New Podcast on TechdotMN

By Paul

I had the pleasure of talking to Harold Slawik of New Counsel about choice of entity, funding and securities law issues for startups. Check out the article and podcast at TechdotMN.

USPTO Director David Kappos at William Mitchell College of Law

By Paul

David Kappos at William Mitchell College of Law

I was only able to attend the first 45 minutes of this event. Thank you to William Mitchell College of Law for making the whole program available online so I could see the rest. Director Kappos seems to be exactly the kind of person we should want to be heading up the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

A Victory for Open Source Software

By Paul

Novell recently won a 7 year battle against the SCO Group over the copyright to UNIX source code. A jury in Utah found that Novell was the owner of the copyrights in question. Its a victory for open source software generally, because it was probably the most serious legal threat to development of Linux, an open source UNIX-like operating system. SCO had alleged that Linux infringed copyrights it held in UNIX. Though Novell’s offerings have changed over the years, currently it offers SUSE Linux and related software and services.

The blog Groklaw has been following this case in great detail over the years. There is an unbelievable amount of information there which illustrates how much work can go into litigating a case of this scale.

FCC Launches Spectrum Dashboard

By Paul

The FCC has created a tool that allows people to quickly see how spectrum is allocated. You can use a map to find all the licensees in a particular county or state. All this is particularly interesting now as there is currently some interest in reallocating spectrum that was used for television broadcast and allowing more wireless broadband services.

FCC Spectrum Dashboard

HT to the CommLawBlog.

TECH{dot}MN Podcast with Justin Porter

By Paul

Jeff Pesek and I recently interviewed Justin Porter who works with the University of Minnesota Office of Technology Commercialization. The OTC harnesses some great innovation that comes out of the University and helps bring it to market by either licensing it, or finding the right people to help start a new company to develop it.

Check out the podcast here at TECH{dot}MN

Check out the University of MN OTC here.