Off you go… into the purple yonder!

The Free Software Foundation has funded a documentary about the folly of software patents, titled Patent Absurdity: how software patents broke the system. The film is available in Ogg Theora format. If you have a modern browser (Firefox, Chrome, etc) it will play embedded in your browser thanks to HTML 5’s video tag. If you [...]

the great patent war begins. This is the big one.

Another sane message about copyright – this time from the European Free Alliance in the European Parliament (the Greens): I wouldn’t steal.
This site touches on two points that have irritated me for a very long time in the whole copyright debate: copying is not stealing, and if the media industry would simply start selling quality [...]

The ever amazing Michael Geist published a great list of “fair copyright for Canada” principles, which he thinks should be adhered to in the drawing up of new Canadian copyright legislation.
A lot of it applies world-wide, in my opinion. This is great stuff, worth a read.

Alexander Wolfe over at Information Week has an article up with a great suggestion: deal with the RIAA as we do with misbehaving children: take away their privileges. He proposes shortening corporate copyrights from the current 125 years to 5 years, because they are clearly being abused – cf. the RIAA’s legal carpet bombing of [...]

Dan Bernstein aka djb writes brilliant software. He has a reputation for being a little difficult but his software is really, really well written and some of the most secure code out there. I used qmail for a long time, and I still think that it is hands down the best choice for an outgoing [...]

Larry Lessig’s excellent talk at TED titled ‘how creativity is stranged by the law’ is now online. Recommended viewing – 19 minutes long.

Michael Crichton (the author) has a most interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times today about the folly of gene patents.
Patents are supposed to cover inventions. Genes are most certainly not inventions. They are ‘features of the natural world’, as Crichton puts it. Patenting genes is as idiotic as patenting rocks, or sunsets. There’s [...]

So, in one week the music industry has managed to get signatures from artists that are dead in support of a (retroactive!) copyright extension in the UK, and now the RIAA is trying to lower the royalties it pays to artists for “innovative” music distribution.
Let us get this straight – on the one hand they [...]

The US copyright office at the Library of Congress has issued 6 new copyright exemptions. Basically, there are 6 new (narrow) exemptions from the DMCA:
* anyone can now ‘unlock’ cell phones
* film professors can break CSS to make compilations of short clips from DVDs
* blind people can use software that circumvents DRM on e-books to [...]