Dr. Dobb's Journal February 1997
The high-tech electricity meters recently installed hereabouts continue to undergo testing. In replacing conventional meters, the utility company went house-to-house, plugging in new ones capable of transmitting and receiving data wirelessly. Like buggy whips and automobile fins, human meter readers are dust in the wind, at least in this burg. (Darn, there goes another career option.) Now, meters all over town fire up once a month, letting the central billing office know if Tom Bodett and the local Motel 6 really did leave a light on.
All in all, the local electrical provider installed more than 36,000 new meters that can transmit/receive data at 900 MHz within a range of 750 feet. Communicating with the meters are 700 intermediate antennas attached to streetlight poles around town. In turn, these intermediate devices communicate at 1.4 GHz with three primary antennas linked via fiber-optic land lines to the billing office about 30 miles away. It is the intermediate antennas that are (literally) driving engineers batty.
While there aren't a lot of tall buildings and high hills in town, there are plenty of tall trees to interfere with low-power radio transmissions. Consequently, utility engineers are having to test and retest to find the optimum layout for the intermediate antenna grid. Not wanting to miss a billing cycle in the meantime, "meter readers" are slowly driving a van -- loaded with portable computers -- up and down the city streets, activating meters and collecting data. At least in this case, mobile computing is just that.
Since big cities such as Denver, Pittsburgh, Spokane, and others already have similar systems up and running, it's a safe bet that the challenges in this small town aren't unique and will be resolved. As in those big cities, the system here is the Genesis Fixed Network automatic meter-reading system from Itron (Spokane, Washington). In addition to standard meter-reading capabilities, the system can provide daily readings, real-time on-demand readings, start-and-end of service readings, time-of-use readings, outage detection, and the ability to monitor inactive accounts for unauthorized usage. The system also can determine peak/off-hour power patterns; the utility companies may start billing us for electricity like phone companies do for long-distance phone service.
There's a power play of a different sort going on in Washington, D.C., at least in terms of software patents and copyrights. In particular, proposals in Congress would move the copyright office out of the Library of Congress and into the executive branch, specifically under the auspices of the Commerce Department's U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The result would be a new "office of intellectual property policy." Behind the shift is the Commerce Department's desire for more control over intellectual property when setting international trade policy and negotiating trade deals. Less clear is how this change would actually benefit content owners.
This bureaucratic move is confounding because, as Joseph Yang points out in his excellent paper "Patenting Content: The Expanding Role of Patent Protection for Internet-based Information Products" (http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~yang/), the distinctions between copyright and patents are blurring, in part due to executable content (aka "applets"). Historically, says Yang, who is both a patent attorney and an engineer, patent protection has been for functional aspects of a computer program, while copyright has protected its expressive elements. Today, however, the trend is toward merging copyright and patent concepts and enlarging the scope of patent protection for software. This is the stance put forward in the PTO's new "Examination Guidelines for Computer-Related Inventions."
Especially during these periods of transition, patents continue to be a topic of vital importance to software developers. According to Greg Aharonian and his Internet Patent News Service, two significant trends related to software patents evolved in the first half of 1996: 919 network-software patents were issued (almost double the second-place count of 528 image-processing patents), and Microsoft moved rapidly into the software-patenting ranks. In 1995, Microsoft ranked 24th in the number of patents issued; in the first half of 1996, it climbed to 12th. When everything is totaled up, Aharonian predicts that 8100 new software patents will have been issued in 1996 -- almost as many as were issued in 1992, 1993, and 1994 combined.
In other words, in the four-year period between 1993 and 1996, approximately 20,000 software patents will have been issued. Now ask yourself if you really believe 20,000 novel innovations have been developed in the software world during that period. Yes, changes are needed in the copyright and patent arena, but the proposals on the table aren't intended to address the real problems.
--Jonathan Erickson