Spotlight Features

There's no doubt about it, Microsoft is a behemoth. It has permeated the computer industry and has an enormous amount of clout. So, what's to rain on Microsoft's parade? Actually, a threat is emerging that can do considerable damage to this powerful software company. The threat is free software. Thi...

On April 27, President George Bush signed a copyright bill that aims to legalize technology that allows users to automatically skip over or mute objectionable content in movie DVDs. Contained in DVD players and other devices, the filtering technology allows parents to prevent their children from see...

Are you considering outsourcing a customer support or software development project? Here are some practical tips, oriented towards South Asian facilities but relevant to North American outsourcing providers. It starts with planning, then moves to address payment and invoicing issues, and then lists ...

When Princeton University Office of Information Technology policy adviser Rita Saltz learned the MPAA might follow the RIAA in suing students, she said, "My heart and viscera just shrank and chilled." Saltz is quoted in the Daily Princetonian in a story that reveals MPAA boss Dan Glickman has "expre...

The dot-com crash that saw hundreds of start-up businesses on the Internet close up shop in 1998 and 1999 is not discouraging new Net entrepreneurs. A record number of domain name sales in 2004 shows that business presence on the Internet is stronger than ever. A domain name that reflects an organiz...

A few months ago the Harvard Business Review did a piece on CEOs and pointed out the average tenure of an external CEO was 18 months, which suggests that a lot of CEOs are simply not qualified for the job they were selected for. Recently the HP board came to the conclusion that their high profile C...

Late last month, the British House of Lords approved a so-called "designer baby," escalating the debate over genetic engineering and other body enhancements. Fortunately, the new book More Than Human helps to calm hysterics and explain the issues. Zain Hashmi is a six-year-old boy born with beta th...

In the mid 1990s, when I first began running into open source in my practice, I noticed that open source had a very strange effect on intellectual property lawyers. It was a Chicken Little situation, but instead of crying "the sky is falling" they were crying "the code is infringing." Nearly ten ye...

New information technology outsourcing opportunities are largely going to India, thanks to India's long-standing advantages. Despite negative press coverage that India has received for problems at a few outsourcing facilities, India is set to maintain its lead as the high-tech outsourcing destinatio...

On Friday Apple released its "Tiger" operating system into the marketplace. Borrowing heavily from what we had seen in Longhorn (Microsoft's next version of Windows) last year, Tiger is an impressive piece of work. I'm not one of those who thinks that using a competitor is a bad idea, particularly i...