Metaphorical Web

Archive for July, 2009

In the first few days of September, just as kids were beginning to head back to school, something rather remarkable happened: Microsoft lost its hegemony. In a vote by the various members of the ISO standards committee, managing only to come up 53% of the votes it needed to fast track the Office Open XML format for consideration as an ISO standard.

On Sept. 7, the US House of Representatives passed sweeping legislation to overhaul the US patent system by a vote of 220 to 175. The Patent Reform Act of 2007 (H.R. 1908), authored by Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., seeks to try to restore some balance to the patent system in the face of radical changes in information technology by introducing a number of changes increasingly sought by the software industry in particular: