Most open-source "foundations" have been operating in a "give away the razor, sell the blades" mentality.

Give away the razor (base software), sell the blades (support contracts / phone support / specific pay-for-implementation requests / etc).

I can see why the IRS is having a hard time taking claims of being a nonprofit or public-benefit company seriously when that's examined. It's kind of taking the "how to make money off FOSS" instructions constantly published in the community at face value.

Trademark =/= Copyright.

They can copyright that fucking mouse all day long, the copyright on the older works is far overdue to reenter the public domain - especially when Walt, the fucking thief, took liberally from the commons to make most of his early successes.

Want to make a new creative work out of an old fairy tale today? Watch out you don't cross The Fucking Mouse's Army Of Lawyers. Nevermind that Sapsorrow/Cinderella is in the public domain, they'll come after you for making something "similar" to something they made based on the same thing.

Same thing for half of Hans Christian Andersen's catalog, same thing for so many songs where they blatantly stole the melodies from earlier-era, public domain music, and on and on and on. Disney and the copyright cartels see the public domain, not as a common resource for all, but their personally owned little idea-mining zone and that needs to fucking change.

It seems absurd to me that a work be protected for 95 years when the medium it was produced for will last less than a decade.

Paying GoG for their work in *adapting* the game - spending the time to troubleshoot or repack the installer, repack the system updates, correctly create the auto-configuration for Dosbox or other compatibility software, and so on - I'm perfectly fine with.

But the point is valid. We LOSE more than we gain from the public domain these days. Almost no software, except that specifically gifted to the public domain, is available like that. The media they are stored on dies, and those whose goal is preserving our digital history against the simple ravages of compatibility and bitrot must be willing to skirt the law in order to do so, which is frankly asinine.

The expansion of knowledge requires that it be brought to the public domain. I propose we limit copyright to a term no greater than that of patent, and require that the source code of any software be provided in the copyright filings so that it cannot be lost.

One reason companies hire contractors for jobs like this is visibility.

Another reason they hire contractors for jobs like this is to get a fall guy. "The code worked before we hired the contractor, now it doesn't work, obviously the contractor is to blame."

Stockholm Syndrome. It's very common among GOP-leaning employees who don't know how hard they get screwed thanks to the steady stripping away of regulatory and union protections for workers...

If the expert was wrong, then the defense should have shown them side-by-side to show the differences.

This. After reading the judge's ruling, I'm convinced it has more to do with the brand-new swimming pool in his backyard with an EA logo on the bottom than anything to do with the facts of the case...

But what ACTUALLY happens is that the big companies have their own attorney on staff, whose job it is to robosign "due diligence searches" without bothering to do them.

placing the burden on the patent holder to prove the patent is NOT the result of:

- Patent slamming to game the system (e.g. submitting the same fucking thing 100 different times hoping one submission will slip by an overworked patent reviewer)
- Patenting something already patented
- Patenting something that is already obvious
- Submarine-patenting

Time for a spate of lawsuits showing how commonly the word is used, and the throwing out of this candy-ass "trademark."

No, the USA is worse.

Iran and SA are slowly embracing the concept of treating women as equals. The GOP are actively trying to repeal women's rights.

Your fault for electing George Dumbass Bush... then Governor Hairgel... Taliban Dan... Louie Gohmert... Ted Cruz...

You'd be surprised how many stereotypes turn out to be right on when it comes to Texas...

"“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”"

--Isaac Asimov

Around here we call that dumbass "Taliban Dan." He's one of the worst of the worst of the GOP's "racist fucking moron christian" base-rousers.

Eventually.

After years of appeals, attempts to bury the employees in mounds of paperwork and bleed them dry on legal fees.

Followed by appeals over whether or not the defendants, if they lose, have to pay the plaintiffs' legal fees too...

Meanwhile, The H1-B Scam is alive and well, just two stories down from this one on the front page...