Comment Bindun... "hats made from shoes" (Score 1) 513
El Reg reported a similar incident a few months ago:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/17/wikipedia_and_the_mirror/
An Open Source Legal Breakthrough 292
jammag writes "Open source advocate Bruce Perens writes in Datamation about a major court victory for open source: 'An appeals court has erased most of the doubt around Open Source licensing, permanently, in a decision that was extremely favorable toward projects like GNU, Creative Commons, Wikipedia, and Linux.' The case, Jacobsen v. Katzer, revolved around free software coded by Bob Jacobsen that Katzer used in a proprietary application and then patented. When Katzer started sending invoices to Jacobsen (for what was essentially Jacobsen's own work), Jacobsen took the case to court and scored a victory that — for the first time — lays down a legal foundation for the protection of open source developers. The case hasn't generated as many headlines as it should."
Comment mySociety's parliament video site (Score 2, Interesting) 629
Just announced yesterday: mySociety's House of Commons video site. Crowd-source some video timestamps today!
Why might the government seek to close the site down? After all, aren't mySociety "the biggest single catalyst for political change in this country"? (Lord Gould of Brookwood, House of Lords debate, 15/6/06)
Well, they may be, but they may have fractured, or at least bent, a copyright law or two.
You see, Parliamentary video exists under a draconian copyright license under which it "must not be hosted on a searchable website and must not be downloadable", apparently for fear of naughty citizens making humorous or satirical use of it; or indeed any use at all.
To which the mySociety guys and gals seem to have said a collective, "Well that's silly," and gone ahead and done it anyway. Good on you, people.
Seriously, do your bit for democratic transparency and go and timestamp a few videos now. It's curiously addictive.
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