Jon Stokes writes about this on Arstechnica, looking at a forthcoming Virginia Law Review paper entitled “The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design,” in which two law professors investigate how the fashion industry manages to thrive despite rampant copying of clothing designs.

While it’s not simply applicable to other areas (such as software), quite a few interesting observations are made – the most interesting (to me) is that making a generalistic presumption about needing very strong IP protection in order to drive innovation is just plain wrong, as the fashion industry proves. It may apply to other areas, but it’s clearly not a universal rule.

I actually think that fashion and software have a lot in common, particularly in terms of the trends that surface and evolve, and the speed at which the market moves. These aspects appear to be key factors, so perhaps there is a strong case for taking note of these observations for software… anyway, have a read and see what you think of it!

Jason McCabe Calacanis (Weblogs) writes about this… Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) does not want to have *any* advertising, even if all of the proceeds were to go to worthy causes.

Is there anything wrong with that? Jason appears to think so, pleading with Jimmy to reconsider. There’ll even be free bandwidth chucked in. But that’s a catch… Jimmy does not want to be dependent on anyone else for hardware or bandwidth, Wikipedia has had fab offers from a variety of companies with great infrastructure. Other people are commenting to that blog post also, some reckon that Jimmy might change his mind “for the right price”. I’m pondering… is it really so hard to understand -or at least appreciate and respect- that some people have certain guiding principles and actually stick with them – no price? Are we really so cynical now that we reckon that everything and everybody has a price?

And is advertising really completely harmless, could someone have advertising on a site and not have it change the site at all, nor affect the users in any way? I reckon not. By definition, for the advertising to be effective it has to catch the user’s eye – so it distracts from whatever they were doing. That’s the objective, and it’s not in sync with Wikipedia’s goals. Also, what about independence? Wikipedia aims to be neutral, and you can’t really say you’re neutral if at the same time some companies advertise on your site… so the solution is: no advertising.

I think Jimmy’s line is perfectly sensible, given his principles and objectives for Wikipedia. Rock on Jimbo.

The domain registrars are making more money again, this time with .mobi. Naturally, people with a trademark or other (like .com) domain will be wanting to grab their .mobi so noone else can nick off with it. But what’s the practical purpose of all these additional toplevel domains?

As far as I can tell, it’s just a money making scheme just like .biz was. You may use one or the other to provide advance clarity to your users/customers, but you’ll want/need to grab all the domains anyway to keep them safe.
Guh.

See this article on InformationWeek.

Looks like an excellent development.
I just hope the EFF has picked the case carefully…

…is a pain. Most hotels “kind of” have broadband Internet access, where broadband is defined as an Ethernet cable or wireless. Usually it’s ridiculously expensive, like $5 per hour or $20 for 24 hours. It bears no relation to actual cost. It makes dining from the minibar look cheap ;-)

I was just browsing for a hotel in Sydney (training course next week), and spotted this:

Broadband available (additional charges apply, PC must have PCI slot)

I know not what to say.