Free South Park Episode Downloads

The Ira Glass Infatuation Post/ This American Life Review: When Patents Attack!

Good old Lord Byron hit the theme of today’s episode on the nose: “This is the patent age of new inventions for killing bodies, and for saving souls. All propagated with the best intentions.”

Patents, the ownership of ideas in the name of individual financial gain and fame. It is the grill of the artist, the mark of individual success. A US office with the mantra, “To promote the useful arts and sciences,” provides the utopic petri dish in which people are to be properly incentivized to share their ideas and inventions. But does that environment actually exist, or are creatives sitting like Chicago drills, uninspired to (pro)create?

Act 1: There’s a patent for toast? “Bread refreshing method”

Laura Sydell and Alex Blumberg give us a very investigative episode delving into the not-so-well-oiled machine that is the patent world of Silicon Valley.

Most interesting is a series of conversations at South Park, a Silicon Valley watering hole that is much like Chicago’s Billy Goat Tavern for the Chicago Tribune, right across the street, and a grounding place in which ideas can bounce freely. In this case, the topic of the patent troll is thrown around, and urban legends abound. Particularly a keyword for this episode and in future news scans is the business Intellectual Ventures, an alleged/ infamous troll that likes to say they are “promoting innovation by supporting inventors,” in hitting the clueless creative types with some business sense and the ability to make bank. But does theory match practice? Unable to find many concrete examples of the inventor on the rise after IV intervention, the team zooms in on one very elusive case, that of Chris Crawford, an innovator with a patent for that pop-up on your computer asking if you’d like to download new updates for your software. Which is compared to getting a patent for toasting bread: general, stale.

One bystander emotes, “Every single patent is nothing but crap.” Another, Chris Sacca, an investor who helps companies like Twitter to get off the ground, has some pretty fair insight: “We’re at a point in the state of intellectual property where existing patents probably cover every single behavior that’s happening on the internet and our mobile phones today…so I have no doubt that the average Silicon Valley startup, or even medium size company no matter how truly innovative they are, I have no doubt that aspects of what they are doing violate patents that are out there right now. and that’s what’s fundamentally broken about the system right now.

Watch Every SouthPark Episode for Free on Your - iphone download ...

The application follows through on its initial promise;  you are indeed given access to the entire South Park series collection on your iDevice . But it doesn’t come without its headaches. It appears as though to access the library, you have to register for a free account with the website that provides the content. While registration is in fact free, it certainly shouldn’t be necessary.

Obviously this app can’t be on the up and up. Much like the SimplePlayer application we reviewed recently, iSouthPark appears to connect to a large library of copywritten content. In fact, that’s all the app seems to do. Pressing the iSouthPark icon just launches the mobile version of the website that hosts the media. From there you can just navigate about the website through the South Park seasons and select the episode you wish to watch.

iDB doesn’t condone piracy of any form . While there is no way to download these TV episodes, it still raises a moral debate. Apps like this have been around for a while on the jailbreak scene but they tend to disappear into the abyss. This particular app was uploaded last night, so I guess we’ll see how long it lasts.

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