Ever hear of a company called HTC (the High Tech Computer Corporation)? They make mobile phones and are, in fact, the largest manufacturer of phones that use the Android operating system, which is the free and open source software released through the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), which was spearheaded by Google, but includes companies like Texas Instruments, Broadcom, HTC, Intel, LG, Motorola, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile and has the goal of developing open standards for mobile devices. Enter Apple and the iPhone.

Words like “free” and “open” are anathema to a company like Apple, and it sees Android as an enormous threat. And when Apple feels threatened, it sues. They’d love to go after Android directly, but I reckon it’s pretty hard to sue open source software. Instead, they’ve decided to sue HTC, and have filed a lawsuit alleging 20 patent infringements for patents ranging from 1995 up ’til Feb 2010.

Apple has much deeper pockets than HTC, so don’t be surprised if you see some sort of settlement that will ultimately result in huge licensing fees for Android-based phones (which will of course be passed along to the rest of us). Then again, if Google and the rest of the OHA get involved, this could drag on for years.

As I understand patents (and I’m certainly no expert), the original idea was to encourage innovation. The idea being that, if you came up with some cool new invention, you got the exclusive right to make money off it for a certain period of time (say, 20 years, though the terms vary) in exchange for the full public disclosure of how it works. Good for the inventor, good for the public.

That’s kind of changed over the years – especially in the Tech Sector. It’s not unlike how our economy has shifted. Used to be people made shit and sold it to make money. Shit got manufactured, people had jobs; not a perfect system by any means, but at least we were making stuff. Now, people push paper back and forth and take a cut out of each transaction to make money. Nothing gets made (except money), and fewer and fewer people have jobs (or homes). Similarly, companies buy up intellectual property (patents and copyrights) and sit on it, waiting like vultures for a chance to pounce on some new innovator for patent infringement and force a settlement. Good for the vultures, good for the lawyers, not so good for the rest of us.

Our lawmakers and the courts are pretty much clueless when it comes to technology (SCOTUS, for example, doesn’t understand the difference between e-mail and pagers, and of course we all remember the then 83-yr old former Chairman/Ranking Member of the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation describing the Internet as “not a big truck,” but a “series of tubes” while debating the rather important issue of Net Neutrality). This has led to companies getting ridiculous patents (and settlements) for things like “1-Click” checkout (clicking on a button to check out) and “parallel tasking” (basically, doing two things at once). Hell, Google even got a patent for displaying patents, and Microsoft got a patent for “page up and page down.”

The patent system is in desperate need of reform, and people who don’t know the difference between a pager and an e-mail, or think you can “send an Internet,” over a series of tubes shouldn’t be in charge of deciding the future of the technology the don’t understand.

It’d be like having me decide who wins next year’s Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group Grammy.

Some good news on the environmental front, for a change, as NYS said it will impose strict regulations on drilling for natural gas (aka, hydrofracking).

New York State environmental officials announced on Friday that they would impose far stricter regulations on a controversial type of natural gas drilling in the upstate area that supplies most of New York City’s drinking water, making it highly unlikely that any drilling would be done there.

Although they did not impose an outright ban on drilling, state officials said that any natural gas company would have to conduct a separate environmental impact review for each well it proposed to drill in the Catskills watershed, which supplies the city.

Those rules also apply to the smaller Skaneateles Lake watershed, which supplies drinking water to Syracuse and some other communities.

In other areas, companies would face a far less cumbersome permit process that would rely on the state’s own environmental assessment of where drilling can be allowed.

In other words, the drilling companies can go frack themselves.

Finally, I just have to mention this. On the Today Show this morning, they briefly showed security camera footage of a homeless man lying stabbed and dying on a NYC sidewalk as people walked around him (and somebody even took a cell phone picture of him). Then the B-Team Today Show newsreader twit segued into a fluff piece on how the most expensive house in America (the Spelling Mansion somewhere in California) is on the market, which she, Amy, and Lester all had a nice lengthy giggle over.

Do these fucking people get the irony there (that’s a rhetorical question, of course; I know they don’t)? They did the teevee equivalent of walking up to a human being dying on the sidewalk, taking a picture of him, then moving along, window shopping and giggling at the prices of all the fancy baubles.

I really hate these people. But they’re gonna have Buddy the hero German Shepherd on, so I gotta watch.