Who's next? (Do they even exist yet?) And most importently, when's the IPO?
Not new, exactly, but worth thinking about: If this is the post-Microsoft world, who's the Next Big Thing? We've had IBM (hardware) and Microsoft (software). Cisco, while now the largest company in the world, doesn't strike me as dominant in the same way as those two companies were.
My tentative projection is that they've cleaned up the security issues to a large extent. In some sense, this was necessitated by the fact that the same security holes they previously opened in web pages could be used to shut Third Voice itself out of a web page... with incentive like that, no wonder they moved out of the browser window itself.
After further consideration of that sentance... I'm even more convinced now they'd lose a lawsuit then I was when I first started speaking out against Third Voice. While I would not approve of this tactic, it would be awfully easy to label the company as a bunch of "hackers" (after all, only "hackers" can change websites), and once that word is attached to them, the judicial system would be happy to tear them apart. This tactic would do more harm then good in the long run, but I think Third Voice is quite vulnerable to it in the short-term.
My objections remain unchanged, neither added to nor subtracted from. I still object to the attaching (and therefore modification) of content to arbitrary webpages from arbitrary people. I still object to the systematic modification and profiting from copyrighted material that does not belong to Third Voice. I still think they'd lose a lawsuit if anybody sued them.
There is a new version of Third Voice out now. I don't have time to do a full analysis of it today, but you can take a look at their online tour.
(Congress is granted the power "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" (Article I, Section 8), but is not mandated to do so. The First Amendment is a guarantee.)
I think the most distrubing thing is how readily the courts throw these arguments out as soon somebody with lots of money is involved. In a conflict between the laws concerning theft of intellectual property and the exercise of free speech... free speech wins, no matter how much it may cost some company, because free speech is constitutionally guaranteed and IP is not.
First Amendment lawyers take on DVD cracking case: "'The battleground over the First Amendment is now in cyberspace,' Jim Wheaton, senior counsel for nonprofit, public-interest law firm the First Amendment Project, said in a statement. 'Old media is lumbering into the new era and wants to knock down our civil liberties in a clumsy attempt to maintain the old paradigm.'"
Now, this 'proves' nothing... law is what the courts say it is. But I think this is a valuable example of a clear inability of the current system to deal with the conditions brought on by the Information Revolution. You can't just wrap the current system around this contradiction... patent law and copyright law are immiscible. It's not going to work. We need to step back and re-analyze the problems from the original principles, I think.