The techie press has been filled with reports that Wikipedia Germany was shut down for three days for hosting an article that revealed the name of German hacker Boris Floricic (aka Tron). The story has also been taken up by the blogosphere. But is the story accurate? Not according to Read more…
(Thanks to Hector MacQueen for the link) IP Watch is reporting that a group of pro-software patent lobbyists and big industry representatives are intent in proposing that there should be another attempt to pass a European directive allowing the patentability of software (pardon me, the patentability of computer implemented inventions). Read more…
This is a very funny website with the top ten reasons why nobody reads your blog. True, I will never be a good-looking naked female from Tonga, but in my opinion the list is obsessed with tech consultancy. Most intriguing to me is the fact that it does uncover a Read more…
I have been looking in more detail at GPL v3 and also reading some comments in mailing lists, and I am starting to become deeply troubled by the new version of the world’s most popular copyleft licence. In the good old version 2, the viral aspects of the GPL only Read more…
The draft of the version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPL) has finally been released, and what a document it is! In general, the wording is clearer, tidier and tighter than version 2. The preamble is still as ideological as always (an in my opinion a tad superfluous). Read more…
Court of Appeals judge Sir Robin Jacob has made a vocal attack against the American practice of patenting everything under the sun, and has stated that there is no evidence that software patents encourage innovation. “The United States takes the view that anything made by man, under the sun, can Read more…
Here is a pledge at PledgeBank that proposes that “I will pledge to never purchase a CD containing any form of Digital Rights Management (DRM), but only if 500 people around the world will too.” I have signed this as I generally dislike the practice of a company telling me Read more…
There is a very good article in The Guardian about the new format battle between high definition DVD replacements, Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Sony is banking on Blu-ray by including it in the Playstation 3, which will mean that they will have some captive audience and a large boost from the Read more…
The EPO has just released a study conducted in 2004 by consulting firm Roland Berger Market Research on the cost of patenting in Europe. According to the study, an average EPO patent costs €30,530 EUR, where the costs are higher for Japanese and American companies validating in Europe. As further Read more…
IBM has joined other big players in the open source community and has expressed that it will use OSS in order to improve the quality of software patents in the United States. The idea is to have a searchable software code repository that will make it easier to detemine if Read more…