Law and Innovation

Tech predictions for 2015 are all around: A smartphone-PC marriage , cyber attacks, the continuing rise of wearable technology (particularly smart watches), phablets, drones, Internet of Things (IoT), 3D printing, mobile payments system, etc. In sum, 2015 is going to be exciting!  But what about smartphones, more precisely, iPhone? It seems the iPhone generation is over. La boucle est bouclée. Most of the mobile trends to watch in 2015 articles are talking about everything related to mobile except a new iPhone... and that makes sense.  Let's take a closer look at the Apple iPhone timeline and evolution And now at the Apple iPad timeline and evolution And finally a closer look at the recent iDevices Considering how big the iPhone 6 Plus is, a new iPhone 7 seems unlikely. A "super" mini iPad too. The iDevice generation is completed. And that's a good thing. Big improvements are sometimes better than small new evolutions. Or perhaps Apple is still ...

Fresh and ( very) interesting  article posted on Wired about the imminent future of wearable technologies.  Happy reading!  "Data will not help you if you can’t see it when you need it. For Dan Eisenhardt—a competitive swimmer for more than a decade, beginning as a 9-year-old in his native Denmark—the data he needed in the water, what he could never know in the water, was his splits. His event was the 1,500-meter freestyle, the longest slog in the sport, a near-mile of grinding exertion divided into 15 laps of 100 meters apiece. As with every distance sport, pacing is all; lag your target time on the first two laps and you may never catch up, but accidentally beat it and you’ll load your tissue with lactic acid, doom your endgame. How fast was his last lap? How did it compare to his usual pace? His coach up on the pool deck could know, his parents in the stands could know. But Eisenhardt, at war in the water, could only guess. The rigors of engineering school e...

Fresh and interesting article from Forbes , the American business magazine, and TechCrunch , about Google's location history Browser "mapping" your movements:  "A recent story on TechCrunch highlighted a little-known feature of Google's mapping services; the ability to record and display a daily history of your whereabouts  [emphasis added]. The service is called  Location History and is available via a web browser when you’re logged into your Google account. What you get is a Google Maps display that includes a calendar to specify the date for which you want to review your travels. An hourly graph is displayed below the map so that you can mouse over a specific time to see your location at that hour. Google even provides a play button that will automatically scroll through the timeline for you.  This location data is coming from your smartphone or tablet, of course. Google’s apps have the ability to periodically track your location, rega...

Last Monday, on August 26, 2013, the Microsoft Corporation v. Motorola Mobility (a wholly-owned Google subsidiary) breach-of-FRAND-contract trial kicked off in Seattle  [1] . It’s already the second trial in this case; a first trial took place in November 2010  [2] . The  federal jury in Seattle has already rendered a verdict on this case,  and Microsoft has won again.  Even though a case between two giants is always exciting, this article will just deal with the meanings of technical legal terms surrounding this case, such as standards-essential patent (SEP), Standard-Developing Organizations   (SDO) and FRAND/RAND terms  [3] ; terms which also have significant interest and impact in the smartphone patent wars. As we all know, the economic role of intellectual property rights , more precisely patents, is very significant. The patent system promotes innovation and economic growth by providing incentives to inventors to apply their knowledg...