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The U.S. International Trade Commission would be the court of first instance for disputes brought by parties claiming that a Web site hosted offshore is trafficking in its intellectual property, in a draft of a bi-partisan bill released today by Sen. Ron Wyden (D - Ore.) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R - Calif.). The Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade bill (whose acronym is somehow "OPEN") is being offered as an alternative to the PROTECT-IP anti-piracy legislation which passed the Senate Judiciary Committee last May, but which has yet to come to a vote of the full Senate. The bill's House counterpart, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), is currently being debated by representatives.

USITC is already the principal court for resolving intellectual property disputes between American and foreign companies, so certainly no one yet can fault the bill lack of precedent.

Evernote Hello is a fine example of a really good idea that, when executed, doesn't work at all well. In concept, Hello is brilliant. Who doesn't have a problem with remembering names, especially when you're at a party or work function and being introduced to a half-dozen people simultaneously?

As I said, it's a really good idea, and the execution is almost perfect. However, Hello doesn't seem to have seen much real-world testing. While this seems like a perfect app for folks working in IT and meeting lots of people for business, it has a lot of problems that need to be sorted out first.

I got another email from Backupify, the cloud-based backup company. We have written before about them here. Usually, these emails just confirm that the backups of my Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter et al. accounts have completed successfully, but this one was different. They were telling me that they were in the process of migrating from an old system to a new one, and I had until the end of the month to make sure that my accounts were protected and authorized on the new system.

Classy.

Is it time to retire Microsoft Office, as my colleague Eric Lundquist says in his latest Information Week column? Much as I would like to, I can't. Part of the problem is addiction, part comfort, and part because it just works well enough that there isn't any reason to get rid of it. Office is the kudzu of the computer world: you can't easily get rid of it, it has grown like topsy to take over other apps, and it holds you in its grip something fierce.

Time is a commodity that when spent, is gone forever. In today's multi-task, multi-function smorgasbord, the flattening of the Internet has opened a window to savvy entrepreneurs looking to utilize and control the time they do have. We aren't talking about magic, but a new breed of workers called virtual assistants.

These assistants take several forms: general assistants, Web developers, SEO specialists, content writers. What they have in common is that they are the specialized, contract workers in an online marketplace. They are the prospective job candidates you've yet to discover.

OpenDNS announced a technology preview today for Macs running their DNS services called DNSCrypt. Think of this as doing for the DNS protocol what HTTPS does for the Web protocols. Like its mainline service, it is freely available, and Windows and Linux versions are promised for next year. You can download the code here for the Mac OS. They will eventually post all of their code on GitHub for public scrutiny.

Over the last three years, an average of 85% of the Mozilla Foundation's revenue has come from search engine partnerships, most importantly from deals that enable the Firefox browser to use its search bar to use Google by default. Though Mozilla's relationship with Microsoft's Bing has grown strangely closer over those years, Google - the maker of the competing Chrome browser, which was created using much of Firefox's braintrust - has remained the principal search tool for Firefox. That tool alone, one analyst said last year, may be responsible for just over 9% of all Google searches.

The last partnership extension between Google and Mozilla - a three-year deal renewed in August 2008 - was apparently allowed to expire last month. This led journalists including my friend and colleague at ZDNet, Ed Bott, to wonder whether Mozilla had any kind of Plan B. Today, we're being told that something resembling a Plan B (or C or D) may be in the works.

In previous months, we've covered here in ReadWriteWeb a new and emerging concept called crowdfunding - a way for entrepreneurs, especially apps developers, to obtain just enough funding to get off the ground, by way of a handful of collected funding sources contributing no more than $1,000 each. It's a superb alternative for businesses as small as one person to build an app and place it in the cloud.

The problem is, it's not officially legal. Not that there's any enforcement against the practice at the moment; in fact, last week the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved by a vote of 407 - 17 language that amends the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, in order to exempt crowdsourced funds from having to clear legal hurdles from every state from which a member contributes funding.

The big trend that many of you will find on several top ten lists this month, but not on mine, is Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). The reason it is omitted is because this isn't news, at least to me. Ever since PCs first started entering corporations in the early 1980s, IT managers have had to contend with users bringing in their own gear. Some analysts call this the consumerization of IT, which still is just a new name for an old trend.

Last week Sears and Kmart became the latest retailers to sell Christmas trees online and deliver them to your doorstep, at least if you live in the lower 48 states of the USA. And while it is great that a company that formerly sold houses via mail order has entered this market, you might get a better deal if you shop elsewhere, both for live and fake trees. Of course, you might be somewhat nostalgic that yet another holiday ritual has been relegated to the digital universe. But while you do your shopping you can see some important user experience lessons to be learned for your own ecommerce site here.