Day: March 14, 2012

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From Ars Technica: Judge orders failed copyright troll to forfeit “all” copyrights


Righthaven, a copyright-troll law firm that failed in its attempt to make money for newspapers by suing readers for sharing stories online, was dealt a death blow on Tuesday by a federal judge who ordered the Las Vegas company to forfeit “all of” its intellectual property and other “intangible property” to settle its debts.

The order is an ironic twist to a copyright trolling saga that began in 2010, when Righthaven was formed with the idea of suing blogs and websites that re-post newspaper articles or snippets of them without permission.

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from Ars Technica

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From Ars Technica: Yahoo IP lawsuit: We patented “Facebook’s entire social network model”


By now you’ve heard that Yahoo has sued Facebook, alleging patent infringement. But just which pieces of intellectual property is Yahoo claiming Facebook ripped off?

Surely, you’d say, Yahoo doesn’t claim that it invented the entire social networking model Facebook is based upon—except it turns out that is almost exactly what Yahoo is claiming.

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from Ars Technica

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From Ars Technica: New 3D printer could create nano-devices in minutes


Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna) have developed a 3D printing technology that can quickly print detailed objects in nanoscale using a process called two-photon lithography. It’s fast, too: the precision required to print objects with features measured in hundreds of nanometers in width meant the speed of previous attempts at printing nanoscale objects were measured in millimeters per second. In contrast, the TU Vienna team’s 3D printer is capable of printing lines of resin at a rate of five meters per second. In a demonstration shown in the video below, the team was able to print a nanoscale model of a 300-micrometer long Formula 1 racecar—made from 100 layers of resin, each consisting of approximately 200 individual lines—in four minutes.

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from Ars Technica

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From Ars Technica: NASA admin returns to Congress to fight for commercial space


It’s possible that no NASA Administrator has enjoyed appearing in front of Congress since the 1960’s. Charlie Bolden’s testimony in front of both the Senate and House oversight committees for his agency last Wednesday was likely to continue that trend.

Although there was some argument over the 20 percent cuts to the Mars exploration program and NASA’s commitments to the ESA, the key issue in both the Senate and House hearings was a philosophical difference over how to get humans into orbit. The legislators favored NASA’s Space Launch System, known among its detractors as the “Senate Launch System,” over CCDev, the Commercial Crew Development program. The two shouldn’t conflict, given that they are meant for completely different purposes, but in these highly-politicized times, they do.

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from Ars Technica