My understanding was he meant casing in the sense of wanting to break in while he was gone, since to some extent once you give up physical security all bets are off.

Two relevant anecdotes from when I was in college:

1) In an artificial life course we got to propose our own semester project. One guy wanted to write a worm, but the professor was afraid that his tenure would not be enough to protect his job if the worm got out of hand.

2) One faculty member that taught a computer security course used to make the offer that anybody who could successfully access his gradebook and change their grade could have the higher grade. He stopped doing this after students switched from trying to electronically break in to just casing his house.

That's a good question that I don't really have an answer for. I don't know know where the line is drawn for reverse engineering -- just dumping the entry points or actively inspecting the internals to figure out what it's doing. Or they could claim that they discovered an undocumented API when testing a random application that failed.

I don't know if angry ninjas were actively involved, but I remember a few years ago they basically froze development to do a code audit. Something about making sure they were able to prove there was nothing in the code base that had been reverse engineered and that all the code was either freshly written or had been copied from publicly-available sources. http://www.reactos.org/wiki/Audit

I had the same experience with ReactOS as several other posters... I installed it on a VM, saw all of the screenshots on the site of "look what we can run!" and tried to replicate some of those, and basically had one crash after another

Ah, glad to see somebody beat me to saying this. One of my buddies in undergrad had the same "I don't want to pirate" mentality, but he wanted to play Super Metroid sometime in that period between a real SNES being readily available and the knockoffs you can buy for $30 being available. His solution, of course, was to get ZSNES and the ROM, but he also went out to a GameStop or something and bought a used copy of the cart.

A patent covers the method, not the implementation. If the patent is expired and the code is not covered under copyright, you can use it. If there are other patents that cover it that aren't expired, then you'd still be exposed to trolling.

(IANAL)

I'm waiting for the email from Defective By Design demanding that we boycott emacs and/or send large amounts of some token object to Stallman.

They've actually started posting signs around Charlottesville to alert both bicyclists and drivers when a cyclist can use the full lane.

FTFY. At least, in this case. I mean, sure, bash Facebook's privacy debacles, and bash Microsoft's patent strong-arming, but there's no real reason to bash them in the context of this article.

And now I will get modded down for daring to disagree without posting as AC.

This is covered a bit in TFA. They reference a case that does remote DVR storage and make the distinction that having one copy that you send to multiple people becomes a broadcast, whereas keeping an individual copy for each person that uploads it is actually streaming the individual their own copy. So essentially, for your work case, you would have to have an individual disc, file, whatever medium stored the content you were streaming, and make sure that you were demonstrably sending a different copy of the same bits to different members. (This article What Colour are your bits seems relevant.) The implication appears to be that Google and Amazon will not be able to use any sort of duplication-based compression to save space when multiple people upload the same track, if they don't want to run afoul of broadcast licensing restrictions.