● 06.23.10

● Links 23/6/2010: Mandriva Receives Investments, Red Hat Surges

Posted in News Roundup at 5:36 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Recently, a new client called with a Quickbooks issue. I should probably mention that I do a lot of Quickbooks (POS and Financials) troubleshooting. Most generally this work is done in Windows.

• Sometimes, however, we get a call about a Quickbooks Linux server. That was the case this time. What was going on was the client’s machines were all losing connectivity to the server. So they called me in. I gained remote access to the server and started poking around.

• The feature allowed PlayStation users to replace the standard PS3 operating system with a different one, such as Linux – a popular free alternative to Windows available for download on the internet – allowing them to use the device as a personal computer as well as a video games console.

Events

• The full schedule for LinuxCon North America 2010 has now been announced. LinuxCon organised by the Linux Foundation will take place from the 10th to the 12th of August at the Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel.

• Virgin America’s Ravi Simhambhatla is delivering a keynote at this year’s LinuxCon North America. He will be giving us the CIO view on how to sell the value of open source internally when cost isn’t the only driving factor. Mr. Simhambhatla took a few minutes to answer some of our questions as we prepare to see him speak in Boston on August 12, 2010.

Desktop

• While Windows XP coated Ubuntu make users feel familiar with the Gnu/Linux systems, it also takes away many benefits that native Gnu/Linux Desktops environments like Gnome and KDE offer. However, YlmF OS seems to be a good efforts to introduce people to Gnu/Linux and remove their doubts about the system.

• The second annual “Linux Against Poverty” computer drive collected more than 200 used computers from Austin homes and businesses Saturday.

Ballnux

Applications

• Econometrics is the application of statistical or quantitative methods to understand economic issues and test theories, and models. It is the study of economic models, mathematical statistics, and economic data. It is also a set of tools which can verify or disprove economic theory using real-world data. Econometrics is an essential part of university economics degrees.

• The default menu application in Ubuntu is functional, but it is also down to earth basic. GnoMenu tries to replicate the looks and functionality of KDE’s Menu application. And I have to say, it almost does. GnoMenu comes with a number of themes and a easy to use configuration menu. Looks like it deserves a try isn’t it? Let’s give it a shot.

Proprietary

• The Wine developers have announced the availability of a fourth release candidate (RC4) for version 1.2 of their Windows API implementation. Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is free open source software that allows users to run Windows applications on Linux and Unix by providing its own native replacements for Windows DLLs.

• Windows, Mac OS X and Linux 64-bit versions are now in widespread use, and software for the operating systems is following suit. So it may seem a bit backward that Adobe withdrew its only 64-bit version of Flash Player.

• Adobe had a version of Flash which ran on 64-bit versions of Linux while Windows users were stuck in 32 bit. This week it seems that rather than releasing a 64-bit version for Windows has, in its wisdom, pulled the Linux version.

• Also due to get Flash Player 10.1 are Palm’s WebOS, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry OS, Nokia’s Symbian, the MeeGo version of Linux from Intel and Nokia, and Windows Phone 7–though not at that operating system’s debut, Murarka said. Many companies will pre-install Flash Player 10.1 on their phones through deals Adobe is hammering out, but in the case of Google, those with Froyo phones will be able to download it directly from the Android Market.

• ISL Online, one of the world leading providers of cloud based communication and collaboration, has released ISL Groop for Mac and Linux. Users can start a meeting and invite participants from all over the world in a few minutes no matter which OS they use.

Instructionals

Games

• Platform: Linux, Other OS via virtualization (VirtualBox) and LiveCD (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS)

• Release Date: 2011

• Price: Client and server are free under GPL version 2, player subscriptions start at $5 per month.

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

• A while ago, the KDE promo team organized a competition to choose a design for labels that producers of software within our community can use to show that they are part of KDE.

Distributions

New Releases

• Scientific Linux Fermi 5.5 has been released for both i386 and x86_64 architecture.

• The SystemRescueCd developers have issued the sixth update to the 1.5.x branch of their Linux distribution. Based on the Gentoo LiveCD, the SystemRescueCd is configured as a tool kit for administering or repairing an operating system and recovering data after a system crash. Supported file systems include Ext2, Ext3 and Ext4, ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, VFAT, NTFS, ISO9660 and Btrfs.

• · Announced Distro: Parted Magic 4.11 · Announced Distro: openSUSE 11.3 RC1 · Announced Distro: Sabayon SpinBase and CoreCDX 5.3 · Announced Distro: SystemRescueCd 1.5.6

• Kiddix OS, a family-friendly operating system built on Linux, is being offered on a pay-what-you-want basis through the end of this month. According to the Kiddix website, the OS contains “child-friendly” web browser, word processor, calendar, e-mail, paint, multimedia player and calculator applications in addition to educational games, extensive parental controls and two regular games (“Frozen Bubble” and “Planet Penguin Racer”).

• Zenwalk Core is a one of a kind complete 300MB base Zenwalk system designed to build high-performance / high-security non-GUI Linux servers, or to be used as the base of your own custom light-speed Desktop System. You’ll be amazed how it can be installed in just 10 minutes using the auto-install setup option on a dedicated disk : then you’re ready to query the Netpkg repository to install your desktop of choice, or any network servers like Apache, Postfix, … in case you’re a network administrator. Feel free to check our repository for availability of any application, you’ll notice it’s fairly complete (you can also use Slackware packages as Zenwalk 6.4 is Slackware compatible).

• Superb Mini Server version 1.5.2 released (Linux kernel 2.6.33.5)

PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• After weeks of concern about the “catastrophic state of it’s finances” and an indefinite delay in the release of version 2010.1, the French website LeMagIT is reporting that Mandriva has been saved by new investors. The article quotes Mandriva Director General Arnaud Laprévote: “Today the company found investors who decided to invest in the company, in order to give balance to the organization and to find a good economic model.” He added that “the community and users no longer need be concerned.” Due to regulations regarding confidentiality the identity of the new investors was not disclosed. Laprévote went on to explain: “we were aware that the existence of Mandriva was threatened, and today that is no longer the case.”

Red Hat Family

• In just a little while, I’m leaving my office to pack for my trip to the Red Hat Summit/JBoss World 2010. As you might imagine, there will be a Fedora booth at the show. And of course, we’re giving away plenty of goodies like Live USB keys containing Fedora 13 for every attendee. I’m looking forward to seeing plenty of Fedora friends at the conference, including the illustrious Matt Domsch, 2010 RHCE of the Year for the EMEA region Sandro Mathys, and many others.

• As such, Amdocs will expand the use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux across its development environment in an effort to increase flexibility, enhance performance and drive cost savings.

• Meanwhile, Whitehurst says Red Hat will continue to develop and support its desktop Linux offering but the company has no plans to make a major desktop Linux push. The reason: Whitehurst sees plenty of demand for desktop Linux but he has no idea why customers would actually pay for desktop Linux.

• The past year has been a good one for Linux vendor Red Hat, and as it looks forward to its fiscal 2011, the outlook remains strong. That’s due at least in part to new customer wins and partnership initiatives the enterprise Linux player unveiled this week.

• Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) is set to report its first-quarter fiscal 2011 earnings today after market close. The earnings report comes during the Red Hat Summit, where the open source software vendor is hosting customers and partners to discuss their latest innovations.

• The Red Hat Partner Center is a community portal used for sharing sales advice and software tools for cloud services, virtualisation, platform and middleware systems.

• Red Hat is not as precisely coupled to the economy as many other IT players. Throughout the Great Recession, Red Hat got its brim a little wet, but it never blew off Wall Street’s head and got trampled in the mud like so many other companies. And as the economy recovers, the commercial Linux operating system and JBoss middleware distributor is growing at more or less the same rate – like nothing ever happened.

• Shares were down 3% in after-hours trading at $29.93. Through the close, the stock has risen 64% in the last year, outperforming the broader market.

• The good times continue to roll at Red Hat, which posted a 20 percent jump in revenue and earnings per share in the latest quarter.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• We’ve noticed that a lot of the Papercut patches are being submitted by new community members! The bugs are trivially fixable and all it takes is for one person to show interest and fix the bug. We’re getting new members involved and willing to help Ubuntu. We were wondering , how can we keep up this energy and momentum?

• Ubuntu Light was announced a few months back and is intended as a ‘fast boot version’ of Ubuntu for quick access to basic internet features such a a web browser, Skype & Empathy..

• The new ‘Unity’ interface Ubuntu Light is intended to be fast, responsive and quick – in the video below Ubuntu Light goes from off to Yahoo! in less than 20 seconds on one of Dell’s newly announced i-core series of laptops/netbooks.

• Many in the Ubuntu community are looking forward to the release of Ubuntu 10.10 this October. One reason, as you’ll see here on a new Dell 14R, is the introduction of Ubuntu Light, which Canonical is working with OEMs to get pre-installed as a dual-boot option on Windows laptops — with the benefit being they can access popular productivity and communication programs like Google Chrome/Chromium, Skype, Totem Media Player, IM, etc. in about 7 seconds.

• A Dell executive has revealed that the company is in talks with Google and is exploring the possibility of shipping netbooks with Chrome OS, the search giant’s cloud-centric Linux-based mobile operating system. The news reflects Dell’s interest in experimenting with new platforms.

Devices/Embedded

• The service providers that Tilera and Quanta are hoping to sell the Tile-based servers to are not afraid to recompile a Linux software stack on a new architecture if it gives them an edge, any more than they care about using various Unix and Linux systems for specific jobs today.

E-Readers

• Firefox was of course an open-source software development project, versus Microsoft’s proprietary IE. The Nook is meant to break two closed systems. One is Amazon’s proprietary Kindle format for e-reading books, versus the Nook’s open ePub format.

• The Android-based Nook is currently 3G only, while Amazon’s Linux platform is based around Wi-Fi. However, Barnes & Noble is to introduce a Wi-Fi Nook priced at $149 (£101), putting more pressure on Amazon.

Phones

• With some minor patches we got the HD2 Linux kernel to boot on different windows mobile qsd8250 based devices like Acer s200 or Toshiba tsunagi tg01. It will be interesting to see if the same problem will be observed on these devices.

Nokia/MeeGo

• Nokia’s rumored tablet had some of its details firmed up today in one analyst note. The device would use MeeGo, the mobile OS designed with Intel, but would use an ARM processor and not the Atom Z600 Intel would prefer. Digitimes Research claimed in the note that it would have either a seven- or nine-inch screen and would be assembled by Foxconn for the fall.

• It’s likely that the new tablet will run MeeGo, a new Linux-based operating system that was formed by the merger of the Maemo and Moblin projects. Maemo was largely a Nokia-backed project, and the company has already released several smartphones and small internet devices running the Linux-based operating system.

Android

• Citing “multiple sources close to Google”, bloggers at TechCrunch report that the top priority for the next Android update, codenamed Gingerbread, is to homogenize the user experience and address criticisms of fragmentation. This could severely curtail the freedom of licensees to create their own user interface overlays – most famously, Motorola’s Motoblur and HTC’s Sense.

Toshiba

• Computer hardware manufacturer Toshiba has unveiled a new smartbook mobile internet device (MID) that runs version 2.1 of Google’s open source Android mobile operating system. Similar to a standard netbook, the AC100 smartbook features a clamshell form factor, a full sized keyboard, a web cam and a 10.1 inch display with a resolution of 1024 by 600.

• The Toshiba AC100 looks like a standard netbook, albeit a particularly swish and sleek netbook, but it’s more (and less) than that.

Chrome OS

• Despite all these possibilities it is arguable that Google missed the mark by imposing hardware restrictions which meant that OEM’s could only use more expensive hardware such as SSD’s. Google’s further insistence that Chrome OS devices have to boast HD capable screens and powerful graphics solutions has meant that the price of the envisaged Chrome OS device is sure to shoot through the roof.

Free Software/Open Source

• According to a report by InforWorld, IBM is going to open source the EGL language, compiler, generators for Java and JavaScript, as well as tools. By open-sourcing EGL, IBM looks to expand its reach.

• This would also enable development of Eclipse based tools, added the report.

• Open source telephony solutions are not new. However, for enterprise telephony buyers, the risk of any downtime is too great to consider open source alternatives to Cisco, Avaya, Siemens, and other well-established telephony vendors.

Lists

• If you’re part of a small business, chances are you’re always looking for ways to save money. What many business owners and managers don’t realize is that they can get all the software they need to run a business — quite literally all of it in most cases — 100% free of charge. That includes operating systems, word processing programs, accounting software, email servers, graphic design programs and more.

Cloudera

• Code-named “Ora-Oop,” the free software will accommodate users who need to link relational data in Oracle databases with the data handled in Hadoop, which serves as a large-scale storage and computation engine, said Michael Olson, Cloudera CEO.

• Codenamed “Ora-Oop,” the new open source connector from Cloudera and Quest connects Oracle and Cloudera’s Hadoop distro — known as Cloudera’s Distribution for Hadoop, or CDH — via an interface that allows for bidirectional data transfers. It supports Oracle data types and table variants.

Databases

• I participate at the MySQL Conference in Silicon Valley every year and look forward to the diversity of ideas, projects and companies that represent the ever-growing open source database landscape. This year, CUBRID, an open source database project backed by a company from South Korea, caught my eye. What was most impressive to me was the team’s enthusiasm about open source software and its belief that an open source model can work for developing good software and, at the same time, for building a healthy services business in Asia as well as globally.

Oracle

• GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 3.0.1 and the commercial Oracle GlassFish Server 3.0.1 product are both now available. This is the first product release under Oracle, and the newly branded Oracle release includes numerous critical fixes and updated platform support.

CMS

• WordPress is one of the most popular open-source content management systems in use on the internet. But despite WordPress’ popularity, one knock against it has been the fact that it’s always been more a ‘blogging engine’ than ‘true’ CMS.

• WordPress is available as an open source download that anyone can setup and install on their own server as well as on a hosted platform at WordPress.com. According to Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), WordPress.com is the 12th most visited site in the world, with 120 million unique visitors in April.

Education

• The grant in question was a mechanism of Becta, the government agency that was in charge of IT in education until it was scrapped in May. At the time, the Coalition said it would save £80m by getting rid of Becta and cutting back on other Department for Education quangos.

Business

• The product I’m examining this week, ZenCart, does have basic shopping cart functionality, but through a series of add-on modules, it gives businesspeople many more capabilities. The major thing that sets ZenCart apart from the competition is the fact that it is open-source software. Open source means the source code is made freely available to the user community.

Monitoring

• Zenoss, Inc. raised $4.83 million in convertible preferred stock of a targeted $5.2 million offering, according to an SEC filing.

• Hustace: Most OpenNMS users find that our XML-based configuration options give them all the flexibility they need to set up OpenNMS for their monitoring needs. But the fact that we’re an open source project offers a lot of value for enterprises who really require one or more modifications to the product as we ship it. And if the modifications make sense as enhancements for the product, they often find their way into a future release that provides benefit to the entire community, but most importantly, doesn’t leave the implementer’s OpenNMS installation forked — with custom source code that must be maintained separately from the project and re-introduced whenever the project is upgraded.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• After 30 days, Nasuni will donate the unwon $5,000 to the Free Software Foundation as a thank-you for the Gnu Project — specifically GnuPG, a Free Software implementation of the OpenPGP standard. Said Rodriguez, “The Gnu Project continues to inspire technical excellence among the best and brightest minds. They are the real heroes.”

Project Releases

• After more than a year of development the open source Jspresso project has released version 3.5 which promises to streamline rich Internet application development for Flash, Ajax and Swing interfaces

Openness/Sharing

• Although I’m still focussed on 1p2U.com, some time later this year I hope to set up the website culturalliberty.org – a site dedicated to the restoration of everyone’s cultural liberty, especially from its constraint by anachronistic privileges such as copyright and patent (which should have been abolished along with slavery).

• Map Kibera is an open-source project started in 2009 in response to the lack of information available for the Kibera district of Nairobi, Kenya – one of the world’s largest slums.

• The winners in the new Digital Economy will be those who master the free by offering enough to make you want to pay for more, like the open source software company who got me to pay $80 for some extra binary that I didn’t need really need (and certainly could have avoided paying for).

• The Office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs has been awarded a $150,000 grant to establish an initiative that provides open-source textbook access for Illinois students.

• Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has said that public releases of data will use open standards when possible.

• Answering a parliamentary written question from Labour MP Tom Watson, Maude said the government will use open data standards for future releases of public data, based on the advice of the Public Sector Transparency Board. “Where possible we will use recognised open standards including Linked Data standards,” he said.

• To spur innovation and drive biopolymers more widely into injection molding applications, NatureWorks LLC is borrowing a page from the computer industry and making details for its new, high-heat, high-impact bioresin, Ingeo™ 3801X available by providing open source access to both formulation and compounding procedure.

• The following guest post is from Ivan Begtin, who is a member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data.

• I would like to give a brief overview of a few projects I have been working on related to open government data in Russia.

Open Hardware

• A robot has been trained to play pool to a decent standard in the space of approximately one week by some of the ”open source robot” guys over at Willow Garage. The best part is that this machine plays by the rules.

• Last but not least is the BeagleJuice. As the main source of power, it’s fitting that the power switch is located on this 2600 mAh power pack. It outputs up to 1.5 amps, promising a max battery life of 6.5 hours for the BeagleBoard (no info on how the BeagleTouch’s operation affects this). Charging is accomplished through one or both type-B USB ports.

Standards/Consortia

• Sencha Touch is licensed under version 3 of the GNU GPL License (GPLv3). A commercial version will be released at a later date.

Leftovers

Security/Aggression

• The prospect of CCTV in tower blocks reared its ugly head in the media last week after Harriet Harman raised the issue at Prime Minister’s Question Time.

• Back in 2009 No CCTV commented on proposals to put CCTV in several tower blocks in Oxford following a trial of cameras in one block, ‘Foresters Tower’ in 2008.

• Security cameras were not working properly when four people were shot at a Birmingham music event, it has emerged.

• An emergency meeting of city licensing chiefs agreed to a police request for an immediate ban on future events at a room in the Custard Factory, Digbeth.

• West Midlands Police has increased its security budget by 25 per cent in the past three years, figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal.

• The city of Annapolis, Maryland recently received a Homeland Security grant for 20 new surveillance cameras in the downtown area. The city of Baltimore already has nearly 500. According to the watchdog site PhotoEnforced, the state of Maryland has at least 375 red light cameras and 80 speed cameras. Your government is watching you, Marylanders. But don’t think for a second that it’s going to tolerate you watching back.

• On Saturday, Yvonne Nicole Shaw, 27, was arrested by sheriff’s deputies in Lexington Park, Maryland. According to the Southern Maryland News, Shaw was cuffed and booked for recording deputies who had come to an apartment complex in response to a noise complaint. Sheriff’s Cpl. Patrick Handy’s report explained that Shaw was standing about 12 feet from him, and that Shaw “did admit to recording our encounter on her cell phone for the purpose of trying to show the police are harassing people.”

• THINK SAFETY FIRST along with stability for the sake of the Domain Name System (DNS), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) chief executive has told the organisation’s Brussels meeting.

Environment

• Campaigners have unveiled a petition signed by more than a million people calling for maintenance of the global moratorium on commercial whaling.

• It was presented to Australian minister Peter Garrett outside the International Whaling Commission meeting in Morocco.

• In a recent conversation about the safety and ethics of synthetic biology in the wake of the announcement of the synthetic genome, many of the professors I was chatting with commented on how they hoped new synthetic biology technology would lead to bacteria that could eat the oil spilling into the gulf of mexico even as I type this right now. Of course, the “technology” for oil eating bacteria already exists and have already been used for clean up in previous oil spills–many naturally occurring species of bacteria can already break down the hydrocarbons in crude oil. The natural oil eaters end up competing with each other, however, leading to decreased efficiency in an already slow clean-up process (these are bacteria after all, not oil-phiranas). Genetic engineering and directed evolution technology has led to the design of improved strains of oil eating bacteria that can proceed more quickly and more stably than the natural strains, and has already been patented–in 1971.

Finance

• One of the reasons the federal budget is chronically in the red is that most people, historically, couldn’t care less. The national debt is an unfathomable abstraction that doesn’t show up on your 1040 or your monthly bills. Over the last few decades, very few people lost sleep worrying if the budget would ever be in balance.

• Keynesian economics, as well as political incentives, argued for ignoring the issue. When times were good, we could afford to indulge. When times were bad, deficit spending was the accepted formula to stimulate the economy.

• RNC chair Michael Steele defended Wall Street as the creators of wealth in a combative interview today while urging the Obama admin not to “demonize” and “demagogue” against a system that plunged the economy into recession.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• So, it looks like the industry is going to plan B: which is going back to trying to ram through legislation that will require ISPs to take the draconian step of protecting one industry’s broken business model. And to get this going, it looks like the industry has set up a neat little set of astroturfing groups and “consumer” campaigns that try to hide the specifics, but clearly are designed to get similar three strikes legislation (similar to the Digital Economy Act in the UK) put in place in the US.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• A libel suit against a website has been thrown out of court because the potential damage to the reputation of the person making the claim was so small.

• Johanna Kaschke sued blogger David Osler after he published an article about Kaschke’s arrest in Germany in the 1970s in connection with a link to an extremist political group that was never proved.

• Creative. Apparently, the guy who did this, one Barry Ardolf, was trying to frame his neighbor. Around the same time, he apparently also sent child pornography to his neighbor’s co-workers, using a fake email address pretending to be the neighbor. If the “open WiFi” haters were correct, he would have been able to do this without any way to catch him. But, of course, that’s ridiculous. With a little effort, the FBI was able to trace the origin right back to Ardolf — and he’s now been arrested for threats to the VP and for identity fraud.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• As leaders in Congress announced a series of hearings this June to tackle huge telecommunications issues with a focus on the Internet, the top phone and cable organizations that control the majority of the access to the Internet have hired 276 former government officials to lobby both the Congress and the executive branch.

• According to data obtained from lobbyist disclosure forms and the Center for Responsive Politics, seventy-two percent of the lobbyists hired by AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Verizon, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association and the US Telecom Association have previous government experience. These organizations combined to spend $20.6 million lobbying the federal government in the first quarter of 2010.

Intellectual Monopolies

• A recent CNET video on “Intellectual property rights vs. journalism” shows a Stanford University’s Innovation Journalism conference on June 7, with a panel discussion by various mainstreamers discussing the quesion “Is intellectual property protection a threat to journalism?” The lack of libertarian principle and sound economics has these commentators floundering as they discuss various cases where IP infringes free speech and freedom of the press.

• It is a well-known fact that in particular numerous newspaper publishing companies are currently suffering from an increasing downturn of their classic paper-based business model.Their long-established but obviously now depreciated business model had been centered around the exploitation of the relative scarcity of news contents. Paying buyers of paper copies who can also be fed with advertising material were attracted, creating a handsome stream of revenues both from buyers of paper copies as well as from advertisers.

• That was one of the few areas of consensus at a gathering convened at Google headquarters Wednesday night. Some 60 business people, coders, journalists, attorneys and others attended the fancifully named Techdirt Saves Journalism, a powwow whose goal was to spark a few ideas that might prove useful to enterprising newcomers, as well as those who write journalists’ paychecks today.

• It first threatened to sue over the use of the logo, but Neighborhoodies didn’t fold. They, properly, realized that trademarks only cover use in commerce and for products that the mark actually covers. Seeing that the New York Herald Tribune has not operated since 1966 (and the NY Times only owned the brand after that), it’s difficult to see how the NYTimes has a legitimate trademark request.

Copyrights

• To expedite DMCA claims, Google specifically requests sufficient information “to permit Google to notify the owner/administrator of the allegedly infringing webpage or other content (email address is preferred).” But BPI does not do that. It only lists out the above webpages.

• The lawyers targeting thousands of people who allegedly pirated “The Hurt Locker” and other films on BitTorrent are fighting to keep the litigation on track.

• In a bid to avoid a third trial — after two mistrials — the Minnesota federal judge presiding over the 4-year-old Jammie Thomas-Rasset case wants the Recording Industry Association of American and the defendant to negotiate a settlement.

• We’re holding the UK’s first ever dedicated digital rights conference on Saturday 24 July.

• Our keynote speaker for ORGCon is Professor James Boyle, the world’s most influential copyright scholar. Boyle will address the question of why we are locking up our cultural heritage when technology offers new and exciting ways to engage with creative works:

• The Incredible Shrinking Public Domain: A Paradox

• All in all this is an incredibly frustrating ruling. It feels like the court didn’t actually want to address the admittedly difficult question of how the First Amendment and copyright law come into conflict, so it just punted and said “well Congress knows best, so it’s okay.” The case will almost certainly be appealed, potentially for an en banc (full appeals court review) or directly to the Supreme Court. So this most certainly is not over yet. But after a reasonable ruling last year to this year’s reversal, it’s definitely a step backwards for anyone who believes in the importance and sanctity of the public domain.

• Biden spoke to the media alongside Victoria Espinel, the U.S. intellectual property enforcement coordinator, to introduce the government’s strategy on protecting the country’s intellectual property.

• “We used to have a problem in this town saying this,” Biden told reporters Thursday at a press conference in Washington, D.C. “But piracy is theft. Clean and simple. It’s smash and grab. It ain’t no different than smashing a window at Tiffany’s and grabbing [merchandise].”

• Vice President Joe Biden announced the multipronged plan to stem the loss of billions of dollars a year generated from innovation, which he described as “perhaps our greatest export.”

• Espinel joined Attorney General Eric Holder, Vice President Joe Biden, and other top administration officials at the White House today to introduce the plan. It is intended to help coordinate the various agencies working on IP as well as ensure the products available on the U.S. market are safe, Espinel wrote in a blog post.

• As expected, it looks like Victoria Espinel, the White House’s IP “Czar” has released the official “Joint Strategic Plan to Combat Intellectual Property Theft,” as required by the ProIP Act. Given the history so far, we had expected the report to be quite one-sided in favor of the industry, and the initial announcements about the report suggested that was to be the case. Specifically, in announcing the report, Hollywood’s best friend, Joe Biden, made some typical uninformed comments about how infringement was no different than “theft.”

• The “Imaginary Property Czarina”, Victoria Espinel, is actually a vestige of the Bush years. Her position was created under a law he signed, but Obama got to appoint the first person to her position. Unfortunately, the Obama/Biden team has been given bribes by the Imaginary Property cartels to prop up their ailing business model of artificial scarcity that kept them alive back when media was more defective than it is now and copies were hard to make.

• We just wrote about a DMCA takedown notice from BPI to Google that appeared to be setting Google up for a future lawsuit, and now it looks like the IFPI, of which BPI is a part, is going even further. TorrentFreak, following up on our post about BPI, noticed an even more direct takedown notice from the IFPI demanding that Google block any link to The Pirate Bay.

• A copyright-compensation levy on blank digital media and devices should only be charged when they are likely to be used to make private copies of copyrighted works, an adviser to the EU’s top court has said.

• Many European countries allow citizens to make private copies of copyrighted works but charge a levy on blank CDs, digital media players and DVDs and use the money generated to compensate copyright holders for the unlicensed use of their work.

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