To get any government action on an internet issue, the best method is to show the government the direct effects of the problem. In other words: Slow down all government websites to a crawl. Especially the ones that the elected officials use regularly and expect to be speedy. Most likely the problem will be solved by throwing more tax payer money at the problem, but some conscientious politician will see the problem and start campaigning to get rid of the issue through a law.

It is often the case that an employee of a company signs an agreement with the employer indicating that all of the source code a developer produces belongs to the company. There is also the "Intellectual Property" agreements that are signed by the employee which indicate that all ideas generated by a developer belong to the company. Those two agreements indicate that once the source code is typed into the computer, it is then a company possession along with the ideas that generated the source code. A logical conclusion from those two agreements is that the developer when fixing defects is fixing defects in the company source code not his own code. Possession is what counts here.

In most cases the employee signs an agreement that indicates that all source code produced by a developer is the sole property of the company. As this is most likely the case, even if the developer created the defect (knowingly or unknowingly) the source code belongs to the company. Thus the developer is fixing company code not his own code. The only way that the developer should be fixing his own defects on his own time is when the company is buying the source code directly from the developer which means that the developer is not an employee of the company. A second point is that there are often in place agreements that indicate that every idea thought of by a person are the "Intellectual Property" of the company. Since the defect was a thought in the developers head as an idea, the company by agreement owns the thought or idea that generated the defect rendering the company responsible for the defect. Another argument that can be used in defense of the programmer is that in some cases the manager/supervisor has specifically stated that the code must go out to the customer within a specific time period and the programmer is obligated to send out the code despite any and all defects. In this case it can be argued that the manager/supervisor is directly responsible for the defects in the code due to time pressure. Those are my arguments against developers having to fix defects on their own time.

This is an interesting dilema for Google. In my opinion google should appeal the descision asking GEMA to provide a filtering algorithm that meets GEMAs demand. If GEMA cannot or will not supply the algorithm the Google should be able to ask the courts to reverse the decision based on the evidence that GEMA has asked google to do something that GEMA themselves cannot do.

Maybe this will force them into changing their marketing model and allowing artists to concentrate on music rather than creating an album. Nah. They are too entrenched in their position to allow themselves to change.