] Internet users fed up with the seemingly endless flow of
] spam should pin their hopes on a technological solutions
] rather than legislative ones, a top U.S. regulator said
] this week.

Like I keep saying, most spam is already illegal under the fraud statutes. New laws absolutely will not help, especially considering that a huge volume of spam comes from overseas -- pac rim, eastern europe, etc.

FTC chief says antispam bills won't work

] At SCO's annual reseller show, the company's executives
] put up a couple of slides as a way of demonstrating how
] Unix code had been "stolen" and put into Linux. The two
] slides were photographed and have since appeared on Heise
] Online; see them here and here. The escape of these
] slides has allowed the Linux community to do something it
] has been craving since the beginning of the SCO case:
] track down the real origins of the code that SCO claims
] as its own. The results, in this case, came quick and
] clear. They do not bode well for SCO.

LWN: Why SCO won't show the code

] "Make a good movie and you win. Make a crappy movie and
] you lose."

Finally, another stupid IP industry is getting clued to the fact that they are not entitled to put out shitty product and make money anyway.

High-Tech Word of Mouth Maims Movies in a Flash

] what SCO's lawyer actually said was arrant,
] unprofessional nonsense

FSF responds to SCO's ridiculous statement on the GPL from last week.

SCO Scuttles Sense, Claiming GPL Invalidity

] A Bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview.
] A Bright's worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements.

Mentioned in this month's Wired.

The Brights

] (Washington-AP) -- Senator Norm Coleman says he'll hold
] hearings on the crackdown against online music swappers
] by the Recording Industry Association of America.

Maybe someone will finally get a clue that the current system just doesn't work!

Senator Coleman to hold hearings on RIAA crackdown

1. I haven't been this pissed since key escrow!

2. Everyone (Sun and Microsoft in particular) who's putting money into SCO via licenses or whatever should know that they're creating another nuissance-IP monster like Rambus. Rambus probably wouldn't be an issue if Intel hadn't pumped money into them way back when.

3. I expect that if SCO tries to sue Linux end-users for copyright infringement, a judge is not going to take kindly to this whole code NDA bullshit. Their claim seems a lot weaker to me if they refuse to give the "infringers" an opportunity to remove their code. The supposition that all of Linux is now derrivative is just ridiculous.

4. I hear they're now getting ready to send invoices to 1500 big corporations running Linux. Corporations receiving these invoices, see #2 above. Even better: could this constitute mail fraud?

5. SCO gambled that IBM would give them some money to shut up and go away. (this group of investors has pulled the same stunt before with Microsoft and Adobe, I think) ... IBM called their bluff. If SCO were to shut up and go away now, they would be admitting that this was all a scam.

6. I guess its somewhat surprising that this kind of issue hasn't come up with Linux before. For all I know, it probably has ... but SCO isn't trying to "protect its intellectual property," its trying to extort billions of dollars from every IT shop running Linux. And that's probably the big difference.

7. Bonus points for any US attourney who figures out how to prosecute SCO under either the mail fraud statue or RICO :P

] The short of it is, their DMCAbot(TM) found
] /distfiles/INFMapPacks123FULL-MAN.zip, picked out the
] words "Pac" and "Man", and is now threatening us under
] the DMCA for distributing a pirated version of Pacman.
] While I'm not too worried about this (in fact, I'm rather
] amused), I'm just wondering if any other dist mirrors
] have received any threats similar to this.

HAAHAA!

Oops...

]
] SCO Group executives have sold about 119,000 shares
] of their company since it filed a lawsuit against IBM in
] March and the stock price increased more than fourfold.

Pump and dump by any other name...

The Salt Lake Tribune -- SCO execs unloading shares

Rattle wrote:
] ] To reward those who can attract a paying audience, and
] ] the firms that support them, much shorter copyrights
] ] would be enough. The 14-year term of the original
] ] 18th-century British and American copyright laws,
] ] renewable once, might be a good place to start.
]
] The economist presents a radical copyright proposal.

"Intellectual property" is an oxymoron, a completely bogus concept that has been foisted on everyone. There is no "copy right" ...

The right answer, IMHO, is that "intellectual property" is transformed to "copy tax entitlement" ... you as the creator are granted no control (which is control that noone can really grant anyway) but are entitled to receive a royalty whenever someone copies your work.

RE: Economist.com | Copyrights