TECHNOLOGY NEWS ROUND-UP. I'll give you the bad news first:

§ Here's an issue that you'll never hear discussed in a Presidential debate, or any debate, for that matter: patent reform.

Case in point: Nintendo patents online gaming with voice communication nearly a year after Xbox Live was premiered.

Adobe sued Macromedia for using tabbed palettes, and now Macromedia has, basically, tabbed pallettes that don't look like tabs and aren't quite as intuitive to use. Did Adobe's patent help me? No, it made it slightly harder to use Dreamweaver. Thanks, Patent office.

So we'll see if Nintendo tries to kill Xbox Live, which will devastate my friends who have already pre-ordered Halo 2, or simply hangs that Patent of Damocles over Microsoft.

By the way, Microsoft can defend itself with a prior art argument, which ties up development of their own system because they're litigating against a patent while Nintendo develops their own system. Again, consumers lose.

§ I don't like stealing music. Yes, I have some burned CDs, I've downloaded an album or two, and I had some fun in a motel room a few weeks back creating an ad hoc wireless network with a friend and exchanging some music (I know -- BIG NERD). When you buy an album, yes, the artist sees very little of that money, but if the record company doesn't make back a band's advance, the band has to pay back the difference, therefore losing money. Thus, any music that I deeply care about or is made buy an artist that needs support, I buy.

Nevertheless, I'm all for peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing like Grokster, Gnutella, etc. Everyone gets to share the load for Internet traffic, which makes everything faster and could help prevent DoS attacks if all Internet traffic was distributed. (I'd love to see a merging of a web servers and browsers with BitTorrent, but that's another discussion.)

Your right to use P2P won a huge victory this week when the Electronic Frontier Foundation defended Grokster against MGM. Comparisons to the Betamax case have been made. It's not the knife manufacturer's fault that you stabbed that hooker; it's your own. It wasn't Sony's fault you recorded the previous evening's episode of Matt Huston; it was your right. Now, a court has ruled that it's not the software's fault that you stole music. If the music industry wants folks to buy music, they have to compete by giving consumers reasons to buy, make it worth our while.

If you agree with what I've said here -- that this is a huge victory for consumers and innovation -- then be sure to write your congressperson and senators and encourage them to oppose the INDUCE act.

God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.

UPDATE: An Xbox enthusiast responds:

I just read the patent article. What is even more Ironic about the situation is that Nintendo has done virtually nothing to support its on-line market. Every major criticism of Nintendo for the past year + was that they need to get into the on-line gaming if they wanted to be serious and save the game cube from a fate like the dreamcast.

I means it sucks cuz Xbox Live is one of the few things that Microsoft has gotten right. I'll be majorly pissed if they shut it down.