Apple vs Samsung, consumers lose…

 

Apple have won their case against Samsung…

A US court has ordered Samsung to pay Apple $1.05bn (£665m) in damages after upholding allegations that several Samsung devices had infringed Apple’s intellectual property, including design patents and some functionality.

Samsung has promised to appeal against the decision describing it as “a loss for the American consumer”.

I can only say, the consumer will lose out in Steve Jobs legacy to take down Google

The chilling effect will be felt…

 

Who needs SOPA when you have the DMCA?

Share

I know there’s a very clear difference between the DMCA and SOPA/PIPA but its interesting that right after the victory of the internet regards to SOPA, Megaupload was taken down a few days later.

It was almost like the incumbents saying, “well you might have won the fight but we’re still in the running and can still take you down…” (or at least thats how I see it). Something like a playground bully sending you message from detention saying “wait till you get outside, then your really going to see what I’m made of!”

The chilling effect is already in effect… Although Rapidshare claim there not afraid of the bully in detention.

Its certainly not a good time to be an file uploader service or even a user, however its funny that Bit Torrent may have built a solution to solve this problem.

BitTorrent Inc. launched a personal file sharing application called Share. Thursday that aims to give users an alternative to paid cloud storage companies and media sharing over social networks. Share makes it possible to transfer files without any size limits to an unlimited number of personal contacts. Files are cached in the cloud, so users don’t have to be online at the same time to complete transfers.

On Wednesday, BitTorrent Chief Strategist Shahi Ghanem told me the company is relying on Amazon’s EC2 and S3 services to provide this kind of caching infrastructure. Files are taken off the cloud as soon as they are sufficiently shared by peers. The app will initially be Windows-only, but Mac users will be able to download an alpha version of the company’s µTorrent client that will offer them the same kind of personal file sharing functionality. Future Windows versions of µTorrent will also offer Share functionality.

Just a shame it doesn’t support Linux in any shape or form yet… Welcome to the darknet?

When the buisness model gets in the way, its time to move on?

By now everyones seen the ravings about Twitter changing the developer API and telling developers not to build twitter clients.

In a statement issued today by Twitter on its official developer mailing list, the company informed third-party developers that they should no longer attempt to build conventional Twitter client applications. In a move to increase the “consistency” of the user experience, Twitter wants more control over how its service is presented to users in all contexts.

The announcement is a major blow to the third-party application developers who played a key role in popularizing Twitter’s service. More significantly, it demonstrates the vulnerability of building a business on top of a Web platform that is controlled by a single vendor. The situation highlights the importance of decentralization in building sustainable infrastructure for communication.

This I feel will have a massive chilling effect through out the developer community. Ideally people would move to status.net but I fear even this change isn’t enough to push people over and if the people won’t go the developers are unlikely to change focus to status.net and identi.ca.

I can’t quite link the two but in my mind there along the same lines. Cory Doctorow did a interview about why DRM is no friend of business. A very good interview which hits all the right points but theres something about twitter’s api change which is related. Maybe its about building a business model on shifting ground. If there business model and your business model don’t match or go in the same direction, maybe its time to move on?