My favorite stories that happened while I was taking finals

So I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus, a necessary absence so I could focus on law school finals. But the rest of the word kept going, and there were plenty of interesting stories

Like.com killed a competitor by suing them for patent infringement to spoil funding round:

Pretty interesting story about how Like.com saw a small startup they deemed a threat, so they sued them on a software patent at the end of their funding round. It scared off a large enough portion of the investors that the startup had to fold. The patent itself is maybe valid, or at least, it isn’t blatantly ridiculous, but the founders of the blown-up company found plenty of prior art to suggest that it shouldn’t have issued. But patent litigation is just so expensive and so time consuming, it is a huge disadvantage to be a small company sued over a patent. The inefficiency of the patent system is really on display here, but maybe if stories like this got more attention (where patent law is really killing innovation) then there would be more support for reform.

Homeland Security tries to squelch a Firefox add-on that let you access the poker sites they just took down, and Firefox declines to help:

A Firefox add-on called Mafiaafire basically ruins all of ICE/Homeland Security’s domain seizure plans by re-directing browsers around the domain names, straight to the IP addresses. Homeland Security obviously didn’t like this add-on, so they asked Mozilla to take it down. Rather than comply, Mozilla asked if it was legally obligated, and whether the add-on has any legal issues itself. The add-on has since become available for Chrome, so it wil be interesting to see if Homeland Security asks the same of Google before they bother to respond to Mozilla. Speaking of Google…

Google launched +1 and so far it is approximately 10% of a feature:

It’s hard to launch a social network, because they gain all of their power from having your friends on them, and your friends probably weren’t on something that launched yesterday. But what would you do if you did launch one? You wouldn’t want to overwhelm your potential audience for fear of scaring them away, but you don’t want to underwhelm either and make that potential audience wonder what they really get from joining. Google’s +1 is solidly in that second category for the time being. You can say +1 (“like”, essentially) to search results, and I guess see when others indicate the same, but I’m not sure what the point is. I could see the feature dramatically expanded and then MAYBE it would be something like a newsfeed on Facebook… but my friends already post articles on Facebook. I dunno, it needs work.