Chapter 13: Copyright and Fair Use

The new about the problem of Copyright and Fair Use:

TEL AVIV (MarketWatch) – Apple Inc. filed a lawsuit, charging that Samsung Electronics Co.’s Galaxy Nexus phone violates four of the Cupertino, Calif., tech giant’s patents, weekend media reports say.

TEL AVIV (MarketWatch) – Apple Inc. filed a lawsuit, charging that Samsung Electronics Co.’s Galaxy Nexus phone violates four of the Cupertino, Calif., tech giant’s patents, weekend media reports say. 

The latest suit was filed Feb. 8 in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., and made available Friday, reports say.

The patents in question include one covering the feature called slide to unlock, in which a user opens access to a phone by swiping an image of a button, the reports say.

Another involves data tapping, in which the system can recognize, say, a phone number in an e-mail and enable the user to immediately call that number. Late last year, the U,S. International Trade Commission banned HTC Corp.’s phones that used the feature, and that HTC then developed a workaround for the function.

A third patent violation, Apple charges in the case, involves technology that helps complete partial words that a phone user inputs. And the fourth is tied to Apple’s voice-activated search function called Siri, reports say.

The lawsuit asks the court to block sales of the Galaxy Nexus, which employs Google’s  Android 4.0 operating system, dubbed Ice Cream Sandwich.

A Samsung spokesman couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

 Source : (Marketwatch)

Chapter 12: Knowledge Management

The example of Knowledge Management (KM):

Think of a golf caddie as a simplified example of a knowledge worker. Good caddies do more than carry clubs and track down wayward balls. When asked, a good caddie will give advice to golfers, such as, "The wind makes the ninth hole play 15 yards longer. " Accurate advice may lead to a bigger tip at the end of the day. On the flip side, the golfer — having derived a benefit from the caddie's advice — may be more likely to play that course again. If a good caddie is willing to share what he knows with other caddies, then they all may eventually earn bigger tips. How would KM work to make this happen? The caddie master may decide to reward caddies for sharing their tips by offering them credits for pro shop merchandise. Once the best advice is collected, the course manager would publish the information in notebooks (or make it available on PDAs), and distribute them to all the caddies. The end result of a well-designed KM program is that everyone wins. In this case, caddies get bigger tips and deals on merchandise, golfers play better because they benefit from the collective experience of caddies, and the course owners win because better scores lead to more repeat business.