04.05.09
Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Identity Management, Microsoft at 2:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
LIKE HIM or hate him, the man is considered influential and his words on Microsoft as of late have not been particularly encouraging. He has already moved some computer/s of his to GNU/Linux, which impressed him. Now he opines that Google, a ‘Linux poster child’ in some people’s eyes, may replace Microsoft.
The point is that Google has given us only glimpses of its potential, and if we were to equate it with Microsoft, it would be like buying Microsoft stock today for 30 cents to 40 cents a share.
In a separate new piece, Dvorak argues that “Microsoft’s Negative Brand Image Gets Worse.”
It’s the Microsoft brand that attracts negative attention, don’t you think? I’ve said this before in other columns, but Microsoft has lost control of its own brand image. The company lost it years ago, and I now see the brand itself as a negative factor. The exercise above confirms this if the conclusions are correct, and I believe they are.
We have already covered many reports and surveys about Microsoft’s ever-declining brand, so this is factual.
Speaking of branding, The New York Times has this new report on “Microsoft and the Corporate Identity Crisis.” Microsoft’s identity management ambitions face new hurdles as parts of the company are falling apart.
It goes without saying that Microsoft has alternative business models in mind. Microsoft’s strategy of fining or sending its partners to prison sure continues.
A federal judge in Milwaukee has ordered Anthony Boldin, operator of AtomicPark.com and other businesses, to pay $1.2 million to Microsoft Corp. for selling counterfeit software.
Microsoft has another strategy of making money from other companies, namely software patents. An update on this subject will come shortly.
This monopolist’s fall will happen only once, so it ought to be captured and documented properly. █
“Every time you use Google, you’re using a machine running the Linux kernel.”
–Chris DiBona, Google
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Posted in Fraud, Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Novell at 1:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Hungary starts embracing more Free software, but Novell is a mismatch
THIS is not yet another report about Microsoft’s corruption in Hungary [1, 2, 3]. Hungary is actually beginning to soften (not Soften) and consider Free software. Mistakenly however, an official in Hungary lists Novell as a prime candidate, despite the fact that Novell — by its own admission — is merely a mixed source company. Here is the word from realdeal.hu (small Hungarian press):
Under a general agreement on public procurement procedures, the same amount will be allocated for the acquisition of Microsoft and Novell products as for open source software, said Ferenc Baja. The sum available is 12 billion forints each, he added.
From Heise Online:
The Hungarian government has announced that it will be modifying procurement rules to allow open source to be used in public sector organisations. Previously, procurement rules had apparently named vendors such as Microsoft and Novell. The new rules, according to Ferenc Baja, deputy minister for information technology, will allocate the same amount of money to acquiring open source products as to proprietary products. The move was announced at a press conference on April 2nd.
This is said to be targeted at education. Some years ago, when Hungarian schools were bound to go GNU/Linux, Microsoft dumped Windows XP, Office XP, Front Page, Visual Studio, and BackOffice CAL to sabotage this plan, as revealed by its own confidential documents. The monopolist is likely to try this again, so it’s important to keep one's egg basket in check. █
“If you believe that discrimination exists, it will.”
–Anthony J. D’Angelo
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Office Suites, Security, Windows at 12:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Expensive office suites leave one’s bank account exposed to malice
Summary: Microsoft Office users are left critically vulnerable and no solution exists to prevent attacks
Conficker is far from gone, but the ‘vulnerabilities treadmill’ marches on. Another unpatched Microsoft Office vulnerability is already being exploited and Microsoft admits this. It is the same old and familiar routine, but Microsoft brought this vulnerability even to Apple Macs.
Microsoft has warned of a vulnerability in their PowerPoint application that can be exploited with a specially crafted presentation file to allow remote execution of code. According to the report, the vulnerability is caused by an invalid object in memory and affects Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2000 Service Pack 3, 2002 Service Pack 3, 2003 Service Pack 3 and Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac. Other versions are reportedly not affected.
More coverage in:
It would probably be more forgivable had it been patched on time, not been such a frequent occurrence, and Windows leadership not said that Microsoft products “just aren’t engineered for security.”
For a secure, free, and standards-compliant office suite, GNU/Linux is recommended because it comes preloaded with one (or several). █
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Posted in Apple at 12:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: New evidence that shows Apple’s poor attitude towards openness/freedom
• Apple cracks down on rogue app stores
Apple has launched a pre-emptive strike on stores selling unauthorised iPhone applications, by changing the terms and conditions of the iPhone SDK to make authoring content for such sites against the rules.
• T-Mobile Germany Banning Skype for iPhone
We in the U.S. love to complain. Take this week’s introduction of Skype for the iPhone. The mobile VoIP client appears to be a pretty solid offering, letting you not only chat with your Skype buddies, but also make voice calls — as long as you’re using the Wi-Fi connection, a stipulation Apple had pointed out way back in March 2008 when it first unveiled the iPhone SDK. (Also see PCWorld.com’s review.)
• Group Prods FCC to Defend Skype on iPhone
An open-Internet advocacy group asked the Federal Communications Commission Friday to investigate whether Apple Inc. and AT&T Inc. are violating federal rules by limiting use of a new low-cost Skype voice service on iPhones.
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Posted in America, Antitrust, Deception, Europe, Google, Microsoft at 12:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
No wonder Microsoft employees take shelter amidst G20 protests
Summary: Disregard for its surroundings costs Microsoft dearly in the public mind
SUFFICE TO SAY because we’ve covered the Abramoff-Microsoft story before, there is nothing wrong with workers in the west. Not only Novell is replacing them right now, but so does Microsoft (it played a major role in making it possible) and it’s covered in the business press. They are of course perfuming what they do in order to remove guilt and reduce backlash from the public.
The company’s stance has attracted heat from critics of the H-1B program, especially as Microsoft announced it would lay off some U.S. workers. But on Mar. 31, Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith continued to advocate for more skilled immigration, posting a blog item outlining the company’s views on H-1B visas. “While the number of visa holders is very small compared to the U.S. workforce, their contribution is huge,” Smith wrote. “For example, last year 35% of Microsoft’s patent applications in the U.S. came from new inventions by visa and green card holders.”
Microsoft Defends the Program
“The future success of Microsoft and every other U.S. technology company depends on our ability to recruit the world’s best talent,” adds Smith. “While the vast majority of Microsoft’s U.S. workforce is American, Microsoft hires foreign workers to bring specially needed skill sets to our U.S. operations and to fill roles when qualified American workers are not available.”
Microsoft’s arguments are rebutted in the following new posting.
Labor leaders and some experts contend that the high-tech labor shortage is a myth.
“The industry claim to need H-1Bs to remedy a labor shortage is false. Their claim that the H-1Bs are ‘the best and the brightest,’ needed to keep American firms innovative, is also false in the vast majority of cases. Instead, the employers’ goal is use H-1Bs as a source of cheap labor,” writes Norman Matloff, a computer science professor at University of California, Davis, in a 2007 report.
We have shown in many prior posts, based on independent studies, that this insult to the intelligence of American people is intended only to improve the company’s bottom line. Like many other lies — including the lie about patents defending small inventors — this one is hardly challenged in the press, which usually just parrots the talking points [1, 2] of greedy executives who own this press.
In addition to that, concern for the environment is rarely a consideration to those whose aspirations align with shareholders’. According to this new reports, Microsoft sank to the bottom of ratings in Greenpeace’s books.
Greenpeace has updated their Guide to Greener Electronics and they don’t fair well for Nintendo and Microsoft, the two companies finished dead last and third to last respectively.
The mainstream press, including some broader-reach Web sites like CNN and Bloomberg, wrote about the controversy over Microsoft’s use of taxpayers’ money (bailout) to build luxurious bridges that mostly serve itself. According to the press in Seattle, a taxpayers group has just stepped in because there are other similar abuses of taxpayers' money, all courtesy of Microsoft, an international tax evader. It’s no surprise that over in London, Microsoft decided to take cover from angry mobsters who are rightly protesting.
As one of the articles points out, Google’s branch in London did not need to do this. Perhaps it’s because Google, unlike Microsoft, does not have a history of abuse, fraud, and crime. █
“How many crimes are committed simply because their authors could not endure being wrong.”
–Albert Camus
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Posted in Microsoft, Vista, Windows at 11:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: New articles of interest, mostly those showing a decline in dominance
• Microsoft allows HP to wipe Windows 7 with XP through 2010
Despite valiant efforts to push its Windows licensees to adopt Vista and the forthcoming Windows 7, Microsoft has one again agreed to extend the option of selling Windows XP for use on new PCs for another year, through April 30, 2010.
• Microsoft’s unprofessional and defective VISTA platform
Office of the Texas Attorney General follows-up on my formal complaint to State Senator Juan Hinojosa against Microsoft for ripping-off Texans with their unprofessional, defective and incompatible VISTA software. Letter of complaint posted below AG’s response. Other states should follow and hold Microsoft accountable.
• Compute: A closer look at Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8
That aside, IE8 is not a bad product. It’s no Firefox, which remains my favorite browser by far.
[...]
Performance-wise I didn’t notice much difference than IE7 but I confess I am very comfortable with Firefox at home at this point. At work I use IE6 or IE7 almost all day and the move to IE8 at home really didn’t mean any big changes for me either in performance or having to think how to do anything differently or rethink any menus or toolbars.
• Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 Fails To Halt Firefox Gains
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Posted in Finance, Microsoft, Open XML at 10:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Portions of Microsoft up for sale
Summary: Microsoft to let go of Franchise Gator; Paul Allen suffers a blow; Microsoft Stirling postponed
WHAT is a company to do when debt is just around the corner [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]? Let redundant bits go, of course. Microsoft has already laid off many employees, but it's not enough. Having just decided to shut in the attic an old expensive trophy which is Encarta (among many other products and services), Microsoft proceeds to selling Franchise Gator.
Microsoft’s digital advertising division, which includes what was formerly aQuantive, has sold off its small subsidiary Franchise Gator, to Landmark Interactive, paidContent has learned. The sale price is around $20 million.
This is also covered in the following articles, so it’s apparently more than just an early/premature rumour:
There is no end to it. Rumours suggest that Microsoft might sell Razorfish because, like many other divisions, it’s just not working out, both financially and technically [1, 2]. This may lead to a rapid decline in Microsoft’s value.
Speaking of Microsoft and financial difficulties, its cofounder’s ‘baby’ has entered a debt of $21,000,000,000. How quietly such things can happen.
Charter officials have said that Allen, co-founder of Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) and owner of the Portland Trail Blazers, will retain 35 percent voting control of the company, down from 91 percent. And his 51 percent stake in shares will drop to 3 percent.
Charter filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Friday in an effort to reduce its $21 billion debt by $8 billion.
More coverage can be found in:
This was pretty predictable.
And here is yet another Microsoft delay, demonstrating the vapourware tactics run deep in the company's veins.
Microsoft delays Stirling security suite until late 2009/early 2010
Microsoft had been planning to deliver its integrated security suite, codenamed “Stirling” in the first half of this year. On April 3, company officials admitted that Stirling, instead, will begin rolling out very late this year, with substantial components not coming until early 2010.
All in all, not good for Microsoft. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Freeswitch + mod_skypiax = Skype for all?
Skype for SIP beta program, announced last week, is a big step for the VoIP industry. Still, as I said before, Skype has more way to go before it becomes truly interoperable and could provide advanced VoIP features. Currently, Skype for SIP is aimed at organizations with IP-PBX wishing to integrate its SIP standard with Skype. It is not known at this time when, and if, Skype will launch a similar program for individuals.
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If you own a TV, or have a friend who knows a thing or two about computers, you have probably heard about Linux. For those who haven’t, Linux is an open-source operating system (OS) and Microsoft Windows’ worst nightmare – by Microsoft’s own admission. Microsoft is not worried about Apple’s Mac OS for the same reason that you yourself aren’t currently running it. It may be awesome, but it’s just too expensive. You also might not be able to run your favourite “educational” applications on it (a.k.a. games) and, until recently, it couldn’t run on IBM PC compatible hardware. Linux, on the other hand, can run on pretty much anything. This includes everything from your beloved Mac hardware and handheld devices to your grandma’s old 386 computer and PlayStation 3 (or PS2). As a matter of fact, it might even be running your $30 router at home – not to mention most of the websites you visited today, if not all.
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Ask a network administrator in any large organisation to compare Linux with network operating systems like Windows NT or Novell Open Enterprise Server, and chances are he’ll admit that Linux is an inherently more stable and scalable solution.
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I just picked it up last Monday, and I told the girl at Kinko’s that my boss was going to be tickled pink when he saw it. She said she thought it looked really good for something produced “in house”, and seemed quite surprised when I told her I made it on a Linux computer running nothing but Open Source software.
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Applications
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Following the series like 14 most popular text editors for Linux or 10 file managers for Linux, next is an overview of the best audio players available in Linux. I will only review the GUI players, leaving tools like mp3blaster, mpg123 or ogg123 for some other time.
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KMyMoney does not support check printing. GnuCash sort of supports check printing: one at a time. You can’t do batches. Many of the devs in both projects live outside of the USA, and are amused at how we cling to using paper checks.
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Games
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For those that have faced issues with WINE or CodeWeaver’s CrossOver Games, perhaps you may want to try out the latest release of Cedega. Transgaming has just released Cedega 7.1.1, which is the first point release since Cedega 7.1 was released a month ago.
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Nearly a year ago Nexuiz 2.4 was released and it offered impressive graphics along with a new menu design, improved networking performance, reduced memory usage, and many other enhancements to this open-source game. The developers behind this first person shooter have now outdone themselves again with the release of Nexuiz 2.5. This latest release of Nexuiz brings even better graphics capabilities along with a new HUD, network communication improvements that cut the bandwidth in half, smarter bots, even better graphics, and several new maps. In total more than 3,000 changes make up Nexuiz 2.5!
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Since some months we have Lemote Yeeloong, the first fully free software laptop but what about gNewSense, our fully free software favourite distribution?
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Red Hat
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Leading open source provider Red Hat is witnessing a spurt in growth alongside a global tendency to seek value for money. Red Hat India president and managing director Nandu Pradhan told ET that the company was witnessing good traffic with its customers and partners, with the performance reflected in high double digit growth.
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All things considered, Fedora 11 progress looks good and the release is shaping up nicely. The developers are already looking to the future and have begun the process of drafting a schedule for Fedora 12, which could potentially arrive in October.
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John “J5″ Palmieri explains how the Fedora community–codename MyFedora–is bringing Fedora users together by integrating self-contained applications into a single framework application. This interface enables Fedora users to see and keep track of what applications other community members are working with.
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Ubuntu
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Windows only: Free application Portable Ubuntu for Windows runs an entire Linux operating system as a Windows application. As if that weren’t cool enough, it’s portable, so you can carry it on your thumb drive.
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The Bifferboard incorporates a 150MHz RDC R8610 CPU, consumes one Watt, and offers 32MB of SDRAM and 1GB flash, pre-loaded with OpenWrt Linux 2.6.27.5, says the company.
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Longtime Linux VoIP stack vendor HelloSoft is shipping a VoWiFi (voice-over WiFi) phone turnkey reference design with a claimed talk time of 15 to 20 hours. Integrating the company’s low-power, ARM-based HS100 IP Convergence Processor, the design ships with a Linux BSP, says the vendor.
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Texas Instruments (TI) and its partners announced two video security reference designs that are based on TI’s TMS320DM365 and ship with Linux SDKs. The IP camera design (pictured) from Appro Photoelectron offers HD/H.264 video, and the DVR design from UD Works provides multi-channel recording, says TI.
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Sub-notebooks
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The Linux laptop business represents a Chinese industry trying to serve a Western market and getting lost in the translation.
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The next generation of Linux laptops will run the same ARM system used in phones, which is why Chinese makers are looking to Android, a phone operating system, as their guide.
The total hardware cost is about $20. Everything else is the case and the bling. With a 1 GHz ARM chip and $200 price point Microsoft may be unable to compete. At least for now.
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Huge swaths of the market have apparently adopted open-source infrastructure like the Linux operating system, JBoss application server, MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, and other open-source systems…
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The difference is that Open BlueDragon is 100% Open-Source, and 100% free to use for any purpose. OpenBD is released under the GPLv3 license.
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Business Intelligence (BI)
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Jaspersoft have updated their open source Business Intelligence (BI) Suite with Jaspersoft v3.5. The new version has two major new features, in-memory analysis and multi-tenant operations. In-memory analysis allows the client to perform data analysis on their local system, rather than sending queries to an OLAP server or data warehouse, so businesses which do not have the resources or capabilities to set up an OLAP server or data warehouse can now still perform analysis.
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Open-source BI and I have come to a parting of ways. OS-BI capabilities, reliability, and support have matured. Commercial OS-BI vendors now compete with BI market leaders.
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New releases from JasperSoft and Pentaho underscore the growing importance of Software as a Service for data analytics.
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Healthcare
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However, the $20 billion package also contains a more obscure provision that has buoyed hopes among advocates of open-source technologies projects that have struggled to gain acceptance in the health IT marketplace.
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The federal stimulus package includes a provision that directs HHS to conduct a study to examine the availability of open source health IT systems and compare the total cost of ownership with the cost of proprietary systems, Government Health IT reports.
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Support for XSPA Sun Microsystems “The Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) is the poster child for all of the benefits that open source software and open standards provide,” said Bill Vass, president and COO of Sun Microsystems. “The federal government has built a working prototype capable of being deployed across multiple agencies in a matter of months with minimal costs.
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Red Hat “As a leader in open source, we are committed to adoption of OASIS security standards, and we support industry interoperability efforts surrounding them. We are eager to showcase the applicability of standards and open source technology to enable privacy and secure transmission in e-healthcare.
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IBM and the Mayo Clinic have partnered to offer the open source development community a crack at their new natural language processing (NLP) initiative, the Open Health Natural Language Processing Consortium.
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Business
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Last week, I’ve attended Philly ETE conference, which I enjoyed very much. Michael Tiemann, Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat, delivered the key note on the first day. His presentation was titled Exonovation: Leveraging Innovation from the Edge.
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Open source content management company has celebrated doubling its revenue in the last financial year by launching a new version of its software.
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The overlaps between the pigeon holes that we put software in are getting more and more common. ECM, Enterprise Content Management, is not something I normally cover. Alfresco however provides a Business Operating Platform (BOM) for content. In addition it has 2 interesting credentials: firstly it is an open source product and secondly the company is led by John Newton, founder of Documentum, and John Powell, former COO of Business Objects.
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Eclipse made the announcement Monday at Eclipsecon 2009. Swordfish, which is described as a next-generation ESB, aims at providing the flexibility and extensibility for deploying a service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy. Based on the OSGi standard, the new ESB builds upon such successful open-source projects as Eclipse Equinox and Apache ServiceMix.
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Enables Hughes to smoothly migrate to PrismTech’s OpenFusion CORBA solution
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The British Transport Police (BTP) has chosen Spatial Technology’s ISM Web Open Source based GIS mapping solution for deployment across its whole organisation. Significantly this decision follows close on the heels of the Government’s latest pronouncement on Open Source software which recommends more widespread consideration and adoption across the public sector.
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Funding
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And he is not alone. John Turner, director of networks and systems at Brandeis University, turned to freely available open source tools in lieu of a commercial monitoring software product, and fortunately for him, one vendor offered both.
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FSF/GNU
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One of the largest Free Software events in the world, the 10th edition of the International Free Software Forum called for papers. Proposals due on April 26th 2009.
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Releases
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Today Djigzo have released a new version of their open source email encryption gateway product.
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Open source web meeting and collaboration vendor dimdim is out with version 5 of their platform today. The key new enhancements are webinar widgets and improved screen sharing (screen casting).
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Transverse, a leader in providing high-quality, low-cost carrier-grade business support solutions (BSS), today announced the availability of blee(p) Enterprise Edition, the commercially supported version of the industry’s first open source BSS solution for telecom service providers. Transverse is showcasing blee(p) Enterprise Edition at the CTIA Wireless Show, April 1-3, 2009, at the Las Vegas Conference Center in booth # 6367.
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Sun
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Today I post the performance finding from the OpenOffice.org User Survey 2009 (OOoUS2009). The OOoUS2009 can be accessed via the registration landing page of OOo linking to our LimeSurvey tooling.
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OpenOffice.org (http://www.openoffice.org) is my personal favorite productivity suite. It is free for public use and includes replacements of Word, Excel, Access, and PowerPoint. I have not had any issues in my two-plus years of using OpenOffice as my choice for replacement of Microsoft Office. OpenOffice will even open MS Office documents and save as MS Office files.
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Government
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The Hungarian government has announced that it will be modifying procurement rules to allow open source to be used in public sector organisations. Previously, procurement rules had apparently named vendors such as Microsoft and Novell. The new rules, according to Ferenc Baja, deputy minister for information technology, will allocate the same amount of money to acquiring open source products as to proprietary products. The move was announced at a press conference on April 2nd.
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Programme to boost open source skills in government and industry to receive part of Germany’s €500 million IT sector stimulus package
The German government has revealed that some of €500 million it has earmarked for boosting the country’s IT sector during the downturn will be directed towards boosting its open source software skills base.
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Licensing
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Various license offshoots of the BSD family tree, whether Eclipse (beloved of IBM) or Apache (hearted by Google) or Microsoft’s various licenses, are one-sided because those companies put so much work into the projects they sponsor. The relative contributions of the communities and the sponsors are unequal, and will likely remain so.
If you want the codebase you built to grow, go with the GPL.
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Knowledge
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I personally feel it is terrible to *train* students mainly to use closed source commercial mathematics software. This is analogous to teaching students some weird version of linear algebra or calculus where they have to pay a license fee each time they use the fundamental theorem of calculus or compute a determinant.
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The government will send Congress a bill before the end of April that seeks to guarantee Brazilians the right to gain access to public information, the president’s chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff, said during the International Seminar on Access to Public Information, which took place in Brasília this week, Agência Brasil reports.
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K-12 educators are increasingly responsive to the open source model for curriculum development, distribution, and use. FreeReading.net is used by educators in all 50 states and in more than 180 countries. FreeReading has been adopted in Florida as a K-1 supplemental reading program, marking the first time that an open source instructional program has been approved through an official state adoption.
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The story of Britannica is now a business-school case study in how rapidly competitors can emerge – apparently from nowhere – in a digital world. The First Rule of Business nowadays is that somewhere out there someone (and not just Google) is incubating a business plan that is based on eating your lunch.
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Programming
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As GCC nears its 4.4 release, there are a number of criteria that need to be met before it can be released. Those requirements—regressions requiring squashing—have been met, but things are still stalled. A number of issues were raised with the changes to the runtime library exemption that have caused the release, and a branch that will allow new development into the GCC tree, to be delayed until that is resolved. In the meantime, however, GCC development is hardly standing still, there are numerous interesting ideas floating around for new features.
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Why would Google spend over $250 million for Twitter, an open source project written in Rails?
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Censorship/Web Abuse
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Hello, this is CygonX. Our Hosting Data Center has suffered a major disaster: Namely the FBI storming the Data Center and the company’s owner’s home (that’s me). The FBI took an entire data center, hundreds of servers, routers, switches, UPS system, cabinets, monitors, printers, and even power strips…as evidence.
[...]
So the FBI is under-funded, under-educated, under-staffed, and they don’t have the budget or the man hours to truly investigate anything. The CSI you see on TV, is 100% not real. The lead agent of the investigation is non-technical. I could barely have a conversation with him. They just don’t get it, they don’t understand the business, and it’s actually their lack of technical expertise that caused them to raid my home, office, and data center to begin with.
They found no drugs, no guns, and no evidence of any criminal activity. No one has been arrested, and to the best of our collective knowledge and attorneys, no one has even been charged with anything.
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Copyrights
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Musical theatre impresario Andrew Lloyd-Webber has railed against ISPs in the House of Lords for profiting from internet piracy, and urged the government to clamp down hard.
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Nearly two dozen public interest groups, trade pacts and library groups urged President Barack Obama on Thursday to quit filling his administration with insiders plucked from the Recording Industry Association of America.
The demands came a week after the Justice Department, fresh with two RIAA attorneys in its No. 2 and No. 3 positions, announced the administration’s support of $150,000 in damages for each music track purloined on a peer-to-peer file sharing program. The administration, moreover, has just declared as classified the inner workings of worldwide intellectual property trade pact. And Hollywood is urging Obama to embrace internet filtering as the content industry seeks to cut internet access to repeat copyright violators.
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Glickman won’t be laughing these days.
TorrentFreak reports he’s been told his services will no longer be required, and we had an email – no doubt prompted by the TF report – saying the same.
So who will the Hollywood moguls find to replace him? And can it be done within 18 months?
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Following the departure of founders Randy Saaf and Octavio Herrera, the future for MediaDefender looked even more uncertain than it did previously. However, those concerned that their favorite anti-piracy spoofing company might drift away, fear no more. MediaDefender’s parent company just acquired everyone’s favorite anti-piracy tracking company, MediaSentry
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A year and a half ago, we were quite surprised when the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals actually sided with Larry Lessig, concerning how a part of copyright law that pulled foreign works out of the public domain was potentially unconstitutional. This was in the “Golan case,” the third of three big copyright cases Lessig had championed.
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The media mogul says Google is stealing from publishers. It could be the call to arms that newsrooms need.
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These days, it’s nearly impossible not to infringe on copyright in one way or another during your regular day — but it’s always amusing when big-time copyright supporters are caught infringing (and it seems to happen quite frequently). The latest is musicFIRST, the lobbying group funded (potentially illegally) by the recording industry, which has been pushing a campaign claiming that radio is piracy and demanding that radio stations pay even more royalties than they already do.
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But what it doesn’t discuss is why do we need such licensing schemes at all? Why not just let musicians come up with the various business models that work. No one’s trying to take away their “right to get paid.” We just think that — like everyone else — they should earn it not by some sort of welfare/tax/licensing program, but through making use of business models where open and willing transactions are made.
Nat Friedman 12
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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