The Software Freedom Law Center has a great response up. From SFLC chairman Eben Moglen: "The confusion and uncertainty behind today's ruling guarantees that the issues involved in Bilski v. Kappos will have to return to the Supreme Court after much money has been wasted and much innovation obstructed."

(I hope they'll be providing a deeper analysis later on; the above came out like ten minutes after the decision, so obviously it's just based on the summary of the decision.)

-Karl Fogel

Ah, meant to tag w/ "bilski" too, my bad.

So I'd love to know how much water, say, New York City uses in a given time period. Anyone know? Like many of us, I don't know what "600 million metric tons of water" means in practice. Comparing it to some more meaningful figure, like a major city's water usage over one year, would help a lot.

The CVS access that started in 1993 was not network-based (since CVS didn't have networking then). You had to log into the server where the masters were. It was still an improvement over raw RCS, however.

I can't remember if it was in the paper offhand, but in any case Emacs development is not really very cathedral-y.

It's a matter of long debate among grammarians, and I take other grammarians's point of view :-).

I've used both and don't agree. Bazaar's quite good. Not that there's anything wrong with git, either. At this point in their development, I think the old rule is starting to apply: "the smaller the differences, the louder the arguments".

Ok, that's fair -- it could go either way. That's what I get for trying to be too clever!

No matter what word the Vatican used, this is fundamentally about trademarks, not copyrights.

Trademarks are about identity: they prevent impersonation. Identity protection is exactly the Vatican's concern here. They don't want other groups pretending to be the Catholic Church. (There remain interesting questions as to who has the right to decide what the Catholic Church is, as with any religion or other affinity group, but that's an inherent property of identity itself.)

This case is not about copyright, in any case, since copyright isn't about identity. When people illegally share music, for example, they don't remove the original artist's name and replace it with their own. Copyright is not about credit or attribution; it's about the sharing itself. That's why it's called "copyright" instead of "creditright".

Lumping these two unrelated concepts together under the term "intellectual property" just leads to confusion. And the copyright lobby is very happy to benefit from this confusion, since people have a strong moral attachment to accurate crediting. For example, see http://questioncopyright.org/promise#plagiarism-vs-copying for a blatant example of the RIAA trying to confuse copyright violation with plagiarism -- that is, confuse unauthorized sharing with identity theft.

Now, if the Vatican were claiming a monopoly right on the Bible, that would be a copyright issue. But they're not, of course, because the Bible is in the public domain everywhere.

See also the BookLiberator, a somewhat more compact cube-in-cradle design, that's also easy to build. Although soon you won't have to build your own: we're prototyping a manufacturable, flat-packed kit to sell from our online store; see questioncopyright.org/bookliberator for more about the project. It should be ready next year.

None of which is to detract from Reetz's accomplishment, of course. This renaissance in personal book scanners is going to make it easier for all of them, in the long run, especially as we can share the same open source software among all the scanners.