Unlimited long distance $24.99/moApril 18, 2008 12:14 PM PDT
Week in review: Psystar and the Mac minions
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Elsewhere in the game world, Electronic Arts and its takeover target, Take-Two Interactive Software, are back to sparring after a few quiet weeks.
The latest round between the video game makers got into full swing Friday morning, with word from EA that it would extend its Friday deadline for buying up all Take-Two shares by a month, to May 16. But even as it gave with one hand, it took away with another: EA said it would trim the per-share offering price to $25.74 from $26, given newly OK'd stock grants to Take-Two's management, ZelnickMedia.
The new offer continues to be inadequate and undesirable, according to Take-Two. "It undervalued the company at $26 per share, and it certainly undervalues Take-Two at $25.74," Strauss Zelnick, chairman of Take-Two, said in a statement.
But Zelnick isn't the only one who's unhappy this week. A former Harvard University classmate of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's, having run into problems promoting a self-published book that uses the company name in the title, has petitioned the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to have the trademark cancelled.
Aaron Greenspan, a 2004 graduate of Harvard, has claimed ownership of the concept behind Facebook, based on a Web project he created in college called HouseSystem--a set of online resources for Harvard students including a feature called "The Facebook."
Now he claims that Facebook's trademark on the term "Facebook" has made it difficult for him to promote Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era.
Busted over Beacon
And because one legal tussle related to Facebook isn't enough in a week, an angry Facebook user is pursuing legal action over Blockbuster's participation in the social network's controversial Beacon advertising program.
Cathryn Elaine Harris of Texas filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for eastern Texas, claiming that it's a violation of a federal statute for Blockbuster to participate in Beacon, which shares rental history on Facebook members' "news feeds" unless they manually opt out. She is seeking class-action status, hoping to eventually net $2,500 for each infringement. Stay tuned.
Also of note
Politicos want free wireless broadband on unused airwaves blog...NBC to Apple: Build antipiracy into iTunes...Microsoft plans Office subscription service...Darwin's private papers go digital...Free Bookmooch service puts novel spin on books fines...Lack of technical talent slowing clean-tech industry...Radio stations: We're still relevant in the Internet age...It ain't easy being an indie gamer.
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And that was a good thing at the oasis, since it allowed Julia Roberts, later, to have a good role as an unsure but smiling, out-of-place professor (with not exactly a Madonna smile, but the Hollywood equivalent) at the kind of school that produces, in real life apparently, tight-lipped presidential hopefuls with short, cocktail dress memories. "The Teacher Smile" might have been a tough sell to the studios.
How the girl from Bay City did it, or course, was by broadening the view of what a trademark smile is. Lurid? Liberating? Like the current, no bridge to the 21st century for intellectual property, it was both and neither. A zero-sum equation. The chains and cuffs were present for a reason. Physical bonds of a physical life in a physical world. Like the portrait model and the metaphor before her, the Bay City girl was imprisoned but in various and different ways, this time making money for it.
And what's a get-off on confinement for, now, but an excuse to supplicate the self before the beastie gewgaws of the past, without the need to grapple with the irony of a mind that's throwing up the images of submission, lust, and past?
Enter "intellectual property," a lusty oxymoron if ever there was one. That we, members of the hairy ape set with, oftentimes, a better sense of hygiene than our cousins at the zoo, are living lives made possible by the strange and furtive irony of living in our heads, outside the physical, postal address of the self, is hard to easily deny.
So clever with our hands that, in our head lives, we're making things we can't come close to seeing, hearing, touching. Using ideas of ideas, to make ideas of things that have a real presence, purpose, use -- uses we can't come close to fully using.
Enter the hind end of "intellectual property" -- a vast array of retooled, beastie poo. Oh, yes -- imposing power and control on creative, free-association has a great and glorious effect. And the people hanging on, still living not in their heads but deep inside their heart of pants-hearts, controlling things -- well, it's just the bees knees for the species.
Not possible for there to exist, together, personal reward and public sharing? Indie lives, lived together? Oh, no. We're way not clever enough for anything as complicated as that. Poor, widdle, Madonna smiling not us, thingies.
Buy a $399 Dell, Compaq, Gateway, etc and run Mac OSX on it if you want.
That said, I would absolutely love to see the Apple EULA struck down in court.