I just sent this to a freeculture.org mailing list -- thought I'd spread the
idea here too (not having time at the moment to implement it):

---

A good protest method, if anyone has time & a means to contact some
students there:

Students there start deliberately using the software to share completely
legal things (e.g., freely licensed and public domain music and books),
and then when the police come knocking, explain to the police that
sharing culture and information is not inherently illegal. Force the
administration and the police to start making distinctions, instead of
always assuming that something is prohibited until proven permitted.

QuestionCopyright.org might try to organize something like that, if we
can find some spare cycles, but... it would be a *perfect* kind of
action for Free Culture / SFC! Please, please beat us to it! :-)

-Karl

The Maltron -- http://www.maltron.com/. It's been a lifesaver -- not only a better shape (curved, to match your hands) but a better layout of letters (to avoid "single-finger hurdles" and other problematic movements). See also http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel/maltron.html.

Not a conspiracy theory, just history taken from primary and secondary sources. See http://questioncopyright.org/promise#history .

Counterfeiting money is unrelated to copyright: see http://questioncopyright.org/faq#counterfeiting .

Some editors have sentence-wise motion commands (for example, M-a and M-e in Emacs). These rely on the "two spaces after a sentence-ending period" rule in order to distinguish sentence ending from abbreviations. Documents that follow the two-spaces convention are more easily editable by people who use those commands.

Personally, I also find it much easier on the eyes -- I can find sentence boundaries with minimal mental effort, which saves those cycles for something else (like, say, understanding what the document is saying :-) ).

Yes, should have been Nevada, not Arizona -- and the fault was mine in the original submission, not Slashdot's. Sorry about that! I'm glad they updated the post.

-Karl Fogel

Considering how many great composers lived and wrote before copyright was even invented or could affect them (*cough* J.S. Bach *cough*), it would make more sense to call this "one composer's view of copyright". Especially given how much every composer -- Brown included -- is indebted to other composers.

http://questioncopyright.org/minute_memes/all_creative_work_is_derivative

(See the embedded video there.)

Good point, but also remember that legislators didn't explictly allow software patents in the first place either, IIRC. Most of the important decisions along the way were made by what is effectively a regulatory body (the USPTO) or by the courts. Asking the Supreme Court to correct the mistakes of either a regulatory agency or of lower courts is not quite the same as asking it to overrule explicit Congressional direction.

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.