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The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc

System and method for enabling users to interact in a virtual space

A system and method for organizing knowledge in such a way that humans can find knowledge, learn from it, and add to it as needed is disclosed. The exemplary system has four components: a knowledge base, a learning model and an associated tutor, a set of user tools, and a backend system. The invention also preferably comprises a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow these components to work together, so that other people can create their own versions of each of the components. In the knowledge web a community of people with knowledge to share put knowledge in the database using the user tools. The knowledge may be in the form of documents or other media, or it may be a descriptor of a book or other physical source. Each piece of knowledge is associated with various types of meta-knowledge about what the knowledge is for, what form it is in, and so on. The information in the knowledge base can be created specifically for the knowledge base, but it can also consist of information converted from other sources, such as scientific documents, books, journals, Web pages, film, video, audio files, and course notes. The initial content of the knowledge web comprises existing curriculum materials, books and journals, and those explanatory pages that are already on the World Wide Web. These existing materials already contain most of the information, examples, problems, illustrations, even lesson plans, that the knowledge web needs. The knowledge base thus represents the core content (online documents or references to online or offline documents); the meta-knowledge that was created at the time of entry; and a number of user annotations and document metadata that accumulate over time about the usefulness of the knowledge, additional user opinions, certifications of its veracity and usefulness, commentary, and connections between various units of knowledge.

BiOS is a response to inequities in food security, nutrition, health, natural resource management and energy. Our goal is to democratise problem solving to enable diverse solutions through decentralised innovation. Open Source We promote an innovation paradigm that focuses on a distinction between the tools of innovation and the products. We promote licenses that couple rights with responsibilities to foster efficient development, improvement, sharing and use of technology. Open Science We create and share new biological enabling technologies and platforms that can be used to deliver innovations. We develop new licensing and distributive collaboration mechanisms that have resonance with the open source software movement, but are tailored for biological innovation. Open Society We enhance the transparency, accessibility and capability to use all the tools of science, whether patented, open access or public domain.

The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (IFOSS L. Rev.) is a collaborative legal publication aiming to increase knowledge and understanding among lawyers about Free and Open Source Software issues. Topics covered include copyright, licence implementation, licence interpretation, software patents, open standards, case law and statutory changes.

The past six months have brought scenes from a hungry apocalypse, as at least 14 countries have been wracked by food-related violence. By mid-April UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon acknowledged that "the steeply rising price of food has developed into a real global crisis." It's the product, economists say, of multiple factors: high oil prices, prolonged drought, biofuel production, and burgeoning meat consumption. In the short term, food aid will help. In the medium term, market-distorting trade tariffs and farm subsidies must end. But the long-term task is monumentally harder: transcending the limits of today's global food production.