Poland’s vote against the proposed software patent directive means that the pro-software patent lobby now is 16 votes short of a majority, and it will have to renegotiate their current position with the European Parliament. This is great news because it helps to defuse the coming crisis in software patents Read more
The site Sorryeverybody.com shows that many Americans are sorry about the results of the election. The site is great, it shows people holding signs sayng that they are sorry. This has prompted other sites to appear, such as the blog Not Sorry Everybody, and even an international site Apologies accepted. Read more
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is suing an undisclosed number of people who they claim are sharing movies online. This follows the same heavy-handed approach by the RIAA against music downloaders. I am not sure what the economic argument is. DVD sales and rentals are more than robust, Read more
Sounds like something taken from Mission Impossible: “This DVD will self-destruct in 5 seconds”. The movie industry is hoping to bring out self-destructing DVDs that can be viewed only twice. They have a chemical cover that destroys the information. This is not really a DRM as the protection is not Read more
This is Intellectual Ventures, which is suppossed to be the factory of the future. They don’t build anything; they hire some few researchers to claim that they actually produce some of their own patents. But their real business is buying patents from others, particularly those who may be used to Read more
The BBC has an interesting test to search engines, as the competition to Google becomes fierce. The test puts five search engines to the test, Google, Yahoo, MSN, AskJeeves and A9. The veredict? Google is still king, with A9 and AskJeeves offering some good options. MSN and Yahoo did not Read more
Groklaw reports that Novell has filed an anti-trust suit against Microsoft regarding WoprdPerfect. The filing states that: “By reason of Microsoft’s anticompetitive acts, WordPerfect’s share of the word processing market, which was nearly 50 percent in 1990, fell to approximately 30 percent in 1994, and to less than 10 percent Read more
Yet another study about the economic effect of music downloads. This one says that downloads are damaging to sales. The link will only take you to an abstract, the paper is offered for sale, or can be downloaded while in a developing country.
Students don’t like copyright? You don’t say! Seriously though, FreeCulture.org is an international student movement that tries to promote the ideas expressed in Lessig’s Free Culture. The site includes calls to action, ideas about how to promote Creative Commons, and other cool stuff such as ways to convert your backpack Read more
So, Microsoft wants to do to Google what it did to Netscape. MSN Search Beta has been launched in an attempt to make Google a thing of the past. This follows a number of attempts by other search engines to dethrone Google. There is Copernic, which searches stuff in your Read more