In one of my favorite scenes in Star Wars (not calling it “A New Hope” that’s revisionist garbage), the ever-plucky and courageous Princess Leia and the evil imperial governor Grand Moff Tarkin have one of my favorite exchanges in all those movies (yes, cheeseball but I still love it):

Governor Tarkin: Princess Leia, before your execution, you will join me at a ceremony that will make this battle station operational. No star system will dare oppose the Emperor now.

Princess Leia: The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

Now substitute Steve Jobs for Tarkin, and you’ll get a good idea of what is going on at Apple today.  Notice I didn’t say Jobs was the Emperor; that would be his ego.

And yet another sordid chapter in software patents begins, as Winksite files suit in Manhattan federal court for  infringment of yet another highly vague software patent, this time over using a mobile phone to connect to social websites.

Winksite, which I had never heard of until yesterday (and I bet you didn’t either), describes itself as:

As reported all over the net this week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a number of other Facebook execs have been awarded US Patent #7,699,123: Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a
social network, yet another highly vague, general software patent.  The abstract:

A little story i’ve been following for about a year now, regarding Yelp and their “advertising sales tactics” seems to have grown some teeth.  According to numerous sources, a class action lawsuit has been filed in Los Angeles Superior Court against Yelp, the massive directory / review website, alleging:

The lawsuit alleges that Yelp runs an extortion scheme in which the company’s employees call businesses demanding monthly payments, in the guise of “advertising contracts,” in exchange for removing or modifying negative reviews appearing on the website.

I can’t say this comes as much of a surprise.

So as CNN is reporting today (yeah, a bit late), that evidently you CAN get sued for libel for a tweet. Sounds ridiculous? Yeah to me too. But really, it’s not so much ridiculous as it is yet another sad disjunction between the 1st Amendment, various traditional libel / slander laws, and all this new-fangled technolowhatsis that has been coming down the pike for the last few decade.

CNN Article: “Can the law keep up with technology?”

This is the same sort of thing that has been going on for ages; I’m sure that the first wheel maker was roundly condemned by the Porter’s Guild for stealing their livelihood.  But that’s really just something that happens whenever someone invents a better widget.