Inventors protest patent reform

[PCWorld] The legislation "will weaken the patent system," said Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway and the AutoSyringe. "It will devalue patents. It will be a disincentive for people to invest in the future."

Jobs subpoenaed in backdating case

[Newsfactor.com] The subpoena of Steve Jobs in the backdating case against Apple general counsel Nancy Heinen doesn't indicate that the SEC is interested in Jobs, said Peter J. Henning, a law professor at Wayne State University Law School. "This is more procedural. They want to tie down what he would say under oath and on the record," he said.

Free software lawyers sue over GPL misuse

[CIO Today] "We licensed BusyBox under the GPL to give users the freedom to access and modify its source code," Erik Andersen, a developer of BusyBox and a named plaintiff, said in a statement. "If companies will not abide by the fair terms of our license, then we have no choice but to ask our attorneys to go to court to force them to do so."

Serious flaw in PDF

[PCWorld] "Adobe Acrobat/Reader PDF documents can be used to compromise your Windows box. Completely!!! Invisibly and unwillingly!!!," wrote Petko Petkov, in a breathless Thursday blog posting. "All it takes is to open a PDF document or stumble across a page which embeds one."

VCs want a tax break

[NYT] The House is considering an increase in a crucial tax rate, prompting venture capitalists and their leaders to assert that such a change will hamper job creation and innovation.

Fox replaces NBC at iTunes

[LA Times] "What we are seeing is a rather messy and inelegant fumbling into the future of video distribution," said Tim Hanlon, executive vice president of Denuo, a consulting arm of the advertising giant Publicis Groupe. "It's also an admission that the television networks' time-honored, top-down manner of distribution is not the way that people are watching video anymore," Hanlon said. "Programmers are having an interesting time trying to figure out how to adjust."

Will GOOG lay its own cable?

[NYT] Google would plan to be part of a project called Unity that would also include several telecommunications companies, that hopes to have a cable in service by 2009, the publication wrote. It would own a dedicated portion of the multi-terabit cable, giving it a significant cost advantage for trans-Pacific data transmission over rival Internet companies.