Ok, a couple of things with the second part of your statement first, in that case, while at Common Law you would be liable for the possession of stolen goods (going back to British cases such as Cundy v. Lindsay), in most jurisdictions these days there are statutory rules protecting purchasers from sales of businesses (though, it usually only applies to sales from a business, not between individuals). The entire theory of "Good Faith" is nice; however, it's not necessarily a legal defence, if you're negligent, it doesn't matter what your intention was.

With regards to comments on the first part, and the situation in question here, yeah, while people were debating back and forth who owned the images in question, it was a relatively gray area (though even that would depend on what "proof" the gentleman provided the stock image firm), which the courts would sort out in time. Based on the statements though, it appears that the Stock Image group or their lawyer crossed some big black lines in calling clients and claiming that the gentleman had stolen images. There are all sorts of charges that can come from this, depending on the nature of the statements, etc. though defamation may be a fairly east case if you can show they made factual statements which are not true (especially in the US). As mentioned elsewehre, if it's found that sufficient proof was provided to establish that he did own the images prior to the legal battle, more charges (dependant on the locale) may be possible, and it would definetely affect the damages awarded.

Hardly, this is a decision from a Court of Appeal, so all courts under its juristdiction are obligated to follow it unless they can distinguish the case, it's a fairly scary precedent. While trial level courts will hopefully read the ratio of the case narrowly and minimise the damage that can be caused (by allowing most other cases to be distinguised), it's up to the individual judge on how he reads the case and its impact, and I'd disagree with the article that this couldn't be interpreted (by a trial judge) to apply to speech other than that between private parties, which would end up coming back to the Court of Appeal (though quite possibly differnt judges on the panel) to "clarify."

At least for now, it appears that in Massachusetts, the truth is not necessarily a defence against the tort of libel, which is a pretty scary prospect, right up there with British Columbia rewriting the rules on defamation regarding private conversations.

Given the comments recently about multicore processors being the norm, and the greater push for specialized silicon, optimizing Linux for Cell processors could be a positive step if we see these innovations move into more mainstream use.

Having said that, has anyone benchmarked the performance of the kernel on the Playstation? Is it only at a "it runs" point, or is there actually decent tailoring to the Cell processor, so that it takes advantage of the architecture?