Patents from the Grave

This story from Boing Boing caught my eye, as it mentions Sony/Philips. Whenever I see those two companies together, it usually means something about their joint venture, in which they purchased the assets (primarily patents) of Intertrust, a fabulously shitty company from which I had the honor of getting canned. A little secret was that right around the time I got laid off from them, I was thinking about quitting anyway. I and my whole team rode in via an acquisition. We were just trying to do our little ebook publishing stuff. We built and delivered it, it worked and then ITRU managed to do nothing with it, much like they managed to do nothing with anything.

But I digress. It links to this story and they editorialize that this means dire things for the future of DRM. I actually had kind of bought into the ITRU dream at the time, but I’ve since come to believe that most DRM is useless at best and harmful in many cases. The BoingBoinger posits that MSFT was actually on the right track for once, and this suit (probably a continuation of the lawsuit that was ITRU’s only real business) will likely derail that. Even after no longer existing, the boners at Intertrust are still ruining things. God help all that touch that bad mojo. I’m off to shower with bleach and get lobotomized. The only good thing from my tenure with them is all the computer and office equipment I got to keep when I was canned.

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Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.