Archive | 2004

Congress wants to outlaw fast-forwarding through commercials. From Engadget:

We thought we lucked out when Senator Orrin Hatch stopped pushing the INDUCE Act, but the RIAA and MPAA are at again, and are trying to push another copyright bill through Congress that does a lot of the same things, like criminalizing copyright infringing file-sharing and punishing anyone who brings a video camera into a movie theatre for recording purposes with up to three years in prison. But there’s another part of the Intellectual Property Protection Act that should perk up your ears (assuming they aren’t already suitably perky). They want to make it illegal to use software or hardware to skip all of those commercials and previews that the studios are placing before the beginnings of movies on DVDs, something which is freaking ridiculous since it’s your DVD playing on your DVD player in your home. How about making it illegal to not pay attention, too?

Link [Alex Feldstein]

Hit http://www.publicknowledge.org/ for more information on this and to write to your senator protesting this poorly thought out bill.

Polish rejection may derail EU patent directive. The future of the controversial European Union (E.U.) software patent directive was thrown into doubt Wednesday after the Polish government indicated it could no longer support the legislation in its current form. [InfoWorld: Top News]

Software patents are an abomination: licensing an idea, instead of the implementation of an idea (the latter is what copyrights are). Patents will chill the software development marketplace and reserve software development for the big companies that can afford patent lawyers. Stealing another programmers copywritten code is theft; building on another programmers code is progress.

Let us never forget those who have gone before us and made the ultimate sacrifice so that we might be free. Bless you all.

Dan Gillmor’s eJournal blogs Another Kind of Election Map. “Barry Ritholtz has compiled a great collection of election maps. The most important message: Land area does not equate to people. At left, for example, is a reduced version of another useful way to look at the polling results. The Republicans won, but this is more evenly divided nation than the geographic county and state maps suggest. Barry has collected links to lots of other informative maps as well. It’s useful to have perspective.”

Several very cool perspectives here. I liked the purple map. We’re just not all red or blue.

John Perry Barlow muses “At least we might try to listen as though the other side might have a point. I truly think we all owe one another an apology.”