Gonzalez: Don't even Try.

Alberto Gonzalez is on some kind of intellectual property spree this week. He's now proposing The Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007. If passed, the 1 to 10 years for copyright infringement would apply to people attempting to download copyrighted material, because, basically, it's the thought that counts.

You'd have thought Alberto Gonzalez was a bigger fan of stealing information, after all he's been accused of illegal wiretapping private residences, so he knows how intolerable it is to be left in the dark.

Alberto Gonzales=RIAA Puppet

Alberto Gonzales has lengthened prison sentences for copyright violators. As he says, "These crimes, as we all know, also have a direct impact on our economy, costing victims millions of dollars." Fortunately, the "victims" are very few corporations. And as we've seen in this blog, even they aren't actually losing that much. So the law gets harder while the software gets looser. Where will this crazy train end?!

Microsoft wants everyone's money!

Doesn't sound like news by the headline, but they're serious! In a major move against Free OSS (FOSS), a lot of open-source software developers have used not code, but 235 patented features of Microsoft products. In fact, Microsoft hopes to get money from both distributors and USERS of FOSS.

Disney busts Donald Lookalike

Through pure coersion, Disney has managed to make Mexican soft drink manufacturer Pascual Boing to change its logo. Maybe this kind of legal threat scares people in Mexico, but if Disney acted on this, just imagine how angry they are about the Disneyland knock off!

Chinese Generic... Disneyland???

Yup, China has walked the line of copyright infringement and opened a state-owned park that I can only describe as "almost Disneyland." Let's take a look:

That castle is very close to Disneyland's. But it isn't...

Hey that almost looks like Donald and Minnie... nahhh...

So where are the copyright lawyers on this one? How close is too close? I think this is an excellent example of "The lines only exist in your mind, once the culture is publicly known, it's publicly owned, so get over it." The nearly-identical nature of the park is so absurd it's a wonderful critique of how modern copyright policy runs counter to nature.

Teachers Dislike Having Tables Turned

That's really too bad, but a New South Wales Secondary School wants to shut down Rate My Teachers.com for its defamatory content. That's rough, I think failing students would fire teachers who give them bad grades too, for defaming them in the face of their parents, but unfortunately we all have voices.

The college equivealent of the site is Rate my Professors.com, and it's really great. I try to be as honest as possible. It really turns teaching into the competetive field that it should be, by letting students select the most enriching college experience. I don't know how many teacher options High School students get, but if it makes teachers squeamish, they have two options:

1) Teach Better
2) Shut down the site

So, in the spirit of any bureaucratic sloth, these teachers are showing us all just how pathetic humans can be.

U.S. Coerses Nations into Art Burning

In a move reminiscent of Farenheit 451 or the Nazi regime,

The U.S. has declared a list of 12 nations it intends to "watch" for their unsatisfactory anti-piracy measures. If nations do not comply with the U.S. standards of intellectual property, we just might lay sanctions on them.

I mean, I think it's great we want people to get credit. But now we're burning culture. There's one side, giving compensation to the artist, but what this represents is limiting the cultural enrichment of the impoverished person who can't afford every album ever made. CDs hold many books worth of data, so seeing a pile of CDs prepared for burning should set off all sorts of humanist alarms. If these policies succeed, we're looking at an intellectual dark age. Fortunately I think it's crazy to believe these policies will work.

Cnet: "Die, Banner Ads!"

Cnet, a site that makes its revenue off banner ads, has proclaimed the new service "We7.com" is doomed because it offers free, DRM-free music at the price of an audio ad embedded on every track. At first I thought it was just banner ads, but in fact every song has an ad, and a "don't steal" tag. It's pretty annoying.

However, if there's a clever coder out there who wants to make a script that automatically trims the ads out, I'd love to have it. The files are DRM-free, after all.

Microsoft Going Semi-Open-Source

As if responding to my last post, Microsoft announced it will partially open source it's new "Silverlight" piece of software. Of course, it's still only partially open, and they're still charging people money to use it. So is it really open source?

One man Driver-writing Machine

In a feat of freelance programming, a French programmer running Linux bought a cheap webcam and decided he needed drivers. He went on a rampage, and ended up coding 352 webcam drivers for Linux.

What kind of world are we living in, where people write huge portions of operating system software for free? Linux in many forms is a free operating system, and this man is enabling video chat for a whole population of people who have never paid Microsoft or Apple for their computer's main OS.

Does this represent a new way of coding computers that will replace big market styles, or will huge Google-armies always be able to strongarm better software?

For one thing, Firefox is continuing to gain popularity (around 31% of all web traffic!). Even in Europe, Firefox is being run nearly 25% of the time the internet is used.

As of right now, the limiting factor for open source software is not programmers, but ideas for innovation. There is a standing call for any Mac users to complain about Firefox on their OS so that it might be enhanced. That's more responsive than most corporations! Will they retake the browser wars, or has the war already been won?