Argyris

Confirmed: I'm in the US and received a message from my Wii informing me that the Internet Channel is now free. I'm using it now to type this message, in fact, which is a ß!+¢#. YouTube seems to ignore my quality settings, and overall the limited resolution is...well, limiting. Videos play fine and all the pages I tried loaded (eventually). For what you get it's worth the price (which is nothing, aside from the memory space the channel uses), but not much more than that. I'm glad Nintendo has finally come to its senses and made this free. I'll hook up a USB keyboard soon and see if that makes the IC usable.

@ sonicspike41

I agree with you there. I might even shorten the time limit further, to just two years. Granted, I'm not expecting a finished product in that time, but if an entity doesn't even show any industry toward producing something, then they should at least have to renew the patent at the end of that time period.

I'd also like to restrict or eliminate the buying and selling of patents wholesale, as patent trolls often get their start by combing through the tombs of forgotten patents looking for anything that might be a vague match to a current hot technology.

Incidentally, anybody think of the Anascape suit against Nintendo when reading this story? I believe it's still going on. Joystiq had a few articles about it (in-site search result linked):

http://nintendo.joystiq.com/search/?q=anascape&invocationType=wl-joystiq&searchsubmit=