‘X-Men: Danger Room Protocols’ shut down after one episode; ComicBookResources.com, 1/25/16

Kevin Melrose, ComicBookResources.com; ‘X-Men: Danger Room Protocols’ shut down after one episode:

"“X-Men: Danger Room Protocols,” a fan-made animated tribute to the 1990s cartoon and comics, has ended after just one episode, purportedly due to legal pressure from Marvel.

“When I set out to make this project, I never really thought this was going to be an issue,” creator Joel Furtado said in a video posted this morning. “I didn’t think that Marvel was going to react this way, and this outcome, for me, is a little bit shocking.”

When contacted by ROBOT 6, Marvel declined comment.

Launched last week, the project was planned as a series of 18 episodes, each pairing two X-Men in a Danger Room training exercise (hence the title). Furtado had described “Danger Room Protocols” as “a love letter to Marvel and my childhood, as well as a way to give something back to the fans.”"

Watson helped IBM win more patents than any other company last year; New York Business Journal, 1/13/16

Michael del Castillo, New York Business Journal; Watson helped IBM win more patents than any other company last year:

"Even after 104 years, IBM is still the most innovative company in the United States by at least by one important metric: patents.

With 7,355 patents granted in 2015 IBM — which was founded in 1911 — crushed the competition, thanks in part to its artificial intelligence system, Watson, based in Astor Place in the East Village.

“More than 2,000 of IBM’s patents last year were related to its cloud and cognitive computing,” an IBM representative wrote to the New York Business Journal this morning. “Many of which are in use and part of the Watson offering’s capabilities.”

Two patents specifically mentioned in the IBM press release are Patent US9117446, which helps machines understand human emotion, and Patent US9146917, which helps machines learn from human beings."

If Patents Are So Valuable Why Does IBM's Intellectual Property Revenue Continue To Decline; Forbes, 1/19/16

Chuck Jones, Forbes; If Patents Are So Valuable Why Does IBM's Intellectual Property Revenue Continue To Decline:

"IBM was awarded 7,355 patents in 2015 which was the 23rd year in a row it has received the most patents. Over 2,000 of last year’s patents were related to cognitive computing and the company’s cloud platform. Over the 23 years IBM has received over 88,000 patents and I would estimate they have generated about $20 billion or more of IP (intellectual property) related revenue.

While the value of patents isn’t calculated just by the revenue they generate, it is interesting to see how IBM is doing with this financial line item. Between 2008 and 2012 IBM’s patent portfolio generated between $1.1 and $1.2 billion per year. It has fallen each year since then to $742 million in 2014 and could fall again in 2015 to under $700 million."

US Copyright Office is taking comments about how well the DMCA is working; ArsTechnica.com, 1/6/16

Joe Mullin, ArsTechnica.com; US Copyright Office is taking comments about how well the DMCA is working:

"If you're feeling down about the DMCA this winter—or feeling just skippy about it—there's a government agency that wants to hear from you. On December 31, the US Copyright Office said it intends to take public comments about the effectiveness of the DMCA and its "safe harbor" provisions.

The comments will be part of a "public study to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of the safe harbor provisions" of the DMCA. Questions that the office wants to consider include:...

There are 30 numbered questions in all (but there's no requirement to address every point.) The questions and other information about the study are listed in the Federal Register notice.

Specific instructions on how to submit the comments will be posted by February 1 on the Copyright Office website, and comments are due by March 21. While a comment to the Copyright Office is a long way from influencing policy, the discussion could be interesting. Many of those on the receiving end of DMCA notices tend to think it's a "shoot first, ask questions later" approach to the problem, while content owners concerned about piracy have long held that the DMCA is too burdensome on them."

What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us; New York Times, 1/22/16

Joe Karaganis and David McClure, New York Times; What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us:

"COLLEGE course syllabuses are curious documents. They represent the best efforts by faculty and instructors to distill human knowledge on a given subject into 14-week chunks. They structure the main activity of colleges and universities. And then, for the most part, they disappear.

Some schools archive them, some don’t. Some syllabus archives are public, some aren’t. Some faculty members treat their syllabuses as trade secrets, others are happy to post them online. Despite the bureaucratization of higher education over the past few decades, syllabuses have escaped systematic treatment.

Until now. Over the past two years, we and our partners at the Open Syllabus Project (based at the American Assembly at Columbia) have collected more than a million syllabuses from university websites. We have also begun to extract some of their key components — their metadata — starting with their dates, their schools, their fields of study and the texts that they assign.

This past week, we made available online a beta version of our Syllabus Explorer, which allows this database to be searched. Our hope and expectation is that this tool will enable people to learn new things about teaching, publishing and intellectual history."