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1196 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 13, 2008 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Two Views of Innovation, Colliding in Washington
BYLINE: By John Markoff
SECTION: Section 3; Column 0; Money and Business/Financial Desk; BRIGHT IDEAS SLIPSTREAM; Pg. 3
LENGTH: 1174 words
AS the Senate prepares to tinker with the nation's patent laws this spring, it's worth recalling the law of unintended consequences.

From the vantage point of a half-century, for example, it's clear that the formation of Silicon Valley involved serendipity more than intentional design.

The co-inventor of the transistor and the founder of the valley's first chip company, William Shockley, moved to Palo Alto, Calif., because his mother lived there. Moreover, although the transistor was invented at Bell Labs in New Jersey, an antitrust lawsuit during the 1950s forced the AT&T phone behemoth to license the technology openly at a nominal charge. And, the venture capital industry, an important part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem, was given a big boost by Congress in the late 1970s when legislation loosened pension fund regulations -- touching off an early wave of high-profile initial public offerings.

Now, three decades later, Congress is likely to write legislation that could again reshape the contours of innovation and entrepreneurship for perhaps decades to come, in ways that are hard to predict.

Passed by the House of Representatives with relatively little debate, the Patent Reform Act of 2007 faces a bruising Senate fight this year. As it now stands, the bill would shift the balance of power in the legal quarrels between patent holders and possible infringers by significantly limiting damage awards.

Although it has become a perennial piece of proposed legislation in recent years, patent reform has acquired urgency in the past year, in the view of large technology companies. Intel, Microsoft, I.B.M. and Apple and others are increasingly finding that the nation's patent system has become a minefield, and they are looking for ways to limit the leverage of both small patent holders and patent ''trolls,'' or speculators who buy hundreds or thousands of patents.

Rather than depending on patents, large information technology companies can increasingly rely on their market power and cross-licensing relationships. As a result, they are trying to rein in huge patent settlements like the $612.5 million award that NTP Inc. won from Research In Motion, the maker of the popular BlackBerry wireless device, or the $1.52 billion award that Lucent briefly won against Gateway Inc. and Microsoft. (It was recently overturned.)

It appears that the Senate leadership has sympathy for the large technology companies. Opposed to big tech is a small group of high-profile inventors, like the Segway designer Dean Kamen and the former Apple engineer and QuickTime co-inventor Steve Perlman, as well as venture capitalists and a growing array of smaller businesses that do not share the market power of the largest companies. They have joined forces with the pharmaceutical industry, which has traditionally relied on the protection of a strong patent system.

The battle lines are now established, and legislators are being asked to grapple with the question of how best to protect innovation.

On the one hand, in changing the nation's patent laws, Congress runs the risk of throttling the little guy -- the Stephen Wozniaks and the Steven Jobses -- who strike out from their garages with novel ideas that change the world. On the other hand, consumers have clearly benefited from the ability of large technology companies like Intel and Microsoft to use their prodigious market power to drive down prices.

If we limit the incentive of the individual inventor in a garage to transform an entire industry, will there still be enough innovation in the corporate research labs of industrial giants?

It is easy to see the imperfections of the current law and its impact on consumer products. For example, although the Apple iPhone has many superior features, its e-mail function is in most cases clunky when compared with the earlier R.I.M. BlackBerry. Industry executives say that's because Apple has been forced to tiptoe around the patents held by NTP. Although the patents have been largely invalidated by the United States Patent Office, there are still active lawsuits that NTP has brought.

Mr. Perlman says the Supreme Court has already made two landmark rulings that he says have largely addressed the ''troll'' problem without harming independent inventors like himself. In one case, eBay v. MercExchange, the court limited the ability of a patent covering a small feature to be used as a weapon, as in the NTP-R.I.M. settlement. In April, the court went much further in KSR International v. Teleflex, substantially raising the bar for patent holders in proving that their invention is not obvious. The ruling will make many existing patents more vulnerable and make new patents harder to get as well.

The peril of the new patent legislation as currently written, he argues, is that it would allow the nation's dominant high technology companies to largely control the pace of innovation, leading to a situation the country has seen once before -- in the American auto industry.

''Detroit is a very clear example of what happens when you have large companies who have already established they're the winners,'' he said.

Under the proposed law, what are known as the ''Georgia-Pacific factors,'' a set of 15 guidelines that courts now use for determining damages in patent cases, would be boiled down to a single concept of ''apportionment.'' Damage calculations would be based on an economic analysis to ensure that a royalty damage award captures only the economic value attributable to the patent's specific contribution over previous inventions.

Because the very nature of innovation in the computer industry is to increase performance while reducing cost, this change will create a perverse incentive for inventors, Mr. Perlman argues. If an invention reduces the cost of a device, ''then your apportionment becomes less and less,'' he said.

BACKERS of the new legislation are skeptical that the limits would have any major impact on incentives for individual inventors.

''I have to say I'm frankly astonished that apportionment has been this controversial,'' said Mark A. Lemley, an intellectual-property scholar at Stanford who has testified in support of the legislation. ''I can't think of a straight-faced argument that you as a patent owner are entitled to more than your invention has contributed to a product.''

Congress watchers expect the bill to pass this year, even if the pendulum swings back partly toward the individual inventor before it clears the Senate. That would largely be because opponents may calculate that they have their best chance to water it down under the current Congress and administration.

For his part, Mr. Perlman, who has been awarded 73 United States patents, is fretting that a new patent law may permanently shift the balance between the big guys and the little guys.

''I need as much patent protection as I can get,'' he said. ''Otherwise Microsoft will clone a crummy version of one of my inventions, and I'll be bowled over.''

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: PATENTS (91%); PATENT LAW (90%); INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW (90%); LEGISLATIVE BODIES (90%); LEGISLATION (90%); SEMICONDUCTOR MFG (89%); TELECOMMUNICATIONS SERVICES (89%); VENTURE CAPITAL (88%); LEGISLATORS (78%); MICROPROCESSORS (77%); MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS (76%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (76%); SMALL BUSINESS (76%); DAMAGES (75%); RESEARCH (75%); ANTITRUST & TRADE LAW (75%); PENSIONS & BENEFITS LAW (73%); TELECOMMUNICATIONS EQUIPMENT (73%); COMPUTING & INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (72%); LICENSING AGREEMENTS (72%); PHARMACEUTICALS INDUSTRY (70%); INITIAL PUBLIC OFFERINGS (67%); PRODUCT INNOVATION (78%)
COMPANY: GATEWAY INC (84%); MICROSOFT CORP (54%); BELL LABORATORIES (57%); RESEARCH IN MOTION LTD (52%); INTEL CORP (58%)
TICKER: MSFT (NASDAQ) (54%); RIMM (NASDAQ) (52%); RIM (TSX) (52%); INTC (NASDAQ) (58%); INTC (SWX) (58%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS334119 OTHER COMPUTER PERIPHERAL EQUIPMENT MANUFACTURING (84%); NAICS334111 ELECTRONIC COMPUTER MANUFACTURING (84%); SIC3577 COMPUTER PERIPHERAL EQUIPMENT, NEC (84%); SIC3571 ELECTRONIC COMPUTERS (84%); NAICS511210 SOFTWARE PUBLISHERS (54%); SIC7372 PREPACKAGED SOFTWARE (54%); NAICS334413 SEMICONDUCTOR & RELATED DEVICE MANUFACTURING (58%)
GEOGRAPHIC: SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CA, USA (90%) CALIFORNIA, USA (90%); NEW JERSEY, USA (79%) UNITED STATES (92%)
LOAD-DATE: January 13, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: ILLUSTRATION (ILLUSTRATION BY RANDALL ENOS)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

1197 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 12, 2008 Saturday

Late Edition - Final

The Burger and Latte Combo
BYLINE: By DAN MITCHELL
SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; WHAT'S ONLINE; Pg. 5
LENGTH: 590 words
McDONALD'S assault on Starbucks's coffee hegemony is not a bet-the-franchise move, but it is a wrongheaded strategy that is bound to lose, according to Chris Dannen, writing on Fast Company's blog this week (blog.fastcompany.com).

McDonald's, he wrote, ''will be maimed most by its own campaign to destroy the Seattle super-brand.''

McDonald's plans to add coffee bars to all its 14,000 United States locations this year.

Although the fast-food chain ''is one of those monolithic brands that will likely have a longer half-life than radium,'' Mr. Dannen wrote, the company's plans give it ''little more than the potential to alienate customers, confuse its menu and open up a black hole for capital.''

There is a simple underlying reason for what Mr. Dannen believes is the certain failure of the chain's plan: ''With hamburgers and fries, you drink cold soda,'' he wrote. ''So it is written, and so it will stay.''

He points to the ''miserable failure'' of McDonald's earlier experiment with pizza. Coffee bars will fail for the same reason -- the ''sweet stink of the flagship fare.''

''The place reeks of fries and beef,'' he went on. ''McDonald's has spent millions of dollars developing chemical aromas for its fries, burgers and chicken, and they are every bit as intoxicating as they were meant to be,'' and will surely overwhelm the lure of high-end coffee.

Starbucks, on the other hand, he wrote, ''smells of beans, frothing milk and pastries.''

''That visceral impression will stay with you the next time you want coffee.''

Further, people who want coffee are usually in more of a hurry than buyers of burgers. You do not want to stand in line behind a Happy Meal-happy family of four. Starbucks may be more expensive, Mr. Dannen wrote, but ''actual price matters little when the customer perceives that they'll get their desired product with less time spent and less stress suffered.''

MUSIC MISSIVE The author, entrepreneur and marketing maven Seth Godin has a message for the music industry. The ''new thing is never as good as the old thing, at least right now,'' he wrote in his blog this week, fleshing out his argument with about 1,700 more words (sethgodin.typepad.com).

''Every single industry changes and, eventually, fades,'' he wrote. ''Just because you made money doing something a certain way yesterday, there's no reason to believe you'll succeed at it tomorrow.''

Record companies must move from selling ''plastic and vinyl'' to selling ''interactivity and souvenirs.'' They have to learn, Mr. Godin says, to avoid ''viewing the spread of digital artifacts as an inconvenient tactic,'' and think of them rather as ''the core of their new businesses.''

And it is not a good idea to sue customers for engaging in your core business.

''The best time to change your business model is while you still have momentum,'' Mr. Godin writes. ''So, the time to jump was yesterday. Too late. O.K., how about today?''

THOUSANDS OF SIMPLE RULESRulesofthumb.org is a vast collection of simple, user-submitted rules to remember as you go about your business. Theoretically, the best rise to the top based on user votes.

''For marketing purposes, elderly consumers think they are 15 years younger than they actually are,'' offered Tracy Lux Frances of Bradenton, Fla.

Think you have the next Pet Rock or mood ring? ''You have 90 days to make and ship a novelty item and 90 days to sell it out,'' according to one submission. ''After that, inventory costs swallow up the profits.''

E-mail: whatsonline@nytimes.com
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: COFFEE & TEA STORES (90%); FAST FOOD (90%); ENTERTAINMENT & ARTS (77%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (77%); BRANDING (76%); NUCLEAR CHEMISTRY (74%); MUSIC INDUSTRY (64%); AROMA & FLAVOR CHEMICALS (50%)
COMPANY: FAST CO MAGAZINE (58%)
LOAD-DATE: January 12, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: ILLUSTRATION (ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX EBEN MEYER)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

1198 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 12, 2008 Saturday

Late Edition - Final

On a Board, Shredding and Stomping, but Mostly Falling
BYLINE: By HARRY HURT III
SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; EXECUTIVE PURSUITS; Pg. 5
LENGTH: 1227 words
I COMMITTED to my executive pursuit of snowboarding by deliberately falling down on my butt. It was minus 17 degrees on the slopes of Whiteface Mountain outside Lake Placid, N.Y. My 56-year-old body was wrapped in long johns, a fur-lined jacket and wind pants. With my black rental helmet, amber goggles and black felt face mask, I fancied myself a winterized Power Ranger. I was determined to drop in, air it out and stomp a ride -- just as soon as I learned what all of that meant.

I stared up at a limitless expanse of blue sky, straining to hear the advice of my 30-year-old snowboarding teacher, Brendan Hayes. Now that I had fallen on my butt as per Brendan's instructions, I had to strap my leather boots into the bindings of my board. I bent forward in a runner's stretch that made my back ache and my hamstrings burn. When at last I had ratcheted every latch, I rolled over onto my belly and pushed myself upright.

''O.K., dude,'' Brendan declared. ''You're ready to shred it.''

If snowboarding lingo sounded like an alien language, the snow-covered kiddie hill that sprawled below me looked like another planet. On my left, there was an upward-sloping moving sidewalk called the Magic Carpet. It was lined with disk-topped stalks that resembled sunflowers. On my right, there was an obstacle course punctuated by three foam-stuffed canvas animals: a red elephant, a blue dinosaur and a green dinosaur.

''I want you to do a toe turn around the elephant,'' Brendan said. ''When you get to the blue dinosaur, switch to a heel turn and stop in front of the green dinosaur.''

With that, Brendan gave me a quick shove. I careered down the kiddie hill, leaning forward toward my toes while struggling to maintain my balance by spreading out my arms like a surfer. Amazingly, I whizzed past the right flank of the red elephant without blowing up.

Then I leaned backward to try the prescribed heel turn. My board veered sharply to the left for about 10 yards. Then it flattened out, straightened out and started to pick up speed. I saw the green dinosaur looming closer and closer. I tried to put on the brakes by transferring more weight to my heels. But in less than a nanosecond, I fell down on my butt again.

''That was great!'' Brendan cheered. ''You really dropped in!''

I groaned in unmitigated baby boomer agony. It was hard to decide what hurt more: my battered butt or my shattered ego. Brendan noted that the forecast for the next couple of days called for much milder weather. He assured me that my learning curve would climb with the temperature.

''Whatever, dude,'' I muttered.

Two hot chocolates, three schnapps and half a dozen Advil later, I limped back to my motel room to review my snowboarding due diligence. I already knew that snowboarding had evolved from skateboarding and surfing. One of the first boards was the Snurfer, a skateboard with a steering rope and no wheels designed by a Michigan man, Sherman Poppen, for his children in 1965. Starting in the 1970s, entrepreneurs like Jake Burton Carpenter of Vermont developed the modern snowboard, which is now made of polyethylene sheets with beveled metal edges.

From the outset, snowboarding took pride in -- and suffered from -- its reckless rebel image. In 1985, only 7 percent of America's winter resorts permitted snowboarding because it was deemed a safety threat to conventional skiers. But the sheer drama and athletic artistry of an expert snowboarding routine had a countercultural appeal that was made for multimedia coverage. In 1998, snowboarding became an Olympic sport.

Today, snowboarding counts more than five million participants in the United States, and generates over $275 million in annual consumer purchases, according to the National Sporting Goods Association, a recreation industry trade group. It is welcomed at over 95 percent of ski resorts, many of them offering specially sculpted concave half-pipes suitable for Olympic-class tricks. The Michael Jordan of snowboarding is Shaun White, a k a The Flying Tomato, a 21-year-old Californian with shoulder-length red hair who won the gold medal in the men's half-pipe at the 2006 Olympics.

Because of its relatively high degree of difficulty, snowboarding remains a young person's sport. According to the sporting goods association, the mean age of male snowboarders is 20.3 years, and for women it is 22.7 years. By contrast, the mean ages of male and female skiers are 31.8 and 32.6. From 1996 to 2006, participation in skiing plummeted to 6.4 million people, from 10.5 million. Participation in snowboarding peaked in 2004 at 6.6 million people.

But for unfazed enthusiasts like Carolyn Campbell, a 20-year-old part-time instructor at Whiteface Mountain, snowboarding is both a sport and a lifestyle. ''Snowboarding is really progressive,'' Ms. Campbell insisted in a slopeside interview. ''It's a lot different than skiing because you can always get better and there's always new tricks to do. Snowboarders are known to be kind of lazy, but we like to get up really early and hit some powder. We usually go out as a group, which makes it really fun.''

Whiteface Mountain offers private snowboarding lessons for adults at non-holiday rates that range from $99 for a one-day session to $256 for a three-day package. Nonholiday group classes range from $25 to $30. I asked my instructor Brendan Hayes if it was too late for a quintagenarian geezer like me to take up snowboarding. ''It's never too late,'' Brendan replied. ''You've just got to be prepared to take a few falls when you're starting out.''

That proved to be the understatement of this gnarly new century. During four hours of lessons spread over three days, I spent at least two hours falling down or trying to get back up.

During my extended periods in the horizontal position, I tried to block out the pain by memorizing snowboarding lingo. ''Shredding it'' meant riding your board on its edges. ''Dropping in'' meant pointing the nose of your board downhill. When you failed to execute a forward-leaning toe turn, you were supposed to ''Superman'' -- dive forward with your arms extended to break your fall. When you failed to execute a backward-leaning heel turn, you were supposed to ''staple yourself to the hill'' -- fall backward onto (what else?) your butt.

Despite my losing battles against age and gravity, I eventually remained upright long enough to experience a few fleeting moments of extreme joy. On Day 2, I put together a sequence of toe turns and heel turns that lasted about 100 yards. On Day 3, something possessed me to attempt a trick known as stomping the box. The box was an eight-foot-long plastic-topped girder that resembled a sidewalk curb. I was supposed to stomp on my board with downward weight pressure so that it remained flat. On my third and final attempt, I rode seven feet along the box before I did a Superman.

Next thing I knew, Brendan and a mischievous friend cajoled me into donning a shoulder-length brown wig. Ms. Campbell interrupted a lesson she was conducting between the elephant and the dinosaurs to give two thumbs up. That inspired us to coin a gnarly new snowboarding handle. Shaun White may rule the Olympics as The Flying Tomato. But henceforth and forevermore, I shall rock and roll on my butt down the slopes of Whiteface Mountain as The Flying Couch Potato.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: SKIING (90%); SPORTS (90%); FUR & LEATHER CLOTHING (77%); SNOWBOARDING (92%); SURFING (73%)
PERSON: MICHAEL MCMAHON (55%)
LOAD-DATE: January 12, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Harry Hurt III learning to snowboard. At left, he was riding ''the box'' while his instructor, Brendan Hayes, watched

he had some less vertical moments, too. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY NANCIE BATTAGLIA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

1199 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 11, 2008 Friday

Late Edition - Final

Mend Your Foolish Ways, Would-Be Church Bandits
BYLINE: By A. O. SCOTT
SECTION: Section E; Column 0; Movies, Performing Arts/Weekend Desk; MOVIE REVIEW 'FIRST SUNDAY'; Pg. 8
LENGTH: 458 words
Ice Cube's recent movie roles, in the ''Barbershop'' and ''Are We There Yet?'' franchises, have emphasized his cuddly, family-man side. In ''First Sunday,'' which is not a new installment in the earlier ''Friday'' series, he departs a bit from the upright-citizen persona, playing a man driven to crime by desperate circumstances.

But ''First Sunday,'' the first theatrically released feature film written and directed by David E. Talbert, is a comedy. Like Tyler Perry, Mr. Talbert has had a successful -- and to the white media, nearly invisible -- career as a playwright and theatrical entrepreneur, and his movie debut fuses social observation and raucous, clean humor with a message of redemption.

Ice Cube, not exactly a mirthful performer, requires an antic sidekick, and he has a pretty good one here in Tracy Morgan. Mr. Morgan plays LeeJohn, the feckless stoner half of a hapless pair of robbers. Durell, Ice Cube's character, is the more practical half of the team. Because he needs $17,000 to prevent his ex-girlfriend from moving with their son from Baltimore to Atlanta, Durell decides to rob a church.

What kind of person would rob a church? This question occupies most of the movie's slow, talky middle third, in which an easy in-and-out safecracking scheme turns into a hostage drama. Durell and LeeJohn's captives include the wise pastor (Chi McBride); his pretty, headstrong daughter (Malinda Williams); a shifty deacon (Michael Beach) and the flamboyantly queeny choir director (Katt Williams), among other easily recognizable church-movie stock figures.

Mr. Williams pretty much steals the movie by rolling his eyes and muttering under his breath. And if Mr. Talbert does not quite manage the shift in tone from rambunctious comedy to earnest uplift, he is nonetheless generous with both the characters and the audience. ''First Sunday'' sometimes feels more like a script read-through than like an actual movie, but its warmth is likely to carry you through the stretches of cliche and tedium.

''First Sunday'' is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has mild profanity and drug references.

FIRST SUNDAY

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Written, directed and produced by David E. Talbert; director of photography, Alan Caso; edited by Jeffrey Wolf; production designer, Dina Lipton; produced by Mr. Talbert, David McIlvain, Tim Story and Matt Alvarez; released by Screen Gems. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes.

WITH: Ice Cube (Durell Washington), Katt Williams (Rickey), Tracy Morgan (LeeJohn Jackson), Loretta Devine (Sister Doris McPherson), Michael Beach (Deacon Randy), Keith David (Judge B. Bennett Galloway), Regina Hall (Omunique), Malinda Williams (Tianna Mitchell) and Chi McBride (Pastor Mitchell).

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