Dana Blankenhorn

Rice Science Wednesday: Glycerin into Ethanol

Cuban-born professor Ramon Gonzalez and post-doc Syed Shams Yazdani have announced a way to turn glycerin into ethanol using a strain of E.Coli and intend to start commercial production next year.

Dr. Gonazalez has been focusing his research on using microbial agents as catalysts for chemical changes, and the press release on this went out in June.

It's now getting the big build-up because DFJ Mercury, a Texas seed capital firm, is now funding the transformation of laboratory science into practical profit. Plus it's another win for Rice in the War Against Oil.

Some Love for the Roberts Court

I am no big fan of many Supreme Court decisions but today they got two patently right.

And in one case, they handed a big win to Microsoft, whose legal department is also seldom on my good list.

In both Microsoft v. AT&T, 05-1056 and KSR International v. Teleflex Inc., 04-1350, we saw an attempt to expand patent rights in ways which harmed innovation. In the first case, AT&T was trying to force payments on Microsoft's foreign sales, while in the latter case Teleflex was trying to patent the basic idea of a brake pedal.

In both cases, it was the Supremes who applied the brake pedal.

This Week's Clue: Accelerating Change

See what happens when you don't subscribe? You get your Clues late.

The following is the current week's essay in A-Clue.Com, my free weekly e-mail newsletter. You can still subscribe by clicking this link.

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A few years ago I was invited to speak at a conference called Accelerating Change, at Stanford University.

I offered a talk on The World of Always On. Use the wireless router as a platform for applications which live in the air, I said. Sensors and motes can measure the condition of your heart and blood, can measure the condition of your lawn, can monitor your perimeter, can find your stuff. A PC board can calculate when alerts must be sounded, or can respond to your verbal commands. This can let millions age in place safely.

Nothing happened. I'm not a programmer. I'm not an entrepreneur. I'm a journalist. I was speaking of what I expected to see, it was pure advocacy. I had no power to make it so.

But I was right about the trend. The World of Always-On is starting to happen. In China.

It was the failure of Always-On to happen here which led to my current obsession with politics. What I have been looking for are policies that will accelerate change. In normal times, throughout the 20th century, America had the very best environment for accelerating change. We had the schools, we had the laws, we had the freedom to fail. Something, I concluded, had gone horribly wrong.

Real Patent Reform

One of the major challenges facing the next Congress will be patent reform. (To the right is the original patent for the laser, given to Bell Labs.)

The present system is a mess. We're still running a 19th century patent system.

A 21st century patent system will be based on the Internet. It will be a tremendous victory for Internet politics and its prime goals of connectivity, transparency, and openness.

Reform starts with understanding the goals of the system:

1. Speeding patented technologies to market.
2. Examining claims so they're valid when granted.
3. Limiting claims so they don't veto the creation of better mousetraps.
4. Eliminating patents for what, as in math, the obvious, and business process, and allowing patents only for how.

At the heart of patent reform must be the publication of patents. Patent applicants must disclose what they're patenting, and this should be public information. Existing patents also need wide publicity, so they can find their market.

Building the Internet Party

After the coming elections there will still be three parties in America.

They will be, in order of power, the Republican Party, the Washington Democratic party, and the Netroots Democratic Party.

While Democrats are currently united and Republicans seem fractured, the opposite is going to happen once Democrats seize Congress. The Democratic party has been papering over its differences. Power will unmask them.

Many of these differences occur on issue relating to the Internet. The Washington party is in bed with the copyright industries. I've seen a large number of Washington-approved ads this year, by Democrats, attacking the Internet as a haven for child predators and terrorists, demanding “protection from” it.

Those of us who have been on the Internet for a time know this is ridiculous. Hiding from the bad actors on the Net does not cause them to go away. It actually makes them stronger. Imagine how much worse the problems of spam and adware would be if we didn't confront those people.

In addition to basic Internet ignorance we still face the problem of over-reaching copyright and patents. Both are antithetical to the way the Internet works. The Internet is a great Commons that allows people to create new works from old. Deny them access to the old works, or allow those who created them a veto, and you don't get the new ones. Other people, who are given this freedom to create, will deliver them to the market.

Then there's broadband. The current duopoly must be challenged in the market, but market conditions must be set allowing that challenge.

In all these cases Washington Democrats are looking for big money handouts from the industries impacted. And they're getting them. The vaunted K Street project is coming apart, becoming once again bipartisan.

And it is this move that the Internet Party must oppose most forcefully. Issues like campaign finance reform, even state financing of elections (the only true reform allowed under Buckley vs. Vallejo) are in the Internet Party's interests.

Free Mark Cuban

A decade ago, a young entrepreneur got a ton of traffic selling something he didn't own.

Before you could say "but he didn't have the rights" he sold that site, Broadcast.Com, to Yahoo for over $6 billion in stock. Then he sold the stock after the Internet bubble doubled its value to over $13 billion.

The entrepreneur's name? Mark Cuban.

Well, Cuban's grown up now. He sees YouTube getting a ton of traffic, much of it from perfectly legitimate sources, and says it's worthless. "The only reason it hasn't been sued yet is because there is nobody with big money to sue," he told Reuters.

UPDATE: Apparently his undies are in a twist because Yahoo may wind up paying about one-quarter what his fake company got for YouTube.

Want to know what's even funnier?

Another Luddite Patent

This fits well into the item which follows, because it is about education policy and the principles underlying Open Source Politics.

The present thesis on knowledge is that it should be closed. It should be treated as property. It should be either an economic good or have its access restricted in some way.

The Open Source Thesis is that this is nonsense. Knowledge should be open and freely available. Incentives are only relevant if they create more knowledge. Restrictions are anti-American.

In line with this, the idiots at the U.S. Patent Office have actually granted a patent covering all course management, to an outfit called Blackboard. These chumps are now trying to shake-down, or shut down, all online education in this country (based on this overly-broad patent) starting with a company called Desire2Learn.

Following is the actual language from this patent, which is filed as number 6,988,138:

The Right Open Source Argument

A lot of smart people are making arguments for open source, net neutrality, and Internet values.

Doc Searls (right) is among those who make great  technological arguments. Matt Stoller is just one of many who make great political arguments.

The winning arguments are economic arguments. These are the arguments that will win the day.

And the best economic argument is the simplest one.

Sharing accelerates innovation.

In order to compete economically we need to accelerate change. We need to be free to work together in order to do that. Rapid back-and-forth communication is the only way to get the upper hand on such competitors as China, which fear free thought and thus repress it.

Open source and a free, wide Internet are the only ways we can do this. A proprietary model benefits only the owners of specific inventions, who then can work only within their silos to exploit them. 

We have seen how university research, technological innovation, and  human communication are all hampered when access to the tools of thought are limited. Free people, free groups, and free thought are the way to economic growth.  As it was  in the beginning of our country, so it is now. Only more so. 

The Open Source Purpose of Patents

The patent system is designed to encourage replacement of the patented technology.

Think back to when patents started. The requirement was that the invention be detailed, that directions for its construction and use be given, in clear language others could follow.

The whole idea was to get improvements into the patent office.

This was natural at a time where patents were filed by individuals. But now that patents are filed by corporations, this has been turned on its head.

Today, patents are designed to prevent advance. Anything that emerges which is similar in technology intent to what was patented by a corporation or a patent troll is brought to court.
This is what is wrong with software and business methods patents. They don't protect a how of something. They protect a what. They don't encourage innovation, as the original patent system did. They try to prevent it.

The Real Political Divide

The real political divide in America is between the ascendent open source view on the one side and the proprietary view on the other.

Right now, the proprietary view holds absolute power. This is partly because open source is not organized. In fact, many with an open source view see what they're doing as merely "good business" and firmly reject its political implications.

At the Freedom2Connect Conference in Silver Spring this reticence was on prominent display. The technical experts who supported the open source view hoped that "competition" -- maybe from WiFi and WiMax -- might suffice to get them the network neutrality they sought. In fact, most wound up rejecting the network neutrality language being debated as part of the Barton Telecom bill.

Thus, it was a shock for them to wake up this week and find that the Movement had taken off without them. The issue of network neutrality had hit the mass media, without them. And, except for a few exceptions of right-wing grassroots organizations that have become dependent on e-mail, the activism here was coming entirely from the Left.

This means the proposal will go down. Anything with a Democratic label is going down this year.

But it also gives Democrats -- especially Netroots Democrats -- another  issue (as though they need one) that can win even some business support.

And that's the point. Open source, as a political wedge, is useful in siphoning business support from the GOP.

That's because all forms of open source -- open source software, open spectrum, and network neutrality -- make sound business sense. More and more businesses are endorsing them. Sun Microsystems is merely the latest. But all companies that have succeeded on the backs of the Internet -- Google, Amazon, eBay -- are in the same boat. So is Intel, which has hitched its future to unlicensed wireless.  None of these companies wants to be partisan in any way, but they are going to find (like it or not) that they are being steadily pushed into the Democratic camp.

That's because their business opponents, seeing themselves increasingly hemmed-in, have essentially turned to Washington for relief. And Republicans, seeing big campaign cash as the only way to prevent a Democratic sweep, are ready to give them whatever they want. Right now, for instance, an even-stupider DMCA bill is in the works. Republicans may decide to sell all the abandoned TV spectrum to the highest bidders, and give none of it to unlicensed use. And of course U.S. trade policy is all for enforcing Microsoft copyrights.

New Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz' (above) most recent blog entry is titled The Brazilian Effect. It's all about the opportunities open source has for Brazil, how Sun's business strategy endorses those changes, and about the threats to it from a proprietary world:

Click over to see what he wrote: