Comment Door in the Face (Score 1) 229
Strategy from the start?
Submission + - Bell Canada Urges CRIA To Sue Its Own Subscribers
An anonymous reader writes: Bell Canada has told a
Canadian government copyright consultation that the recording industry
should be suing its subscribers. The company argued that not
suing sends the wrong message and that it is waiting for lawsuits. The
comments come as Canadians are being squeezed
by the recording industry
on one side and the copyright collectives on the other as Canada's
copyright consultation winds down. With only five days left to speak out on copyright,
the music and movie groups are calling for a DMCA+ model that includes
three-strikes and you're out, while copyright collectives want new
taxes on iPods. Time for Canadians to have their say before it's
too late.
Submission + - How Many Rejections Will It Take to Kill 1-Click?
theodp writes: "Last week, a USPTO Examiner issued another 'Final Rejection' for Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' 1-Click patent. So will Amazon finally suck it up and be a gracious loser? Don't bet on it. The e-tailer just dumped thousands more pages of documents — including 600+ pages of CORBA specifications and a 495-page CompuServe text — on the poor USPTO Examiners that got stuck with the 3.5+ year-old 1-Click patent reexamination, requesting a full review of them. Let's hope Amazon at least had the decency to submit the documents on one of their carry-your-library-in-10.2-ounces Kindles. After all, didn't 'patent-reformer' Amazon say they're all about making life easier for the overworked USPTO? BTW, when IBM sued Amazon for allegedly ripping off its IP ('Much, if not all, of Amazon's business is built on top of this property,' quipped IBM), new USPTO chief David Kappos was in charge of Big Blue's patent portfolio. Not sure if that's good news or bad — let's hope it's not out of the Amazon frying pan and into the IBM fire!"
Comment Re:Full refund (Score 1) 318
Perhaps in its execution, but not in its intent. According to my studies, criminal law is intended to prevent crime and civil law to correct damage done. There is no mention of "punishment" in either.
Comment Missing the point (Score 1) 418
The FCC does not need to be regulating this. We could be spending the cash on eliminating our trillion-dollar deficit instead, or another worthy pursuit.
This law co-opts censorship. It labels it as good and necessary, when in reality it depends on the maturity and development of each child. This is a fact that psychological studies always seem to sidestep.
I play videogames and watch violent movies. This does not make me a cold-blooded assassin. My brother, on the other hand, could not as it would rub off on him significantly. The Senate is subtly saying "Censorship is OK".
Getting Paid To Abandon an Open Source Project? 654
darkeye writes "I'm facing a difficult dilemma and looking for opinions. I've been contributing heavily to an open source project, making considerable changes to code organization and quality, but the work is unfinished at the moment. Now, a company is approaching me to continue my changes. They want to keep the improvements to themselves, which is possible since the project is published under the BSD license. That's fair, as they have all the rights to the work they pay for in full. However, they also want me to sign a non-competition clause, which would bar me from ever working on and publishing results for the original open source project itself, even if done separately, in my free time. How would you approach such a decision? On one side, they'd provide resources to work on an interesting project. On the other, it would make me an outcast in the project's community. Moreover, they would take ownership of not just what they paid for, but also my changes leading up to this moment, and I wouldn't be able to continue on my original codebase in an open source manner if I sign their contract."
Germany Implements Sweeping Data Retention Policies 210
G'Quann writes "Starting next year, all communication providers in Germany will have to store all connection data for six months. This includes not only phone calls but also IP addresses and e-mail headers. There had been a lot of protest against the new law, but it was ignored by the government. Quoting: 'The content of the communications is not stored. The bill had been heavily criticized. Privacy [advocates] had organized demonstrations against the bill in all major German cities at the beginning of this week. In October there had already been a large demonstration with thousands of participants in Germany's capital Berlin. All opposition parties voted against the bill. Several members of the opposition and several hundred private protesters announced a constitutional complaint.'"
Ex AT&T Tech Says NSA Monitors All Web Traffic 566
Sir Tandeth writes "A former technician at AT&T, who alleges that the telecom giant forwards virtually all of its internet traffic into a 'secret room' to facilitate government spying, says the whole operation reminds him of something out of Orwell's 1984. Appearing on MSNBC's Countdown program, whistleblower Mark Klein told Keith Olbermann that all Internet traffic passing over AT&T lines was copied into a locked room at the company's San Francisco office — to which only employees with National Security Agency clearance had access. 'Klein was on Capitol Hill Wednesday attempting to convince lawmakers not to give a blanket, retroactive immunity to telecom companies for their secret cooperation with the government. He said that as an AT&T technician overseeing Internet operations in San Francisco, he helped maintain optical splitters that diverted data en route to and from AT&T customers. '"
Sony Calls Current Blu-ray/HD DVD Format War a 'Stalemate 547
unger814 writes "Sony CEO Howard Stringer says that Blu-ray and HD DVD are currently in a 'stalemate' and is 'playing down the importance of the battle.' Stringer addressed a crowd at Manhattan's 92nd Street Y cultural center Thursday, where he said that 'it was a matter of prestige' which format wins. Stringer pointed to the switch by Paramount from producing movies in both formats to only HD DVD as a turning point. 'We were trying to win on the merits, which we were doing for a while, until Paramount changed sides,' Stringer said."
Congress Pressures DoJ With PIRATE Part II 217
Anonymous Pirate writes "Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) have re-introduced the 'PIRATE Act' (pdf) to Congress. According to Ars Technica, the purpose of this act is to get the DoJ to go after individual copyright infringers. It would allow the Department of Justice to bring civil lawsuits instead of criminal ones so that they would be able to prosecute copyright infringers with only a minimal burden of proof, rather than the heavier burden required for criminal prosecution." Took a long time to do a sequel; we first talked about this proposal quite some time ago.
