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CIA’s Gus Hunt On Big Data: We ‘Try To Collect Everything And Hang On To It Forever’
Speaking before a crowd of tech geeks at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference in New York City, CTO Ira “Gus” Hunt said that the world is increasingly awash in information from text messages, tweets, and videos — and that the agency wants all of it.
A bill introduced last week with bipartisan support would substantially level the playing field for companies sued for patent infringement by non-practicing entities (NPEs), sometimes called patent trolls. The bill is referred to as the “SHIELD Act,” which stands for the “Saving High-Tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes Act of 2013.”
Companies that have been sued for patent infringement by NPEs appreciate the special problems such litigation presents. The NPE has substantial leverage over the company: Responding to discovery can be very burdensome and disruptive for the company, but not for the NPE, which generally has few documents to produce and perhaps no witnesses; the stakes for the company can be substantial, while the NPE has nothing to lose but its patent; and the company faces potentially large legal bills for defending the patent lawsuit and challenging the validity of even overbroad patents, while the NPE likely has small or no legal bills, because it likely has a contingency fee agreement with its lawyers. To make matters worse, NPEs typically sue an end user of a technology, such as a bank or retailer, which has less incentive and less ability to defend the lawsuit than the company that actually makes the equipment or technology at issue. And finally, the company is likely to be sued in a location like the Eastern District of Texas that is favorable to plaintiffs, convenient to the NPE, but quite inconvenient to the company.
With these leverage imbalances in mind, the NPE typically offers to settle for low six-figure sums, a much smaller figure than the average cost of litigating a patent lawsuit to conclusion. Not surprisingly, companies that are sued by NPEs generally choose to pay rather than litigate. A recent Boston University study estimates that NPEs collected $29 billion in 2011. Further, the number of patent cases brought before the International Trade Commission by NPEs swelled from 22 in 2010 to 232 in 2011.
via Patent troll litigation – is legislative help on the way? – Lexology.
Following every data-based rabbit hole
In a very basic sense, computer forensics (sometimes known as digital forensics because mobile technology is covered) involves searching through digital assets, and if there’s a court case involved, the results of that search become e-discovery.
Although both are geared toward finding information that’s relevant to a lawsuit, the strategy can be used even when there’s no litigation. Forensic investigators follow every data-based rabbit hole in an organization and look for evidence of wrongdoing, depending on a client’s main concern.
For example, a CEO might be worried about employees forwarding offensive “jokes” to other departments, creating fertile ground for harassment claims. A computer forensics specialist can find those email threads, even if they’ve been deleted, and pinpoint the source of the issue. Or there may be concerns about whether a network issue has exposed customer information, including credit card data or enterprise banking information.
Using highly sophisticated tools and detection methods, computer forensic professionals can ferret out usage logs and even determine what company information has passed onto thumb drives, cloud-based data storage applications and home computers.
via Tech Toolkit: Computer forensics brings more robust security | Finance & Commerce.
Some see hope for a lull in the patent wars on news of a truce between Apple and HTC after years of litigation. But unfortunately this is just one skirmish in the numerous smartphone patent wars among tech companies. RPX estimates that there are 250,000 active U.S. patents applicable to the smartphone. Assuming an average of 20 claims each, that is 5,000,000 restrictions on smartphone innovation.
CCIA’s DisCo project did some further calculations and found smart phone patents account for 16 percent of active patents in the U.S, using RPX estimates.
As for software patents, researchers say it would take roughly 2,000,000 patent attorneys working full-time to compare every software-producing firm’s products with every software patent issued in a given year. Moreover, any such search would be incomplete, because it cannot reveal applications that are not yet published (18 months from filing in most cases), let alone those that have not yet been filed.
But beyond the legal research costs, there are the court and settlement costs. In August, nine California jurors awarded Apple a $1.05 billion penalty in its patent suit against Samsung. While the size of the verdict is just two percent of Samsung’s global revenue, the steep price tag here and economic studies on the cost of patent litigation has led some policymakers to question why tech companies are increasingly spending money on litigation rather than innovation.
via Patent Wars Rage As Tech Industry Waits For Serious Reforms – Forbes.
TECHNOLOGY tends to cascade into the marketplace in waves. Think of personal computers in the 1980s, the Internet in the 1990s and smartphones in the last five years.
Computing may be on the cusp of another such wave. This one, many researchers and entrepreneurs say, will be based on smarter machines and software that will automate more tasks and help people make better decisions in business, science and government. And the technological building blocks, both hardware and software, are falling into place, stirring optimism.
Michael R. Stonebraker, a pioneer in database research, is one of the optimists. Software used by companies and government agencies — in products sold by Oracle, I.B.M., Microsoft and others — descends from research done in the 1970s by Mr. Stonebraker and Eugene Wong, a colleague at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a team of scientists at I.B.M.
Today, Mr. Stonebraker sees an opportunity for new kinds of ultrafast databases. The new software, he explains, takes advantage of rapid advances in computer hardware to help businesses and researchers find insights in the rising flood of data coming from so many sources, including Web-browsing trails, sensor data, genetic testing and stock trading.
via Data-Driven Discovery Is Tech’s New Wave – Unboxed – NYTimes.com.
