the BBB into a protection racket.

That's not far from what has happened, according to a January 2009 article by David Lazarus in the Los Angeles Times and a November 2010 story by Brian Ross of ABC News' 20/20. (Dan Mitchell also had a good story about this July 20 in Slate's late, lamented sister publication The Big Money.) Both the L.A. Times and the 20/20 stories led with the mysteriously poor grades the BBB gave restaurants owned by chef-to-the-stars (and BBB nonmember) Wolfgang Puck—a B-minus for his flagship Spago in Beverly Hills, according to the L.A. Times, and an F for some of his other restaurants, according to 20/20. On 20/20, Ross further reported that two other nonmember businesses—the Ritz-Carlton in Boston and Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., (which, Ross duly noted, is owned by ABC's corporate parent)—had both received an F. Puck told 20/20's Ross that the BBB was punishing him for not joining. "If you become a member," Puck said, "[they think] you should get an A. But if you don't pay, it's very difficult to get an A." It was an outrageous accusation, but Ross and the L.A. Times' Lazarus found evidence to support it.

Lazarus reported that in searching through the BBB's North American database he found that "the roughly 400,000 accredited businesses, even those that get numerous complaints, very often receive higher grades than unaccredited companies with spotless complaint records." When Lazarus asked Stephen Cox, then-spokesman for the Council of Better Business Bureaus, to explain, Cox's answer wasn't reassuring: "There is no guarantee that an accredited business will get an A-plus." (Nearly two years later, Cox, who had since been promoted to chairman, had a better answer for Ross: "We have more than 500,000 nonaccredited businesses who have A ratings.") But Cox conceded to Lazarus that you couldn't qualify for an A-plus unless you were a member company—a criterion the BBB Web site didn't bother to acknowledge. In fact, Lazarus reported, any company could raise its grade by one-half (from B-minus, for instance, to B) merely by joining.

Or maybe by more than one-half. Cameras from 20/20 rolled while two small-business owners phoned the Southern California BBB chapter to complain about their ratings. Both were told by BBB telemarketers that if they joined the BBB their ratings would improve. Both agreed to join, giving their credit card numbers, and both saw their ratings rise within 24 hours—a C and a C-minus each upgraded to A-plus. "That is in violation of our sales policy," said Cox when confronted with this information. "I believe they are anomalies."

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Sousveillance

 by Clive Thompson

When Mans Adler founded Bambuser—a Sweden-based service that lets people broadcast live video from their cell phones to the Internet—his idea was simply to help users share their lives with friends in real time. Early this year, however, Adler saw an explosion of use from a political powder keg: Egypt.

During the Arab Spring, pro-democracy activists discovered that Bambuser let them thwart the Egyptian secret police. If a protester filmed an incident of police brutality, it didn’t matter whether they were arrested and their phone confiscated: The footage had already streamed to the world, where it catalyzed political energy against the Mubarak regime.

“The police thought, if we take all the phones, we can control the information. But they didn’t,” Adler notes. “The message still got out.”

The Arab uprisings showed that the use of video as a monitoring tool has shifted decisively. Throughout the ’90s and ’00s, civil libertarians worried about governments and corporations slapping up surveillance cameras all over the place. The fear was that they’d be used as tools of oppression. But now those tools are being democratized, and we are witnessing an emerging culture of “sousveillance.”

Sousveillance is the monitoring of events not by those above (surveiller in French) but by citizens, from below (sous-). The neologism was coined by Steve Mann, a pioneer in wearable computing at the University of Toronto. In the ’90s, Mann rigged a head-mounted camera to broadcast images online and found that it was great for documenting everyday malfeasance, like electrical-code violations. He also discovered that it made security guards uneasy. They’d ask him to remove the camera—and when he wouldn’t, they’d escort him away or even tackle him.

“I realized, this is the inverse of surveillance,” he said.

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Raphael Saadiq

Dennis Zilber

[ed.  This gallery is really worth a visit.]

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Which Stay, Which Fail

by Anne Hays

The woman who works at Athena, the Greek restaurant two blocks from my apartment, forgets everything. She forgets the specials, so she reads them, stumbling over her words, from the notepad in her pocket. She forgets to bring us water, or silverware. She forgets my girlfriend’s bread, when she orders more, and she forgets to ask if we want desert once we finish. The woman apologizes. She’s older than us—maybe mid-forties. Her dark hair is streaked through with dusty silver (so is mine) and she wears it in a ponytail, waitress-style. She has pale skin, a sharply hooked nose, stringy-long arms. When the woman apologizes we say No! Of course! It’s not a bother! but we both think she’s a terrible waitress, that she won’t last long, and then we think maybe the restaurant itself won’t last long either. It’s new, after all—it’s only been here a few months—and the economy is wretched, after all, and anyway most restaurants fail: this we all know. So many other restaurants have failed, up and down our street, many of which were our favorite restaurants, and when this happens Jill and I think It wasn’t our fault! We were regulars! We tasted the baklava! Every day when we walk down the street we catalog the newly failed restaurants, strange dark holes in our once lit streets, and then murmur to each other about what went wrong. These restaurants—which stay, which fail—are a major source of daily anxiety.

And so when construction began on another new restaurant down the street from our apartment, we felt the excited stirrings of speculative anticipation. What would this empty space, so long a vacant corner store, become? Every time Jill and I passed by, en route to wherever lay beyond, we would muse over the construction and comment casually about the likely new occupant, the way people discuss the gender or name of a friend’s unborn baby. Will they name it Greg, or Allison? Will the baby be cheerful, cranky, spunky, shy, or impossibly stubborn like its mother? The sign they hung up along the brick was classy, almost contemporary, with its pale background, its bold red and black lettering. We were so entranced by the newness of it all that it took an extra moment to register their ludicrous name: The Park Slope Bistro Restaurant Bar & Grill. We wondered: what made them stop at bar, grill, restaurant and bistro and what force of self control held them back from adding the words diner, cafe, boulangerie, speakeasy, and chop house? The establishment’s identity crisis was the first indication of its inevitable doom to failure, but we didn’t want to think about that.

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BackDormBoys

[ed.  A true classic, and apparently one of the 20 oldest or most-viewed videos on YouTube, or something like that.  It always makes me smile. They should get some kind of royalties or something.]

Wikipedia: BackDormBoys

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Failure Notice

216.219.254.203 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: I’m sorry
Unresolvable address: alexj@hottype.com.
Giving up on: 216.219.254.203.

Hi alexj@hottype.com. This is the automated qmail-send program [68.142.199.112], at yahoo.com. I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following address: joan@pja.com. This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.
----

216.219.254.203 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: I need to see you.
Unresolvable address: alexj@hottype.com.
Giving up on: 216.219.254.203.

Hi alexj@hottype.com. This is the automated qmail-send program [68.142.199.112], at yahoo.com. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following address. joan@pja.com This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out. Time to move on.
----

216.219.254.203 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: It doesn’t have to end like this
Unresolvable address: alexj@hottype.com.
Giving up on: 216.219.254.203.

Hi alexj@hottype.com. This is the automated qmail-send program [68.142.199.112], at yahoo.com. I'm afraid I still wasn't able to deliver your message to joan@pja.com. Sorry it didn’t work out. But seriously, alexj@hottype.com, move it along now.
----

216.219.254.203 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I am lost.
Unresolvable address: alexj@hottype.com.
Giving up on: 216.219.254.203.

Hi alexj@hottype.com. This is the automated qmail-send program [68.142.199.112], at yahoo.com. Again. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message. The truth is, joan@pja.com does not want to hear from you right now. She feels free for the first time in years. Last night she did eight shots of Patron and then totally mashed with a hipster dude from Williamsburg who was wearing a kilt. This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. And so has joan@pja.com.
----

216.219.254.203 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: Do you want your copy of The English Patient?
Unresolvable address: alexj@hottype.com.
Giving up on: 216.219.254.203.

Hi alexj@hottype.com. This is the automated qmail-send program [68.142.199.112], at yahoo.com. Okay, so maybe I haven’t been completely upfront with you here. It isn’t just your address that is unresolvable. If only it were that simple. It’s just that joan@pja.com is looking for somebody with certain core attributes. A job, for example. Someone whose bed has made it off the floor. Someone whose life ambition is not just to own a crepe truck. Please try to understand. It’s not you, it’s joan@pja.com. I was unable to deliver your message. This is a permanent error. Sorry it didn’t work out. And no, she doesn’t want her goddamn copy of The English Patient.

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Avett Brothers