Poland’s vote against the proposed software patent directive means that the pro-software patent lobby now is 16 votes short of a majority, and it will have to renegotiate their current position with the European Parliament. This is great news because Read more…
The site Sorryeverybody.com shows that many Americans are sorry about the results of the election. The site is great, it shows people holding signs sayng that they are sorry. This has prompted other sites to appear, such as the blog Read more…
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is suing an undisclosed number of people who they claim are sharing movies online. This follows the same heavy-handed approach by the RIAA against music downloaders. I am not sure what the economic Read more…
Sounds like something taken from Mission Impossible: “This DVD will self-destruct in 5 seconds”. The movie industry is hoping to bring out self-destructing DVDs that can be viewed only twice. They have a chemical cover that destroys the information. This Read more…
This is Intellectual Ventures, which is suppossed to be the factory of the future. They don’t build anything; they hire some few researchers to claim that they actually produce some of their own patents. But their real business is buying Read more…
The BBC has an interesting test to search engines, as the competition to Google becomes fierce. The test puts five search engines to the test, Google, Yahoo, MSN, AskJeeves and A9. The veredict? Google is still king, with A9 and Read more…
Groklaw reports that Novell has filed an anti-trust suit against Microsoft regarding WoprdPerfect. The filing states that: “By reason of Microsoft’s anticompetitive acts, WordPerfect’s share of the word processing market, which was nearly 50 percent in 1990, fell to approximately Read more…
Yet another study about the economic effect of music downloads. This one says that downloads are damaging to sales. The link will only take you to an abstract, the paper is offered for sale, or can be downloaded while in Read more…
Students don’t like copyright? You don’t say! Seriously though, FreeCulture.org is an international student movement that tries to promote the ideas expressed in Lessig’s Free Culture. The site includes calls to action, ideas about how to promote Creative Commons, and Read more…
So, Microsoft wants to do to Google what it did to Netscape. MSN Search Beta has been launched in an attempt to make Google a thing of the past. This follows a number of attempts by other search engines to Read more…