Intellectual property law

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Putting the Open Source Community to Work on MyDoom

Technology
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Recently, the MyDoom virus affected the sites of two of the biggest opponents to the Open Source community: SCO and Microsoft. While Vigilante action is plain wrong (a message that few in the open source community seem to be sending out), there are opportunities for the open source community to shine. Here’s how. As many people in the net community know by now, SCO has posted a reward of $250,000 for information leading to the arrest of the MyDoom author. In parallel, Microsoft has posted a reward of $250,000 to people that will help find the creator of MyDoom.B That’s a total of half a million dollars. Earlier this year, the OSDL created a Linux Legal Defense Fund to fight SCO’s claims. Let’s imagine for a second that the open source community use its effort to find the person responsible for the MyDoom virus and its variant. What if the community then picked up the purse from SCO and Microsoft? What if it then gave that money to OSDL as part of the fight against SCO? Wouldn’t that be the sweetest irony? I think it’s a good idea and that’s why I’m issuing a call to the community to fight…
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SCO vs. the world

Business
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One of the nice things about organizing events filled with geeks is the fact that I get to hang out with people that are smarter than me. The discussion on Tuesday covered a wide number of subjects but most of the fascination came from what to do with SCO. For those not familiar with the battle, SCO is currently suing IBM, Redhat, and other Linux vendors, claiming that some of its code is present in the Linux operating system. Their claim is based on the concept that they did not authorize their code to be redistributed in such a fashion. Going further, SCO is now trying to overturn the GPL, the licensing scheme used by most of the open source community to share and redistribute code. As a result, they have essentially gone to war against the whole open source community. One of the interesting suggestions that came up is the fact that, by saying that Open Source is theft, and that by saying Linux is theft, SCO is essentially defaming any person that uses or promotes Linux and/or open source product. Based on this insight, it is possible to look forward to a time when geeks might consider striking…
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Digital Assets

Media
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The recent fights of the music industry remind me a lot about the early days of the personal computer industry. While I was still a kid then, it seems the software industry went through a similar experience in terms of trying to figure out how to deal with piracy. In this entry, I examine what I consider to be the four stages of dealing with piracy of digital assets. I believe that any industry that is seeing a move of their intellectual assets to a digital medium will go through four basic stages: ignorance, panic, protection and litigation, quiet acceptance. This was the case with software in the 80s and 90s, is currently the case with music, and will soon be the case with movies. I suspect that other industries like the professional photography market are facing similar issues currently or have in the past. Stage 1: Ignorance During this stage, an industry ignores the problem, either because it is seen as the domain of fringe elements or doesn’t seem like it could possibly have a huge impact. Consider this the ostrich strategy. Executives downplay the importance of a new culture (software crackers in the 80s, file-sharing in the mid-90s)…
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RIAA lost the war

Business, Media
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A new survey just highlighted that three quarters of teens feel that file sharing should be legal. This pretty much caps any chance for the music industry to survive under their current model. The issue here is that if kids are perceiving file sharing as something that should be legal, they will probably not grow out of it. Half of the teens that were polled had downloaded free music and gave an interesting set of reasons: Those who download music but have never paid for a download say they download because: They only like one or two songs on a CD (59%); They want to get music quickly (48%); They believe that music is too expensive to buy (46%); They want to get music for free (44%); They want songs that are not available for sale (40%); And they believe that music should be shared (38%). There is hope though. If you look at those stats, stores like the Apple iTunes Music Store or the new Napster can satisfy over 50 percent of the public. The third point, however, shows issues relating to pricing. Obviously, the Internet has had an impact here as kids are probably more aware than their…
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Napster Shut Down

Media
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It’s official: it’s curtain for Napster for now. The judge in a lawsuit filed the Recording Industry Association of America ordered the service to shut its doors by midnight this Friday. The genie is out of the bottle Yet, I can’t help but believe that the shutdown of Napster will not do much in terms of limiting distribution of online music. People will now move to alternative services like Gnutella and Freenet. In other words, it’s time for the recording industry to face the music. Shawn Fawning and his crew did, in the words of the judge, create a monster but I seriously believe that if the goal of the RIAA is to stop widespread distribution of digital music, this lawsuit is a moot point. Back in March, I talked about Gnutella, a Napster-like client/server applications that escaped from AOL‘s vaults. Since then, Gnutella use has increased, largely due to the fact that Napster was being sued and that Gnutella has no controlling authority. Since no one is officially in charge of Gnutella, no one can be sued. And since the service can’t be sued, it’s a much tougher one to deal with as far as the recording industry is…
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