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Cato Unbound » Blog Archive » The Future of Copyright
A very condensed version of copyright history could look like this: texts (1800), works (1900), tools (2000). Originally the law was designed to regulate the use of one machine only: the printing press. It concerned the reproduction of texts, printed matter, without interfering with their subsequent uses. Roughly around 1900, however, copyright law was drastically extended to cover works, independent of any specific medium. This opened up the field for collective rights management organizations, which since have been setting fixed prices on performance and broadcasting licenses. Under their direction, very specific copyright customs developed for each new medium: cinema, gramophone, radio, and so forth. This differentiation was undermined by the emergence of the Internet, and since about the year 2000 copyright law has been pushed in a new direction, regulating access to tools in a way much more arbitrary than anyone in the pre-digital age could have imagined.
OOXML backwards compatibility led Microsoft to ODF | Tech News on ZDNet
In Microsoft’s announcement, the company said it was adding native support for ODF due to increasing pressure from customers “and because we want to get involved in the maintenance of ODF”. The company now says OOXML support would require substantially more work.
Microsoft pushed OOXML through as a fast-track International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard, and OOXML became IS29500 in April. However, Microsoft on Thursday told ZDNet.co.uk that the changes OOXML had gone through in the ISO ratification process had made it more difficult to support OOXML than ODF in Office 2007.
This is a real shame. Patent Troll Tracker was a great blog that did most of my work for me. Quite a loss.
The Daily Journal’s Tuesday edition (not linkable) reports that Troll Tracker author Rick Frenkel, and his employer Cisco, have been sued for defamation by two East Texas attorneys who are players in that district’s patent litigation scene, Eric Albritton and T. John Ward, Jr.
John “Johnny” Ward, Jr. is a Texas lawyer who has filed a large number of patent infringement lawsuits in recent years. Between January and mid-October of 2007, his name was attached to 54 separate lawsuits by my count; in all but four, he represented the plaintiff. He is also, as I reported in October, the son of Judge T. John Ward, the judge who is largely responsible for making the Eastern District of Texas a hotspot for patent litigation.
There’s a lot more on this, here.
Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise: No Assurance for GPL - Software Freedom Law Center
There has been much discussion in the free software community and in the press about the inadequacy of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) as a standard, including good analysis of some of the shortcomings of Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise (OSP), a promise that is supposed to protect projects from patent risk. Nonetheless, following the close of the ISO-BRM meeting in Geneva, SFLC’s clients and colleagues have continued to express uncertainty as to whether the OSP would adequately apply to implementations licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). In response to these requests for clarification, we publicly conclude that the OSP provides no assurance to GPL developers and that it is unsafe to rely upon the OSP for any free software implementation, whether under the GPL or another free software license.
Read the full paper here.
Red Hat Puts More Muscle On Its Legal Staff — Linux — InformationWeek
Red Hat is beefing up its legal staff with two appointments to strengthen its hand in patent disputes and open source licensing issues.
Company spokesman on Wednesday declined to comment on whether Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s claims in early and mid-2007 that its patents cover parts of Linux had anything to do with the expansion.
“We are helping pave the way for open standards and changes in the IP regime needed for the future,” responded Robert Tiller, VP and assistant general counsel for IP, one of the new hires at Red Hat’s legal department. “We feel a responsibility to lead these efforts and to encourage projects that support open, multi-vendor standards,” he wrote in an email response.
Red Hat announced Wednesday that it was adding Tiller and Richard Fontana, a former associate of Eben Moglen at the Software Freedom Law Center, to its legal staff. Fontana will be Red Hat’s open source licensing and patent counsel.
Over the past two decades, multimedia pioneer and college professor Nicholas Negroponte has gained a reputation for producing outsize ideas. Chief among them was his goal of providing 150 million of the world’s poorest children with inexpensive laptop computers by the end of this year through the One Laptop Per Child organization. But, with the group far short of his goal, Negroponte is looking for help in piloting OLPC. During an interview with BusinessWeek, he revealed publicly for the first time that he’s searching for a chief executive while he continues in the role of chairman. He says the organization has been operating “almost like a terrorist group, doing almost impossible things” for three years. Now, he says, it needs to be managed “more like Microsoft.”
The CEO search comes amid a retrenchment for the organization that Negroponte started three years ago. OLPC will hand more of the development and support of its XO laptop and its core software to technology companies, including Red Hat (RHT), the leading distributor of the Linux open-source operating system, and Microsoft (MSFT), which is just now putting the finishing touches on a version of Windows for the XO machine. OLPC will concentrate on developing prototypes and other new concepts. “In the end, we should not be in the hardware or software business. We should be in the learning business,” says Negroponte, 64.
CCIA Asks House To Oppose Telecom Immunity
Washington, D.C. — The Computer & Communications Industry Association sent a letter to House members Friday asking them not to support retroactive immunity for major telecommunications companies as part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act legislation.
Click here to see the letter[PDF]
For some background on this story, and what telecom immunity for warrentless wiretapping has to do with national security, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has a good rundown here.
Red Hat News | Strike One Against Microsoft
by Michael Cunningham, Executive Vice President & General Counsel
Strike One!
In our last blog posted on February 21, I proposed three test pitches for Microsoft to help judge the meaningfulness of its latest efforts to turn over a new leaf on interoperability. The first of these was to embrace the extant, multi-vendor ISO standard, ODF (Open Document Format) in lieu of its single vendor dominated efforts to create a new standard, OOXML (Office Open XML).
The first pitch was thrown in Geneva last week at the ISO ballot resolution meetings on OOXML. And we can safely say: strike one! There was no renouncement of the OOXML standard by Microsoft. Instead, every indication was business as usual.
By the way, you have to seriously wonder about those Geneva meetings. According to reports I’ve received about the meetings (which were closed but reportedly audio recorded), only a disturbing 25 or so of the approximately 1,000 substantive comments that were scheduled to be acted upon were actually discussed. As for the remainder of the comments, it appears that, in order to complete the agenda, a decision was made to vote on all of the remaining, undiscussed comments in a single vote.
Red Hat CEO Targets Oracle, Microsoft - Breaking News - Technology - theage.com.au
“Here, we are the attacker. If you listen to all the squealing that Microsoft and Oracle do about us, clearly they’re worried about us.”
“We are working to democratize information,” Whitehurst said. “A lot of people don’t see the importance of that. But, ultimately, it is about information freedom and making sure information’s accessible.
“If we don’t fight those battles now, our entrenched competitors will lock up file formats, force you to use their software or force royalties,” he added. “Then the information stored in those formats will no longer be free.”
I’m just glad he stopped short of warning them to lock up their women and children.
Intel drops out of One Laptop Per Child program: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
“The OLPC board ‘had asked Intel to end its support for non-OLPC platforms including the Classmate PC and other systems,’ Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said. ‘They wanted us to focus our support exclusively on the OLPC system.’”
Quicktime | Real
Real Stream | Ogg Theora
The death of software patents?
Wikipedia Tries Approval System to Fight Vandalism
More on GPL-compliant patent settlement
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