Author name: Booksquare

It is somewhat sad, but we can see how this is going to work: the girl you’re trying to score with calls, all excited. “You’ll never believe this, but Kurt Vonnegut will be coming to my dinner party. You’ll be sitting right next to him — how cool is that? You can talk about Welcome to The Monkeyhouse all night.” It is only after she hangs up that you realize that your little white lie has come back to haunt you. You were trying to impress her with your intellectual intellectualness and hoped that she’d never heard of the book

If you pay attention (and surely you do), you know that the World of Patents is where the strangest and most dangerous battles are fought. Patents are dangerous because they don’t necessarily involve things as much as ideas. You cannot copyright an idea, but you can patent one. Appropriate caveats duly noted. This plays out all the time in the world of technology: overly broad ideas are patented and held like gold* until someone else builds something similar and makes lots of money. It is especially interesting when the patent is filed long after the technology has been in place.

Last week, someone mentioned that Microsoft is starting its own digital library project — yes, kids, we’re sitting on the sidelines of what may become the world’s most fascinating* pissing match; let’s call it “My Digital Library Is Bigger Than Yours”. Despite the legal opposition, we’re putting our money on Google. Call us old fashioned, but we believe companies that primarily do data indexing are better suited to the task than companies that sort of do data indexing. . .in addition to everything else. Focus, people, focus! Microsoft is also playing it interestingly safe. Last week’s correspondent mentioned something about