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The Courts

UK Proposes Copyright Changes, Invites Comments->

Submitted by
JJC
JJC writes "Today the UK government's Intellectual Property Office has begun a consultation process about several proposed changes to UK copyright law.

The most interesting change from a Slashdotter's perspective is probably the creation of an exception to allow consumers to "format shift" content for use on different devices (nothing in current UK law allows consumers to copy audio CDs onto MP3 players, for example). The downside is that they do not propose for the exception to allow the circumvention of DRM (paragraph 114 of the consultation document [PDF]). If no circumvention of DRM is allowed then format shifting DVDs or "copy-protected" CDs will not be legal and copyright owners will be able to prevent any format shifting simply by applying some form of "technological protection" to the media.

The consultation runs until 8 April, and comments are accepted by e-mail."
Link to Original Source

Comment: What this is about (Score 2, Informative) 315

by JJC (#21925122) Attached to: McAfee Worried Over "Ambiguous" Open Source Licenses

So as far as I can tell, here's what this story is actually about:

McAfee makes a virus scanner for Linux. Presumably the "on-demand" scanning uses a closed-source kernel module. Some kernel developers (i.e. copyright holders) assert that it violates the GPL to distribute closed-source kernel modules (although NVIDIA's and ATI's lawyers presumably disagree). This has never been tested in court. If one of the kernel copyright holders decided to litigate and won, then McAfee might have to stop selling their product, or significant alter it. Since there is a risk of this happening, they are required to disclose it to investors.

Television

Daily Show writers find Youtube; speak on Strike

Submitted by Inakizombie
Inakizombie writes "The writers from the Daily Show have turned to Youtube to give their perspective on the writers' strike in the best way they know how, humorously. From the post "What do the writers of the Daily Show think of the ongoing writers' strike? If only there were some way to find out like, I don't know... clicking on the image(Youtube) to your left. It's so crazy, it might just work!""
First Person Shooters (Games)

Hourly Game Server Rental

Submitted by JJC1138
JJC1138 writes "PayAsYouPlay.org is a new service that offers game server rental on an hourly basis. It should suit people who would like to have occasional deathmatch sessions with friends, and also clans that don't need their server 24/7. So far 'Counter-Strike' and 'Counter-Strike: Source' are supported, but more games are coming soon."
Communications

BBC Uses Skype Links In Murder Hunt 193

Posted by kdawson
from the free-and-anonymous dept.
Nico M writes "The highly publicized UK murder hunt for the serial killer(s) of five young sex workers in Suffolk is using Skype to ask the public for information. BBC News is embedding freephone Skype links to both the police incident room and Crimestoppers UK. Is this the first time Skype has been used in this way?"
It's funny. Laugh.

Time's Person of the Year 2006 is... You

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Time Magazine's Person of the Year selects the person (man, woman, group or idea) that, "for better or worse, has most influenced events in the preceding year". Previous recipients have included Charles Lindbergh (1927), Adolf Hitler (1938), the Generation Twenty-Five and Under (1966), the Computer (1982) and the Endangered Earth (1988). The Person of the Year for 2006 is you. Time believes that you are the most influential person in 2006, by using the "Web 2.0" (i.e. Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace) to control the media and change the world. So give yourself a round of applause and a teary acceptance speech."

Ask Apache Software Chairman Greg Stein 117

Posted by Roblimo
from the many-feathers-in-his-cap dept.
Here's a man who obviously has his finger on the pulse of open source software development. I mean, who hasn't heard of Apache? His work history is interesting, too: He's moved from Microsoft to CollabNet to Google. And he's not shy about speaking his mind about open source, as shown in this ZDNet blog entry. Please try to confine yourself to one question per post. (If you have more than one question, post more than once.) We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Greg tomorrow and run his answers when we get them back.

Ekiga 2.0 Released 203

Posted by ScuttleMonkey
from the truly-free-speech dept.
Some Anonymous Coward writes "After about one year of development the former GnomeMeeting team has released Ekiga. Ekiga is the successor of the popular GnomeMeeting. Ekiga calls itself the very "first Open Source application to support both H.323 and SIP". Ekiga is based on the h323/sip codebase, provided by the openh323 project. Also introduced with this release is ekiga.net, a platform to provide the community with free sip addresses."

Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant. -- Edmund Burke