EDUCAUSE | intellectual property rights

Adventures at an IT trade show

StuartYeates — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 09:46:30 -0600

While at a small IT trade show I was surprised to come across an open source CMS: squiz.net. Under the slogan "Open Source. Own It. Squiz.net" They were very big on open source, one of their case studies saying:

...the use of open source software means that 100% of the resulting system is owned by [the client] including the valuable intellectual property that's been build whilst creating it—such as documentation, processes and the resulting web site code itself

All excellent sounding stuff. Unfortunately, further investigation of their licence shows that:

2.1 You agree that Squiz.Net controls all intellectual property rights (including copyright) in every aspect of the Software, including source code and related documentation.

Which hardly gels with the client owning 100% of the "web site code." Even worse:

2.8 You must Notify Squiz.Net within 30 days of making any Modifications even if You do not intend to distribute those Modifications. Notify is defined in Clause 4.2 below. If Your Modifications are incomplete, You must still Notify Squiz of the status of your progress not less frequently than once every 30 days. If You do not Notify Squiz.Net of Modifications You have made (complete or not) within 30 days, Squiz.Net may deem that you have opted to limit your obligations in accordance with Clause 3 and as such Squiz.Net may reasonably charge You the consideration indicated in Clause 3.

This clause is in conflict with Clause 3 of the open source definition which says:

3. Derived Works: The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

So the the Squiz.net CMS is not open source in the way that everyone else uses the term.

A little looking around the net shows that other people have seen through this in the past.

cheers, stuart

Microsoft and Novell shack up

StuartYeates — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 03:28:36 -0600

There's been a swathe of coverage of this, but the best I've seen is at Groklaw: Novell Sells Out.

Seriously though, I can understand why they have sold out. For a small tech company with stagnant growth, Microsoft's money and resources must have a black hole-like attraction, because these companies have legal obligations to give their share holders value for money.

cheers, stuart

Announcement to Members from Brian Hawkins

lgesner — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 15:30:42 -0500

EDUCAUSE President Brian Hawkins has released a statement to the association’s membership concerning the recent course management system patent issue in higher education.

GPL to be tested in court in Israel

StuartYeates — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 08:05:09 -0500

It looks like there's a GPL dispute heading to court in Israel. It's between Jin (the original authors) and IChessU (who redistribute it). The case appears to rest on notions of separation between programs, which has long been a grey area with respect to the GPL, because there are complex technical issues involved and the GPL appears to rely on common sense.

At this point I need to explain a bit about the IChessU client, to clarify what I mean by "partial source code". IChessU aim to develop a site which brings chess tutors and students together. An important feature is the ability to see and talk to your tutor and fellow students. This part is an external C++ library Alexander had obtained seperately (I believe another Russian team developed it for him), and is used as a library (via JNI) from the Java code. So, what IChessU have released was everything (which is 95% my code and 5% theirs) except this audio/video over IP library and the few Java classes used to interface with it.

I've then spent a week or so trying to explain Alexander that it does not matter that the A/V library is "a separate library" and that in order to comply with the GPL, he must publish the source code to that too.

Even if this is lost, it's not the end of the world for the GPL, since most likely loss would simply involve slightly withdrawn lines about reuse in proprietary systems.

Thanks to /.

cheers, stuart

DVD sniffing dogs

StuartYeates — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 09:20:46 -0500

ABC is reporting that the MPAA have deployed sniffer dogs trained to detect CDs and DVDs into Stanstead Airport.

For the time being, Lucky and Flo are working at a FedEx shipping center at Stansted Airport where they are sniffing packages that are shipped around the world. Trainers say the dogs have been notifying customs agents of packages with discs in them. The packages have been opened but so far no pirated movies have been found.

"We're encouraged by this. It's a new tool against piracy but we welcome it and hope others will adopt such practices [...]"

Thank goodness London airports aren't swamped with other security concerns an have the time and energy to address this issue.

IBM gets most of SCO case thrown out

StuartYeates — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 04:12:11 -0500

SCO has long-running litigation against IBM, accusing it of essentially stealing portions of UNIX (which SCO claims to own) and including them in Linux. The case has received a great deal of media attention, particularly in the web-based media and has been billed as a make-or-break case for open source. Even of something catastrophic happens in the case it would be unlike to kill all open source, but it would be a very significant setback for Linux and leave the rest of the open source community under a cloud.

The international open source community, perhaps without a clear understanding of how US litigation works, has been rather worried by the length of time the process has taken and the numerous extensions which have been given to SCO.

Fortunately, it doesn't look like there will be a catastrophe. A new ruling on the claims made by SCO has stuck most of them down because SCO repeatedly refused to be concrete and specific. Judge Brooke Wells is pretty clear on a number of points, and it now appears that some of the earlier perceived leniency towards SCO may have been related to ensuring that everything was watertight and that the respective sizes of the parties was not a determining influence.

In the following extract from the ruling I have removed footnotes and added emphasis.

IV. Prejudice

IBM argues that SCO's lack of specificity is prejudicial because without more detail it would have to undertake a massive analysis of multiple versions, files, and lines in Unix, AIX, Dynix and Linux to defend itself. This analysis would allegedly take substantial time and create additional delay in the resolution of this case.

In rebuttal SCO states

"It should be remembered that it is IBM, not SCO, that made these contributions. IBM has ready access to the engineers who made the disputed disclosures to assist in identifying the nature of the contribution, whether it originated independently from protected material, how it is used, and whether it was in fact disclosed to the Linux community."

Thus according to SCO, IBM should be able to determine what was misappropriated without being given substantial detail. Further, SCO argues that it was IBM's own roadblocks that hindered SCO in identifying particular misused material so IBM cannot now claim that they were somehow prejudiced.

The court finds SCO's arguments unpersuasive. SCO's arguments are akin to SCO telling IBM sorry we are not going to tell you what you did wrong because you already know. SCO received substantial code from IBM pursuant to the court's orders as mentioned supra. Further, SCO brought this action against IBM and under the Federal Rules, and the court's orders, SCO was required to disclose in detail what it feels IBM misappropriated. Given the amount of code that SCO has received in discovery the court finds it inexcusable that SCO is in essence still not placing all the details on the table. Certainly if an individual was stopped and accused of shoplifting after walking out of Neiman Marcus they would expect to be eventually told what they allegedly stole. It would be absurd for an officer to tell the accused that "you know what you stole I'm not telling." Or, to simply hand the accused individual a catalog of Neiman Marcus' entire inventory and say "its in there somewhere, you figure it out."

Without more specificity than SCO has provided some very important questions that could materially impact this case are nearly impossible to answer. For example, is the code that comprised the method or concept still in use in Linux? If not, then damages may become nominal instead of in the billions. Or, it may be possible that the code comprising a method or concept was already disclosed pursuant to some other license such as the BSD License. Since Linux uses some BSD code this could have a substantial impact upon SCO's case. Especially since SCO claims to be a successor in interest to some of the technology involved in the dispute between Unix System Laboratories and The University of California. Without the code, however, there is no way to ascertain exactly what the impact is of prior disclosures that may involve the code at issue in the instant case.

...

This case is being followed blow-for-blow by both the pro open source groklaw website and SCO's share price.

Debian starts redistributing newly-relicensed Sun Java

StuartYeates — Wed, 17 May 2006 03:55:51 -0500

The Debian project has just started redistributing Sun's Java implementation after the recent relicensing. As with all Debian software, the software has been repackaged into a standard format for ease of install, upgrade, removal and testing. Previously Debian merely distributed a placeholder and users had to install Java from the Sun website.

Debian remains committed to supporting free runtimes and development environments for Java, such as Kaffe and GCJ, and we look forward to working with Sun as they explore their options for making Java more free, and extending their involvement in the free software community for other portions of Java and other projects. "This new license shows that Sun and the Java technology world care about GNU/Linux and open source platforms and are willing to put aside philosophical differences and get down to business," said Mark Shuttleworth, founder and sponsor of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, the most-downloaded GNU/Linux in the world for the last eight months. "This eliminates one of the biggest roadblocks to wider use of the Java platform on free and open source operating system platforms and makes Java technology a more attractive foundation on which to build new projects and innovations." "We are really pleased to see Sun's increasing involvement in the free software community, from the opening of the Solaris Operating System source and now the re-licensing of Java technology to be compatible with GNU/Linux distributions, and are looking forward to building stronger ties with the Sun community in the future", said Anthony Towns, Debian Project Leader.

The timing of this move is very interesting, since debian have just announced they're moving to GCC 4.1 primarily for the better Java support and it is the open source gcj/gij implementation of Java within GCC that appears to be forcing Sun to relicense their implementation. The improving support for Java within GCC threatens to undercut Sun's position as the supplier of the dominant Java implementation. Faced with a choice between having full control over the a minority implementation of Java or partial control over the dominant one, they ceded partial control by releasing it under an open source-friendly licence.

Kororaa Accused of Violating GPL

StuartYeates — Mon, 15 May 2006 03:57:38 -0500

The open source project Kororaa has been accused of violating the GPL, one of the core open source licences.

The numb of the problem is that some pieces of PC hardware have linux divice drivers released under non-GPL licences, which means that while the drivers can be downloaded form the hadrware manufactures website, they cannot built and linked into a kernel which is then redistributed as a whole.

This is a huge issue for LiveCDs like Kororaa, because they would have to download from the website every time they booted.

Enforcing the GPL

StuartYeates — Fri, 12 May 2006 08:45:36 -0500

Joe Brockmeier has written a piece for newsforge on Enforcing the GPL (GNU Public License), and while the news is not good, there is substantial hope, including the information (which I'd overlooked) that because copyright has fixed term, there is no statue of limitations, so even if enforcement is very lax, we can catch up later. There had to be at least one silver lining to the continuous attempts to increase the length of copyright terms.

Most of the infringing appears to be in the embedded market, particularly in the routers and other "Internet" devices:

According to former BusyBox maintainer Erik Andersen, violations are fairly common. "I get roughly three reports every week of some device or other that is shipping with BusyBox in violation of the license; i.e., the vendor fails to support source, fails to offer source, and in many cases, claims the software is completely proprietary, when in fact it is obviously running Linux and using BusyBox."

Companies in dispute over their use of the Artistic Licence

StuartYeates — Fri, 05 May 2006 02:48:44 -0500

newsforge.com is reportingthat a pair of companies are in displute over their use of the opensource ArtisticLicence, widely used in the Perl world. It's a clear case ofwhoever drafted the contract for work between the two companies notunderstanding the licence being used.

This does not appear to be a challenge to the licence itself.

Patents threaten open source model train software

StuartYeates — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 03:53:52 -0500

Digital Lifestyles is carrying an article about what appears to be a case of pure intimidation of an open source project by a commercial competitor.

I have real reservations about whether commercial software can survive in fields of endeavour such as this, in which a large proportion of the participants hobbyists are doing it out of love. Such fields are ideal cradles for open source software, and to be frank, it's hard to see how businesses can compete, especially when they shelling out money to IPR lawyers...

UK Patent Office launches new Mediation Service

StuartYeates — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 02:48:41 -0500

The UK Patent Office has launched a new Mediation Service in an attempt to settle IPR disputes without expensive court proceedings:

If both sides agree to mediation, the mediator will meet with each side, separately and together, to discuss the issues involved. When the main issues are identified it is then hoped that the dispute can be settled. There are no fixed results in mediation and both sides must agree on what the solution is to be. It is worth remembering that the mediator is a facilitator and does not make a decision; that is down to the opposing parties. The discussions are "without prejudice" that is they are not binding and parties can continue with proceeding if mediation fails.

Unfortunately, this is a model that requires both of the parties to be well behaved and doesn't address situations such as the SCO case in which parties appear to be essentially using blackmail tactics. It also does not address any of the structural issues with the current patent regime, such as the ever expanding scope of patents and the disproportionate amount of power apparently held by the holders of large incumbents.

GPLv3 draft released

StuartYeates — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 11:14:18 -0600

The first drfaft of the GPLv3 has been released.

Microsoft wins FAT patent appeal

StuartYeates — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 06:14:31 -0600

In an appeal in which other industry players were not permitted to present their case, Microsoft have had the United States Patent and Trademark Office's rejection of their File Allocation Table (FAT) file system patents overturned.

If upheld in the courts (which seems unlike to me), this could require the removal of FAT compatibility from Linux and the BSD operating systems.

From a technical point of view, the embarrassing thing is that the FAT family of filesystems are based on 1970s technology, there exist far, far better filesystems ("better" largely depending on exactly what you want to use them for), but because Microsoft doesn't ship drivers for those file systems, they can't gain market share. The newer filesystems are variously faster (because they lay out the data more intelligently), more secure (because they store owner, permissions and access information), support larger partitions and files, more robust (particularly in the case of users removing the drive while data is being written) or some combination of the above.

Coverage at news.com.com.

"Why SCO has no case" against Linux

StuartYeates — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 05:40:52 -0600

Normally third party lawyers don't take public positions about court cases, nor do they give interviews about the legal and factual issues involved, but attorney Thomas Carey has given an interview to techtarget.com outlining why the SCO cases against several players in the Linux market has no merit. Unfortunately he seems less optimistic about a quick end to the cases:

Hitler fought World War II until the Allies had nearly overrun his bunker. As long as investors are willing to provide the cash, SCO will sue because that is their business model. They will likely go after smaller companies as a means of controlling the cost of litigation.

Further analysis and copies of the original court documents are available from groklaw.net. Also covered on Slashdot.

JISCLegal newsletter now available as RSS

StuartYeates — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 06:16:53 -0600

JISCLegal are now making their newsletter available via an RSS feed. The newsletter is entirely focused in UK and EU law and happenings.

It's not clear whether items are released to the RSS feed as they become available or batch published once the newsletter is sent.

Cambridge University Academics Agree Changes to IPR Policy

StuartYeates — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 05:59:10 -0600

Cambridge (Bridge of Sighs)
Originally uploaded by Stuart Yeates.

Academics at Cambridge University have agreed to a package of intellectual property rights reforms which give the university more control over their money-making inventions. This changed the previous policy which had granted most rights to the academic. Academics will retain copyright in their written work under the new policy.

Full Story in the Guardian (via JISCLegal)

An Interview with ArtStor's James Shulman

mpasiewicz — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 17:06:00 -0600

In this 22 minute recording, we'll hear from ARTstor's James Shulman as he compares and contrasts the work of ARTstor with the likes of flickr, jstor, portico and the amazoogles of the world. Later, he touches on some of the domestic and international intellectual property issues encountered while building the service. He also shares some thoughts on ARTstor vis-a-vis institutional repositories.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2005 Fall Task Force Meeting. The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

EFF walks away from US Copyright Office's DMCA rulemaking proceeding

StuartYeates — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 04:32:34 -0600

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is walking away from the US Copyright Office's DMCA rulemaking proceeding.

EFF has participated in each of the two prior rulemakings (in 2000 and 2003), each time asking the Copyright Office to create exemptions for perfectly lawful consumer uses for digital media that are encumbered by DRM restrictions. For example, we asked that DVD owners be allowed to skip those "unskippable" ads at the beginning of DVDs. We asked that people who bought copy-protected CDs be allowed to get them to play on their computer. We asked that consumers be allowed to bypass region coding to play a DVD purchased in another part of the world. The Copyright Office rejected all of these proposals.

It looks like the EFF has given up fighting for consumers rights within this particular system and will be fighting the whole law.

IPPR releases document on "Markets in the Online Public Sphere"

StuartYeates — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 07:51:35 -0600

The IPPR (a UK based progressive think tank) have released a document "Markets in the Online Public Sphere" outlining the sources of some of the current confusion of [free|open][content|software|standards].

This paper looks at some of the politics and economics surrounding online information. It asks why this area become so bitterly contested, especially around intellectual property, and explores the dilemmas this creates for policy-makers. The paper stands back from this to ask why things have reached this impasse, and presents an analysis that positions all these competing visions within a broader understanding of what constitutes "the public sphere." It concludes by out-lining the possibilities available for Government.

FLOSSE Posse gear up for a software patent fight

StuartYeates — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 11:43:28 -0600

FLOSSE Posse gear up for a software patent fight

The FLOSSE Posse has started organising to oppose a second EU software patents directive (directives are effectively templates for pan-European law). It is widely believed that a second software patent directive is being prepared by the European Patent Office. If a directive is in preparation, they have certainly failed to consult with the multitude who registered their objections to the first directive.

FLOSSE is of course an acronym for "Free, Libre, and Open Source Software in Education" and is run out of University of Joensuu in Finland. It is an education-specific daughter organisation of the well known Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) who led the EU-wide opposition to the first directive.

OSS Watch releases guide to the GPL

StuartYeates — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 08:02:16 -0600

OSS Watch have just released their latest IPR document, an overview and guide to the GPL. This is their sixth licence-specific document and sits beside their documents on ownership and licensing issues , software patents and dual licensing.

Brazil keeps up the push for open source

StuartYeates — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 11:42:11 -0600

Gilberto Gil, the serving culture minister of Brazil, has been in London talking about open source and intellectual property. In an interview with the Guardian, he talks about music, politics and IPR.

The kernel of the issue is that in less developed countries the economics of software production are completely altered by the significantly lower costs of labour, which is made significantly worse by the move to selling software as a service and licensing it on a per-individual basis. Coupled with this are the facts that very little of the money is spent locally and that local independent companies are frequently caught in the cross fire by incumbent monopolies' efforts to strengthen their monopolies using closed formats and limited interoperability.

As a result, Brazil and Peru but have policies supporting open source, and Ubuntu has exploded out of Africa.

Is Microsoft telling porkies about Microsoft Office?

StuartYeates — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 04:39:35 -0600

David Berlind over at ZDNet has an interesting article on what happened when he started to check some of the claims that Microsoft's Alan Yates made about Microsoft Office.

Microsoft have one of the largest stables of lawyers in the world, so for them to say "I'm not a lawyer but..." as they effectively do here is just bizarre.

Full article.

Analog Hole

StuartYeates — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 08:13:40 -0600

The RIAA have proposed a legislative draft for a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, on the topic "Content Protection in the Digital Age: The Broadcast Flag, High-Definition Radio, and the Analog Hole," on November 3rd. To quote the EFF the effect of the legislation would be to:

[...] take one of the most basic and ubiquitous components in multimedia, and encase it within a pile of legally-enforced, complex, and patented proprietary technology - forever.

Coverage from: public knowledge.org and eff.org.

Amazingly, not even RIAA.com appears to have positive coverage of this at the time of writing. If anyone finds any material justify this, I'd really be interested.

Copyright being used in the Intelligent Design vs Evolution battle

StuartYeates — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 02:38:53 -0600

The National Research Council and the National Science Teachers Association have moved to prevent the Kansas State Department of Education from using their documents "National Science Education Standards" and "Pathways to Science Standards." This is a reminder, once again, that "educational use" is not and has never been an excuse for copyright infringement.

Different points of view on this may be found at /. and family.org.

ibiblio launches torrents, but loses sight of the goal

StuartYeates — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 06:16:16 -0500

ibiblio, the famous Internet library and archive, recently launched a project to distribute content via bittorrent, a protocol which is very efficient at distributing large files over the Internet. Unfortunately, ibiblio missed an opportunity to set themselves apart from the many who use bittorrent to distribute content of dubious legality, by completely failing to include any kind of licensing information.

A random example is their speaker series, containing a raft of people I know to be both excellent speakers and supporters good licensing practise. Their presentations are being distributed with "License(s): None", which presumably translates into "we believe we have a (perhaps implicit) licence to distribute this content, but no record to hand of what that license might be."

Don't get me wrong, there is no doubt in my mind that ibiblio have a licence to distribute this content, it is just a shame to see them not taking this sterling opportunity to take the high moral and legal ground on this.

EFF: Legal Guide for Bloggers

StuartYeates — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 12:41:40 -0500

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has an excellent guide to legal issues for bloggers. Covering such topics as copyright, defamation, liability and reporter's privilege the guide covers everything a blogger might need to know. These issues are of particular concern for the EFF because they are representing a number bloggers in court cases on these very issues. The resource is limited to the US jurisdictions, allowing ti to be exact and precise, but less useful to foreigners.

Copyright Shenanigans with the Eiffel Tower

StuartYeates — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 14:30:15 -0500

Recently I was in Paris for the weekend, and I took digital photographs of several tourist attractions, including the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame, by day and by night. On my return, I duly posted them to flickr under a Creative Commons licence, as I do with all my photos. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I didn't actually own the copyright on the nighttime picture of the Eiffel Tower...

It seems that copyright is claimed on the nocturnal image of the tower, but very selectively enforced. There is considerable discussion on a blog by Brian Micklethwait. Interestingly the SNTE makes a distinction between amateur and professional photographers, but not between images licensed for potentially commercial use (as mine are) and those restricted to non-commercial use. I wonder whether such a distinction can stand up incourt? I wonder whether such a distinction is even legal under under EU law.

The Political Economy of Reading

StuartYeates — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 04:03:16 -0500

In July 2004, CUP published William St Clair's The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period which bought an economist's and statistician's point of view to the interrelationships between prices, print runs, intellectual property, and readerships both in the Romantic period and whole span on the printed book in English. For those of us to poor to buy the original (Amazon noted that "[t]he author's painstaking efforts and publisher's equally meticulous efforts to accurately record, classify, and arrange the novel data in smaller type with footnotes account for the high price of the book"), William St Clair has released a lecture covering the same ground.

The Political Economy of Reading

This is the background against which the players were standing when they enacted the original copyright laws, and the original laws make a certain kind of sense (or at least an internal consistency) when viewed against them. Whether or not those laws make sense in the current landscape is another matter.

Found on the CC-UK list.

UK High Court rejects software patent and criticises the European Patent Office doctrines

StuartYeates — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 10:01:49 -0500

The UK high court has thrown out a pure-software patent and directly criticised the doctrine and approach of the European Patent Office. It is not clear whether this is going to have any medium- or long-term significance, since this looks like the kind of ruling that is likely to no longer apply once the law is changed, and several parties in the UK and EU seem pretty keen to change the patent law as it applies to software.

Full text. Coverage from Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure. Seen on IPkitten.

Debian developers move to tighten licensing requirements on documentation

StuartYeates — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 03:41:56 -0500

The Debian project has as it's core the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG), which define the licences which software distributed in Debian could use. It has long been understood but unenforced that the DFSG should apply to documentation and content as well as software. With the recent release of the stable "sarge" distribution the Debian developers are laying the foundations of the next release by (among other things) enforcing this rule.

So why is debian throwing out all content licensed under the widely-known and well regarded Creative Commons and GNU Free Documentation License licences? They have a statement of what they collectively believe in, and a close analysis shows that these licences aren't up to scratch.

In the medium to long term this is likely to re-enforce the position debian already has as the high-moral-ground software distributor to the open source world but seriously undermine their ability to distribute content, which arguably isn't something they should be doing anyway.

Copyright arguments: more than a century later they haven't actually changed

StuartYeates — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 09:25:30 -0500

Recently I was reading "Copyright Law", a speech to the House of Commons on 5 February 1841 by Thomas Babington Macaulay. The amazing thing to me is how little the arguments have changed in the intervening time. When he says:

Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be [...] ?

we can see Napster, when he discusses the possibility of using copyright to suppress religious works, he might be talking about Disney's use of copyright to suppress Song of the South.

Debian ponders licences for Wikis

StuartYeates — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 02:57:12 -0500

The Debian project is once again pondering what licences should be used for the content in wikis.

As I see it, wikis present additional problems from a licensing point of view because they systematically undermine the notion of authorship on which so much of western copyright law is based. Content placed in the wiki is _meant_ to be updated, improved, honed, repurposed and even retired by a huge range of participants, without so much as a "by your leave" to the original author of the content.

The myths of open source

StuartYeates — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 11:29:08 -0500

TechWorld is running an article on the myths of open source.

The myths are: the attraction is the price tag; the savings aren't real; there's no support; it's a legal minefield; open source isn't for mission-critical applications; and open source isn't ready for the desktop.

The article isn't necessarily flawed, but by their nature such articles need to assume a flawed understanding of their subject matter by their readers, making them very subjectively focused on an unnecessarily narrow group of readers. Maybe the article might be better entitled "The myths of open source, as held by IT managers who believe what vendors tell them and have no technical background whatsoever." Such articles undoubtly have a place in magazines aimed at IT managers who believe what vendors tell them and who have no technical background whatsoever, but when removed from the contect of the magazine, and published to a much larger and more diverse audience on the Internet, the article looses some of its effectiveness.

The article.

EU to reject pure software patents

StuartYeates — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 01:53:00 -0500

It looks like there has been progress in the EU "consensus building" around the topic of software patents.

There's a lot of he-said she-said, but it looks like serious numbers of MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) are signing up with various colours of anti-software patent groups.

Coverage from Business Week

Coverage from Forbes

Coverage from BBC

Coverage from The Register

Coverage from the FFII (Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure), a key anti-software patent campaign

Tags:osswatch opensource eu patents softwarepatents