Category Archives: Law
Foundem And The Google Anti-Trust Case – Thanks To Groklaw.net
I dropped into Groklaw this morning, and PJ had posted an article on the Texas Anti-Trust case against Google. She had taken a look at the people and players involved, the court filings, and the press coverage, and come to some interesting conclusions.
What I read got me curious, so I decided to do a little research from a different angle. I knew none of the companies involved (except Google), so I decided to look at one of the complainants, Foundem. First I went to their website to see what they offered, and decided to research laptop computers, since that’s what I use all of the time. Continue reading
The Enemy Of My Enemy Is My Enemy Or Why VP8 Is Important Even If It Came From Google
But everyone seems to be missing something. What if VP8 becomes the de facto standard? Remember that VP8 is an open standard. Totally open. This means that adding DRM to it will be difficult, if not impossible. So VP8 kills off Windows Media Video (WMV) and Quicktime as a video standards, just like MP3 killed off Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Quicktime as audio standards. Remember that one of the reasons that Microsoft and Apple fought MP3 was because MP3 wasn’t compatible with DRM, and the Frauhoffer Institute controlled the specification. Now we have the same situation with VP8, and we already know that Steve Jobs is panicking. You have to ask yourself why…
Simple – VP8 will destroy the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, ACTA, the new Canadian Copyright Act, the WIPO copyright treaties, and every other law which attempts to protect DRM. The ripping noise you hear is Hollywood tearing it’s hair out in clumps.
And now you know why the patent trolls at MPEG.LA are trying to sidetrack VP8 adoption. Continue reading
More Legal Shenanigans In Britain – Which? vs ACS:LAW “The UNUSUAL suspects”
It has been claimed that the program that is used to determine Internet Protocol Address (IP Address) was purchased for less than $750.00 US, and possibly as little as $250.00 US. While some of the basics of such a program could be found online, most often licensed under the BSD, MIT, Apache or GPL licenses, it is hard to see how a reliable system could be built for only $750.00 US, since this is less than one day’s billing for an experienced programmer. Also if code that was licensed under the GPL was used, the program itself would be a case of copyright infringement, which would be exceptionally embarrassing to ACS:Law. Since over two thirds of freely available source code is licensed under one or another version of the GPL, the odds of this being the case are very high. Continue reading
SCO Train Wreck still occuring in slow motion – molasses would be quicker
Oh dear. The total idiots at The SCO Group finally had a court decision that fell partly in their direction. Partly. The Appeals Court has decided that Summary Judgment was the wrong way to deal with the case, that it … Continue reading
open…: Microsoft cocks a snook at the EU
Glyn Moody wrote Microsoft cocks a snook at the EU. I often agree with Glyn, but not this time. Microsoft is trying to make the EU Competition people out to be fools, by delivering a version of Windows that won’t … Continue reading
News on Zotero suit
Sean made another post on the tenth (don’t know how I missed it) stating that the lawsuit was dismissed without prejudice due to lack of jurisdiction. Unfortunately that’s all he knows. What this means so far is that Thomson Reuters … Continue reading
Reuters Lawsuit Against Zotero Dismissed
This is an important case. Very important. On one side, we have a major media conglomerate, part of which is a news service. We have all heard of the financial problems that traditional news media have been having recently (at … Continue reading
Corporate Suicide
From the Legal Blog Watch an article about a lawsuit. The has apparently sent a cease and desist letter to Barbara Holmes, and artist who lives in Alaska. They want her to stop selling tee shirts with the slogan “Got … Continue reading
This is very scary
According to an article on Groklaw, the Bush Administration had commissioned an opinion from a lawyer named John Yoo. It appears that what they may have been trying to do was bypass the Fourth Amendment: http://www.groklaw.net/comment.php?mode=display&sid=20080403011138264&title=Authority+for+Use+of+Military+Force+to+Combat+Terrorist+Activities+Within+the+United+States&type=article&order=&hideanonymous=0&pid=686029#c686050 I strongly suggest everyone … Continue reading
Shareaza
For those who don’t know, Shareaza is a Peer to Peer client, that works on the Gnutella, Gnutella 2, and EDonkey networks. It is an open source project, under the GPL V2. Recently they lost their domain – Shareaza.com. Apparently … Continue reading
