If reinventing the wheel is ridiculous, being able to patent such a device is even more so. Yet that is what happened in 2001 when patent attorney John Keogh won a patent for a "circular transportation facilitation device" from the patent office in Australia. He did this to flag up deficiencies in the country’s new patenting system.

To qualify for a patent, an invention is supposed to be new, useful and non-obvious. Patent examiners establish novelty by making sure the invention is not either already patented, or in use commercially without patent protection.

They do this by checking for so-called "prior art" in existing patent applications and granted patents, as well as looking for non-patent prior art in sources such as trade magazines, websites and journals. However, examiners – particularly in the US – are often criticised for not checking thoroughly enough for non-patent prior art.

Univentio, the patent-information company he runs in the Netherlands, has discovered that Espacenet, the European online patent database, is missing 322,000 UK Patent Office documents, plus 186,000 and 17,000 patents respectively from the French and German offices.

The Leeds Patent Information Unit, the largest regional library of its type in the UK, was unable to relocate a large percentage of its hard-copy collection when it moved offices in 2004, says Lagemaat, while the Dutch patent office has already begun disposing of its hard copies of patents.

Between 2002 and 2003, MGM saw a 40% boost in DVD shipments in North America, and 53% increase worldwide. One slide shows just how quickly DVD has caught on: it took only five years for 30 million DVD players to be sold, compared to circa 8 years for CD players, and 10 years for PCs to reach that volume. All of this translates into a booming market, which helps explains the considerable profit margins attached to DVDs. This slide indicates that net profit margins on DVD sales are 50-60%, while the lingering VHS business sees 20-30% net profit. To put this into plain English, your average $20 DVD apparent costs around $9 to produce, advertise, distribute, etc., leaving about $11 on top as pure profit. For an industry supposedly under dire threat from piracy, things look pretty rosy.

One thing is certain: these DVD numbers clearly show that people want to pay for compelling content. DVDs are superior to VHS in every way (save their oppressive encryption), they're roughly the same cost to produce as VHS is these days, but many people are willing to pay more.

The first computer virus that passes from PCs to humans has been discovered in the wild. Leading anti-virus firms are putting users on high alert after Malwarlaria.B was spammed worldwide in the early hours of Friday morning.

"We've had proof-of-concept examples of this for some months now," said Avril Poisson, principal analyst at industry watchers Willwisp. "But disinfection is hard to achieve because the virus mutates so quickly. This is truly a significant and worrying development."

Another version of the virus, Malwarlaria.C is prevalent in rodents and can infect users through the mouse. As yet it had not been found in the wild, but users are advised to switch to touch-pads.

"Anti-virus vendors have been caught on the hop here," said SC technology editor Jon Tullett. "I've seen many viruses in my time, but truly, this one is different gravy."

Online security firm Symantec said some of it anti-virus software has holes in it.

The company admitted its Norton Antivirus, Norton Internet Security and Norton System Works, 2004 and 2005 editions, were so flawed hackers could quite easily sneak in and knobble computers running the software.

Japan's Information-Technology Promotion Agency told Symantec about one situation with both Windows versions of Norton AntiVirus 2004 and 2005, where a real-time scan of a specific file type can cause the Blue Screen of Death to appear.

The programs' Auto-Protect and SmartScan features were found to be faulty and susceptible to Denial of Service attacks.

Richter's company, Westminster-based OptInRealBig.com, has filed for bankruptcy protection in Denver. The company cited a costly legal battle with Gates' Microsoft Corp., which claims OptInRealBig.com illegally spams computer users.

Microsoft officials called the filing a victory. "Microsoft and the state of New York said we would drive him into bankruptcy, and together we have," said Aaron Kornblum, Microsoft's Internet safety enforcement attorney. "The kind of spam Mr. Richter was sending was not only annoying, it was illegal, and the law sets out penalties for this kind of illegal activity."

"They asked if we wanted to settle with them, and we told them where they could go stick it," Richter replied to Spitzer in a Denver Post article.

He claimed his company operated legally and made $15 million a year sending 15 million e-mail messages a day.

Swedish ISP Bahnhof is considering legal action after it emerged that illegal material uncovered in a raid on its premises was placed there by a paid informant of the antipiracy group that mounted the operation.

Speaking to The Register, Jon Karlung, Banhof's CEO, claimed that the pirated materials found on its servers were placed there by Rouge. "He logged in from outside," he said.

Bahnhof was "the victim of a badly arranged ambush", said Karlung, which had only resulted in what Swedish police viewed as "a low priority case".

Whether Bahnhof had been an unwitting victim of Rouge, illegal activity in Sweden had dropped since the raid, said Ponten. "The scene in Sweden is totally quiet right now."

This may in part be because Sweden's digital underworld has turned its attention to Antipiratbyran.

Ponten confirmed the organization's web site has been under attack since the raids. In addition, he said, Antipiratbyran's office had come under physical attack and he had received death threats.

The Washington Post offers this writeup about how the U.S. Secret Service uses a Distributed Network Attack program to crack encryption on computers and drives seized as evidence. How can brute force still succeed with 256-bit encryption, you ask? Customized password dictionaries from the seized computer's email files and browser cache: People still use non-random passwords.

When the alarm clock goes off and the snooze button is pressed, Clocky will roll off the bedside table and wheel away, bumping mindlessly into objects on the floor until it eventually finds a spot to rest. Minutes later, when the alarm sounds again, the sleeper must get up out of bed and search for Clocky. This ensures that the person is fully awake before turning it off. Small wheels that are concealed by Clocky's shag enable it to move and reposition itself, and an internal processor helps it find a new hiding spot every day.

I don't like being told when to wake up but I've come to terms with the idea that I have to. In designing Clocky, I was in part inspired by kittens I've had that would bite my toes every morning. Clocky is less of an annoying device as it is a troublesome pet that you love anyway. It's also a bit ugly. But its unconventional look keeps the user calm, and inspires laughter at one of the most hated times of the day.

If you're familiar with the word "haptics," you're familiar with the company Immersion. They're the company that seems to own every possible patent having to do with the haptics space, and any kind of tactile response or force feedback device usually involves patents that were first licensed from the company. So, in some ways, it's pretty impressive that Sony has gotten as far as it has apparently without licensing patents from the company. A court has found, however, that Sony's force feedback controllers for the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 violate Immersion's patents and not only have they ordered the company to pay $90 million in damages, but also told Sony it can no longer sell either console in the US. Sony, of course, will appeal the ruling, which will allow them to keep selling the consoles in the meantime. Of course, this is the same Sony that keeps insisting on the importance of stricter intellectual property enforcement to teach violators a lesson. Funny what comes back to bite you...

Well, well, what have we here? SCO has put up its own legal documents page after all. Evidently the generic brand anti-Groklaw websites that coincidentally sprang up just when theirs didn't were not a huge success.

All they have there so far are some of the legal documents in all their cases. But Frank Sorenson noticed one little thing: it appears the defenders of their most holy IP grabbed the PDFs from Groklaw and Frank's tuxrocks.com site, without giving us credit for doing the work of obtaining the documents from the court and scanning them to create the PDFs. Oops.

You can check Groklaw's IBM-156 and Declaration of Ira Kistenberg as well. Now, Frank and I have spent good money obtaining those documents, money that SCO didn't have to spend, because they get all the documents for free. And Frank and I both go to a lot of trouble to make these available to you. SCO, instead of scanning them in themselves, evidently grabbed Frank's work that he did for Groklaw and his own site.