Royalty fee 'to damage net radio'
,----[ Quote ]
| Hundreds of US net radio stations face potential closure from Monday when
| they will be expected to comply with a new royalties ruling for playing
| music.
|
| Smaller stations face a payment increase of 1,200% while larger station could
| owe up to 300% more, lobby group SaveNetRadio has said.
`----
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6896152.stm
Loosely related to Microsoft vs Free software (see below).
Related:
A Patent Lie
,----[ Quote ]
| Microsoft sang a very different tune in 1991. In a memo to his
| senior executives, Bill Gates wrote, "If people had understood how
| patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented,
| and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete
| standstill today." Mr. Gates worried that "some large company will
| patent some obvious thing" and use the patent to "take as much of
| our profits as they want."
`----
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/09/opinion/09lee.html
,----[ Quote ]
| ...Thanks to Mr. Gates, we now know that an open Internet with protocols
| anyone can implement is communism...
|
| ...Mr. Gates' secret is out now--he too was a "communist;" he, too,
| recognized that software patents were harmful-until Microsoft
| became one of these giants...
`----
http://news.com.com/Bill+Gates+and+other+communists/2010-1071_3-5576230.html?part=rss&tag=5575731&subj=news.1071.20
Big businesses boast of patent benefits, for small businesses
,----[ Quote ]
| A report published by an EU task force on intellectual property claims
| that small businesses benefit from a patent system, despite lacking
| almost any participation by the small business community.
|
| Instead, the report, titled IPR (intellectual property rights) for
| competitiveness and innovation, was written up almost entirely by
| large corporations and the patent industry.
|
| [...]
|
| The report does note objections from the likes of patentfrei.de and
| Sun Microsystems, which were recorded at some length in the report.
| But this does not appear to have impacted the conclusion of the
| report in any way
|
| [...]
|
| Jean-Pierre Laisne, of ObjectWeb, an open source software community,
| said that he found the report useless: participants were told that
| all their contributions would be recorded but at the end only
| those of Business Software Alliance and Microsoft were used.
`----
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/99155/big-businesses-boast-of-patent-benefits-for-small-businesses.html
|
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