samaparicio

Of companies mentioned in the article, the asymmetric contributions to OSM that bother me the most are AllTrails and Strava - 2 companies that heavily rely on trail data sourced from OSM.

AllTrails does close to zilch to help put trails into the maps, even though the majority of trails are user-generated content.

Strava has let "Slide", their one project that could help put trails on the map, die an ungracious death.

If you build a whole business model on top of free data, it may be worth considering improving that data.

Will you go back and do my classification for tax year 2018?

Liked this post. Would love more detail on GPU query offloading and on how different the engine looks compared to one that would run queries on the CPU, as that seems to be the primary innovation

It could. It could also force the startup to hand over control of the defense (which the startup would most likely be ill-suited to control) and therefore control the defense strategy.

All that is required is a big enough defense fund that acts as a true deterrent.

Mind you, if the startup loses it doesn't mean that it would not be responsible for the payout - but at least the startup wouldn't fold simply because the costs of defending itself are out of reach.

There are several ways of reaching a distributed consensus about that, like proof of stake.

It is also conceivable that it would be in the fund's interest to defend all lawsuits. That would provide the largest deterrent, since the lion's share of today's suits are without merit, and the cost of defense would be considered the operating cost of the fund.

What the trolls exploit is the assymetry between a defendant without resources and their own resources which are solely dedicated to this.

Without all the licensing fees that startups pay to settle the alleged infringement the business model for trolls would stop working.

A lot of startups get sued by Non Practicing Entities (trolls) that have no operating business to speak of. That provides the slimmest counterattack surface - so not sure how useful it is to have a portfolio to hit back.

I think a better defense mechanism would be a legal defense fund that would force the trolls to make their case at trial, to go through discovery, to bring expert witnesses.

Because the law firms that represent them work on contingency, this would effectively cut into the potential licensing fees, and make trolling less profitable (and less likely).

Also, a lot of trolls extract patent licensing fees out of startups for patents that should have never been granted, and that deserve to be invalidated (e.g with prior art), but the process of getting a patent thrown out is expensive, so having a fund would greatly help.

The other strategy that could work is to get all the startups that get sued by a troll for a specific infringement and make a sort of "reverse class action" - making it possible for the startups to re-use the same lines of argument, evidence, etc in their cases.

I see this type of refining activity on our payment gateway logs. I can only imagine what it looks like at a major online retailer or SAAS service. It just goes to show how fundamentally broken is payment card processing at the moment, and how ripe it is for disruption.

The charges against Ellsberg were dropped when it became public that the government had spied on Ellsberg by wiretapping Ellsberg's psychiatric visits.

So maybe all Snowden has to do is to show the government spying on him. Which would be kind of meta, as it would put the government on trial for PRISM itself, while probably acquitting Snowden