● 09.02.10

● Links 2/9/2010: Red Hat at Year Highs, Fake ‘Open Source’ Called Out

Posted in News Roundup at 8:02 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Desktop Linux is the same sort of deal. Linux believers always assume that next year will be the year of desktop Linux. Windows followers often chide those who seek Linux with that belief, both here and elsewhere.

• Before anyone starts thinking this Catholic boy has changed his stripes, my point is simply that, in the case of desktop Linux, Jerusalem is here.

• This is the year.

• This is also the year where the definition of a desktop has changed. Apple changed it with the iPhone and, now, the iPad. Microsoft has failed to deliver in both these key areas. Linux has not.

• Google gets the credit for that. As I noted yesterday Google Android has soaked up the excess demand for Internet hand-held devices that the iPhone left on the floor. My guess is that, once Chromium comes out, you’ll have the same experience there.

• The real bad news for Sony is that the software is being realised under an open source licence for free.

Desktop

• If I missed out on any major providers of Linux pre installed laptops and PC’s, please do share in the comments below.

• 7.) Linux is not Windows. If you are trying it with the expectation that it is a “Free version of Windows” you are going to be in for a world of frustration and disappointment. You should want to use Linux because it is a better operating system than Windows, not because it is cheaper.

Kernel Space

• LinuxCertified, Inc., a provider of Linux training and services, revealed the dates and venue of its next Linux Device Driver Development Course class. The class will be held from Sept. 20 – 22, 2010 in South Bay, Calif.

Graphics Stack

• Mesa 7.9 has shaped up to be one hell of a release with many new features and improvements throughout this open-source graphics software stack. For those that have been waiting for this to be officially released, there’s good news and that is Mesa 7.9 should be released by the end of September.

Applications

• In my dumber days when I ran Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows, I was more concerned with backup programs. After I moved into the Linux desktop, I became much less paranoid about system failures. The Linux environment just never crashed.

• That does not mean that I never make backup copies of my critical data files. It’s just that I do not worry about the Linux OS crashing to the point that I have to reinstall everything from scratch. That was the nudge with Windows that pushed me to migrating to Linux.

• In the seemingly never-ending quest to find the perfect, light weight graphical file manager, I have gone through just about every one I can find. So far my favorite has been Thunar (see Thunar content on Ghacks for more information) which comes standard with a few distributions. PC File Manger can be found in the LXDE desktop environment and was totally rewritten by the creator (Hong Jen Yee) to resolve some on-going bugs.

• 1. Google Chrome 2. gtk-recordMyDesktop 3. OpenShot Video Editor 4. TeamViewer 5. OpenOffice…

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Back in July we reported that Unigine Corp, the company behind the advanced Unigine gaming/3D engine, was working on its own strategy game. This game was supposed to be announced by the end of July, then in private we were told it got pushed back to the middle of August, but to start off September we finally have the announcement for this new game. Unigine OilRush is the game title and it will be available for Linux. Will this be the best Linux native game we see in 2010?

• Valve is all too familiar with gaming folks out there. They are the guys behind the awesome STEAM online gaming platform. They were in a bit of controversy recently when they denied all reports of a Linux version of their famous online gaming platform. But once again, Valve is in the news.

Desktop Environments

• Well, you filthy readers, see what happens when we don’t acquiesce? In case you haven’t heard by now, A gunman named James Lee, an Asian man with a years-long vendetta against the Discovery Channel cable network has entered the building and got an armed hostage taking situation going on right now.

• [...]

• I want Discovery Communications to broadcast on their channels to the world their new program lineup and I want proof they are doing so. I want the new shows started by asking the public for inventive solution ideas to save the planet and the remaining wildlife on it.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

• The concept of activities is a new feature introduced with KDE 4. In the old desktop model of KDE 3, the desktop was a program called “kdesktop”, which gave users the ability to have a number of virtual desktops. Although other tools like Superkaramba could be used to add more features, the essential KDE desktop ended there.

• When activities were introduced into KDE 4, they did not make much sense in isolation. In addition to having virtual desktops, there were activities, which the user could create and configure to have different wallpapers and different widgets. Much of the virtual desktop functionality of KDE 3 was absent and not directly connected to Plasma activities.

• Hard on the heels of the release of KDE Partition Manager 1.0.3 follows the new version of the KDE Partition Manager Live CD, now also featuring version 1.0.3.

GNOME Desktop

• Elegant Gnome Theme Pack, one of the best dark themes was updated today and it now automatically installs a Firefox theme to match Elegant Gnome. But that’s not all, there are a lot of changes in the latest Elegant Gnome Pack 0.7:

• * New GTK+ theme version

• [...]

Distributions

• The top 3 contestants will receive three t-shirts in their design, donated by the Gentoo Foundation. The judging panel includes Dawid Węgliński, Alex Legler, and your host David Abbott.

• Recently, the Fedora distribution decided to dump its long-standing photo manager application, F-Spot, in favour of an upstart called Shotwell. Shotwell doesn’t have anywhere near the features, stability or stature of its precursor. But it doesn’t use Mono either – the .NET-inspired framework that many people love to hate thanks to its third-party association with Microsoft.

Reviews

• Tonight the second of our Reader Voted Lightweight Distros. Linux Mint XFCE, the second Mint to grace this series.

• I couldn’t wait to check out this one. Linux mint has again become a favorite of ours, and the XFCE version of it promised to deliver.

• [...]

• We are nearing the end of this series. I am surprised to find so many good things to say about all the lightweight distros we tried so far. Linux Mint XFCE is a definite option if you are looking for a lightweight yet powerful distro.

• ArtistX is an Ubuntu GNU/Linux-based live DVD that includes a pretty big lineup of free multimedia applications. The most recent version, ArtistX 0.9 is based on Ubuntu 9.10 and features the 2.6.31 Linux kernel, GNOME 2.28, KDE 4.3.5, Compiz Fusion, Ubiquity Installer, and more.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat is currently trading 4.23% versus its previous trading session close, and it has calculated support and resistance at $30.29 and $35.27 respectively. Clearly with this action this range has been penetrated, and traders will be reviewing price action to establish a new tradable range

• Shares of the company touched a new 52-week high of $36.44 on Wednesday. Red Hat, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides open source software solutions to enterprises worldwide.

Fedora

• The other day, I caught a message that KSplice was available for Fedora. I thought I’d be a wiseguy and I replied “Yeah, great. Call me in 20 years when it’s available for for RHEL”. Well, as several people pointed out, it turns out the joke is on me.

Debian Family

• This is my first step in the process of becoming a Debian Developer, so I hope to share the progress

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Would you like to find out about how Ubuntu is being deployed in the cloud space? Would you like to see how KnowledgeTree uses Ubuntu for its SaaS offering? If so, please join KnowledgeTree and Canonical on Wednesday 8 September 2010 at 11 am Pacific (2 pm Eastern) for a joint webinar.

• Happy Beta day everyone!

• I will, however, leave you with a link that you might find interesting or useful: My Ubuntu Network, which is a social networking site with Ubuntu as its locus.

Flavours and Variants

• Finally, after a hiatus of over a year, the Ubuntu derivative tailored for Romanian and Hungarian Linux beginners is having a new release! Of course English is still available on the CD

Devices/Embedded

• Mistral announced two Linux-ready daughtercards for Texas Instruments (TI) evaluation modules (EVMs), the latter already available with the chipmaker’s ARM9-based Sitara AM1x and OMAP-L1x SoCs (system-on-chips) on board. The UART Expansion Module offers interfaces for soft UART, hard UART, and soft DIR, while the CAN Expansion Module provides soft CAN, and hard CAN bus interfaces.

• Pogoplug has begun shipping the business version of its Linux-based home media server, which allows people to securely access their files and media from any internet connection.

• In a blog post on Tuesday, Pogoplug said it is now selling its Pogoplug Biz device and its new Pogoplug Wireless Extender in the US. The Wireless Extender is a dongle that makes it possible to place the media server anywhere within Wi-Fi range of an internet connection, rather than having to hook it up to an Ethernet cable.

Phones

Android

• Motorola has introduced MILESTONE 2 enhanced with MOTOBLUR. Android 2.2 powered device offers more speed, more connectivity, more messaging, more storage, more web with Adobe Flash Player 10.1, more multimedia and more personalisation than the original MILESTONE.

• Motorola announced three Android versions of its popular “Ming” family of flip-phones, again aimed at the Chinese market. The new low- to mid-range Ming line-up includes the Android 2.1-based XT806 for China Telecom’s CDMA-2000 network, the Android 1.6-based A1680 for China Unicom’s WCDMA, and the MT810 for China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA, running the Android-based OPhone.

Tablets

• Hannspree announced a 10.1-inch, Nvidia Tegra 2-based tablet running Android 2.2, aimed at a European audience. The Hannspree Tablet offers 16GB of flash, HDMI output, 802.11/b/g/n, and claimed eight-hour battery life, and also supplies one key feature so far missing from many Android tablets: Android Market access.

• Toshiba’s is prepping a “Folio 100″ tablet that will run Android 2.2 on an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor and offer a 10.1-inch, WSVGA display, says a report. Meanwhile, the Tegra 2 scored strongly in benchmarks, the Android-based Samsung Galaxy Tab is tipped for a Thursday release, and Korea’s KT announced an “Identity Tab” Android tablet, say reports.

• Archos announced five new Android-based tablets running Android 2.2 on 800MHz to 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processors, all offering 720p HD video playback and 802.11n Wi-Fi. Shipping this fall, the tablets include the 2.8-inch Archos 28, the 3.2-inch Archos 32, the 4.3-inch Archos 43, the seven-inch Archos 70, and the 10.1-inch Archos 101, says the company.

Free Software/Open Source

• The Little 4 may be smaller in terms of their bottom lines, but in terms of systems management capabilities, there’s nothing little about the open source offerings from Zenoss, Hyperic, GroundWork Open Source, and The OpenNMS Group.

Events

• The Nordic Free Software Award given to people, projects or organisations in the Nordic countries that have made a prominent contribution to the advancement of Free Software. The award will be announced during FSCONS 2010 in Gothenburg.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• According to the download page for Firefox 3.5, Mozilla has already killed off this browser version.

Databases

• The first release candidate for version 9.0 of the PostgreSQL open source database has been released after four months in beta. The developers expect no changes in commands, interfaces or APIs between the release candidate and the final release, though there may be more release candidates before then, depending on bug reports. The most prominent feature in the new release is integrated replication using “Hot Standby” and “Streaming Replication” while other features include full support for 64-bit Windows, improved reporting queries, SQL standard per-column triggers, enhanced Perl and Python integrations and easier database permission management.

Oracle

• Sun aspired to be central to the next network-inspired boom, and it was understood that to do that, you had to be promiscuous, available, familiar, and easy-to-acquire. Hence open source, and hence OpenSolaris, and hence creating an OpenSolaris distribution (rather than just offer the source).

• Let’s take a look at the good news. According to DanT’s Grid Blog Oracle has plans for Grid Engine. As Dan mentions, Grid Engine does not compete with any Oracle product and like other resource managers has applications outside of HPC, which probably means Cloud based solutions.

Education

Semi-Open Source

• However, it didn’t quite work out that way: Commercial open source software, it turns out, is just the same as any other commercial software; the only difference is that one gets to take a peek at the source code (and often only certain portions of the code, see The H Open feature “Open core, closed heart?”) and can download a free trial version with varying degrees of functional restrictions from the internet.

• But what about vendor independence? There is only one company that can offer vendor support for SugarCRM. Lower costs? Commercial open source vendors need to cover their development costs just like every other software vendor. Low entry requirements? Not least because of the competition from the open source community, more and more proprietary applications now also offer free trial or community versions. And don’t you dare mess with the code if you wish to have vendor support.

• The “commercial open source” model, it seems to me, has outlived itself. Sure enough, vendors such as Alfresco or SugarCRM have established themselves in the market – because their products stand up to those of their proprietary competitors. Not because their software is open source, however – this “only” gave them an added edge compared to other start-ups. However, this effect is now gone, and companies who develop open source software are no longer considered extraordinary.

• By commercializing open source projects indirectly, through complementary products and services, multiple vendors are able to seize a commercial advantage and run with it without endangering the core open source project. As long as they continue to collaborate on the non-differentiating code, the project should benefit from being stretched in multiple directions.

• There will inevitably be some vendors that want to have their cake and it eat – benefiting from the work of others without sharing – but that is an inherent risk with community-developed open source, and I would argue that most have learned that they stand to gain more from collaborating than they do from forking and that it is in their own commercial interests to contribute to the common good.

BSD

• Pawel Jakub Dawidek has announced he has prepared a port of the ZFS v28 file-system for FreeBSD, which is a newer revision of this advanced Sun/Oracle file-system than what is currently available in FreeBSD 8.1. This updated ZFS file-system brings a number of new features to FreeBSD-ZFS users including data de-duplication support, triple parity RAIDZ (RAIDZ3), ZFS DIFF, Zpool Split, snapshot holds, forced Zpool imports, and the ability to import a pool in a read-only mode.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• This month we welcome Jose Marchesi as maintainer of the new package recutils, Mike Gran as maintainer of the new package guile-ncurses, and long-time maintainers Bruno Haible, Jim Meyering, and Simon Josefsson adding the new package vc-changelog to their duties.

• Software Freedom Day, a day observed worldwide to spread the message of free and open source software, will be marked in Melbourne on September 18 from 10am to 4pm at the State Library of Victoria.

Government

• There was an interesting little piece in the Guardian few days ago suggesting that local authorities could save £51 million by moving some council employees to Open Office* and ODF**, and away from Microsoft Office and their document format, with the total savings rocketing to £200 million if every council employee in the country moved over.

• This sensible proposal came from Cllr Liam Maxwell who’s reponsible for IT in the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead, and I’m sure Cllr Maxwell would be the first to acknowledge it’s not a new suggestion. The office suite – as a commodity piece of software – has long been seen as one of the easiest ways to get open source onto people’s desktops and save money in the process.

• I’m certain Cllr Maxwell also appreciates that there are issues, some of which are mentioned in the Guardian, but they’re not made very clear and it’s worth expanding on them.

Licensing

• As Welte says, this really is outrageous: it’s GPL’d code, and the embedded system manufacturer is somehow trying to claim that it has the right to stop someone else from using and modifying that code on those devices – as if the hardware made any difference. But the whole point of the GPL is that others must be able to take software distributed under it and use it as they wish.

• I suspect that with some careful explanation from Welte (and others), the company will see that it doesn’t have a case, and the court action will be quietly dropped. On the other hand, if the case were to go forward and resulted in a win for the company concerned, it would represent a major problem for the GPL. Stay tuned…

• Right now I’m facing what I’d consider the most outrageous case that I’ve been involved so far: A manufacturer of Linux-based embedded devices (no, I will not name the company) really has the guts to go in front of court and sue another company for modifying the firmware on those devices. More specifically, the only modifications to program code are on the GPL licensed parts of the software. None of the proprietary userspace programs are touched! None of the proprietary programs are ever distributed either.

Openness/Sharing

• Sharing. It’s one of the first things most children are urged to do.

• Few children, though, have the presence-of-mind to ask their parents when they last shared their weed-eater, their water blaster or even their car.

• The fact that virtually every garage has one of each of the above suggests the concept of sharing has some way to go in the adult world.

• Yet if dwindling resources and growing population is the biggest issue of our times, this will need to change. Everyone with one item of everything is not a sustainable thought.

• The following is an investigation into the difficulties of extending the open-source collaboration model from coding to its next logical step: interface design. While we’ll dive deep into the practical difference between these two professional fields, the article might also serve as a note of caution to think before rushing to declare the rise of “open-source architecture,” “open-source university,” “open-source democracy” and so on.

Open Data

• We had a wonderful meeting yesterday with Dave Flanders (JISC) David Shotton’s (Oxford) group (#jiscopencite) and our #jiscopenbib (Cambridge/OKF) – more details later. We really believe these projects can make a major change to Open Scholarship. We came up – almost by chance with the ABCD of Open Scholarship:

• * Open Access * Open Bibliography * Open Citations * Open Data

Open Hardware

• Anyone who has ever hacked around in their PC will have been hit with an urge to take their tinkering to the next level and create a custom-built device, but few actually try – believing such things to be far too complicated. At least, until the Arduino appeared on the scene.

• Originally developed in Italy in 2005 as a tool for students building interactive design projects, the Arduino is a microcontroller-based prototyping board – but one that pretty much removes the barriers to entry that previous electronic prototyping systems had.

Programming

• The end of the year is right around the corner (already!) but we’re not quite done showcasing projects that have been with us for 10 years or more. September’s Project of the Month is GPL Ghostscript, a complete set of page description language interpreters including PDF, PostScript, PCL5, PCLXL, and XPS.

Standards/Consortia

• You can now use Google search to find SVG documents. SVG is an open, XML-based format for vector graphics with support for interactive elements. We’re big fans of open standards, and our mission is to organize the world’s information, so indexing SVG is a natural step.

Leftovers

• Six state senators want to give a break to ex-convicts who might be haunted by their criminal records when they attempt to land jobs.

• Senate Bill 291 would remove court and police records from public view by allowing nonviolent criminals with multiple convictions to apply to seal records documenting their offenses after five years of clean conduct.

• A gossip Web site has been hit with an $11 million judgment for libel and slander after posting false accusations that a Northern Kentucky teacher who works on the side as a Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader was exposed to two venereal diseases.

• Earlier this year, as part of a discussion about Nick Carr’s most recent book we pointed to some reports that noted Carr appeared to misrepresent the scientific research to support his point. It appears that others are finding more examples of this as well. There was a little web-hubbub that I ignored earlier this year when Carr declared that links in documents were bad, and he was shifting all his links to the end. This was apparently based on some research, Carr claimed, that showed links in text are really distracting. Personally, I found that premise to be laughable, as I think after my second week online I stopped being distracted by links and quickly learned to use them effectively.

• Still, without having a chance to dig into the research, I didn’t have much to say on the subject. However, Scott Rosenberg is digging in and finding that, once again, it appears that Carr is conveniently misrepresenting the studies he relies on to support his anti-link thesis. T

• All governments need to be watched. You never know when one of them will slip in a nasty tax on the quiet or pass a seemingly simple notification that can be the undoing of entire communities or of the environment. That is the nature of the beast. But how vigilant can people be with a government that will try to alter the entire complexion of a critical law-in-the-making by sneakily replacing a clear-cut ‘or’ with a lethal ‘and’—under the very noses of the MPs opposed to legislation?

• And all this was enabled by technology. The modern supermarket – with its electronic scanning and inventory controls and price reductions decided by a software program run out of head office – is probably more hi-tech than any web-design firm. The result is that the man or woman in charge of your typical supermarket (or other chain shop) now has little to do with the selling or arrangement of goods: nowadays they concentrate on driving their staff to meet the targets set by head office. Their job is not so much retail-management as rowing cox.

Science

• of ancient Nubians shows that they were regularly consuming tetracycline, most likely in their beer. The finding is the strongest evidence yet that the art of making antibiotics, which officially dates to the discovery of penicillin in 1928, was common practice nearly 2,000 years ago.

• The research, led by Emory anthropologist George Armelagos and medicinal chemist Mark Nelson of Paratek Pharmaceuticals, Inc., is published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

Security/Aggression

• A Greater Manchester Police special constable convicted of assaulting an off-duty soldier and lying about the attack has been jailed for three years.

• Peter Lightfoot, 40, was filmed hitting Mark Aspinall while attempting to arrest him after he had been thrown out of a Wigan club last July.

• In the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina, an order circulated among New Orleans police authorizing officers to shoot looters, according to present and former members of the department.

• Vladimir Putin today angrily dismissed protests against his regime as “provocations” and said anyone who took part in unsanctioned street rallies against the Kremlin should expect a “whack on the bonce”.

• So, in essence, the outside public – including Iranians – are asked to believe that a) Haystack software exists b) Haystack software works c) Haystack software rocks d) the Iranian government doesn’t yet have a copy of it, nor do they know that Haystack rocks & works. (And who could fault them for not reading Newsweek? I certainly can’t). For someone with my Eastern European sensibilities, that’s a lot of stuff to believe in. Even Santa – we call him Ded Moroz – appears more plausible in comparison.

• The prime minister’s media adviser, Andy Coulson, freely discussed the use of unlawful news-gathering techniques while editor of the News of the World and “actively encouraged” a named reporter to engage in the illegal interception of voicemail messages, according to allegations published by the New York Times.

• Those who were in London on 11 September 2001 may recall the wild speculation flying around about potential attacks on our own city. Several hijacked planes were heading for London, the whole of Canary Wharf was being evacuated…anything might happen. Fortunately, we were hit by nothing more than rumour. But a new revelation from Tony Blair’s memoirs reveals how close we came to accidental tragedy.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• What’s ironic about all this is that the big news on the Guardian’s website isn’t an investigation into whether or not the police deliberately misled the public by duping lazy newspapers into regurgitating a fake smear story. Rather, some journalists think that it’s the Climate Camp who are the ones supposedly controlling the media.

Finance

• The investment bank, which is still trying to burnish its reputation after settling fraud charges brought this year by the Securities and Exchange Commission, stands accused in a lawsuit of using information it gleaned from one client to win business from another.

• The former chief of Lehman Brothers told a panel investigating the financial crisis that the Wall Street firm could have been rescued, but regulators’ refused to help – even though they later bailed out other big banks.

• Richard S. Fuld Jr. told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission at a hearing that Lehman did everything it could to limit its risks and save itself in the fall of 2008.

• Labor Day this year comes draped in mourning. More than half of all workers have experienced a spell of unemployment, taken a cut in pay or hours, been forced to go part-time or seen other such problems during and after the Great Recession.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Another weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• I don’t like William Gibson’s Op-Ed piece on Google in today’s New York Times merely because, barely a week after I went all Jeremy Bentham Panopticonic on the cat bin lady, he writes that “Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison design is a perennial metaphor in discussions of digital surveillance and data mining, but it doesn’t really suit an entity like Google.” Even though it’s kind of a put-down (perennial!), still, great minds think almost alike, right?

• Stepping back from the brink of a crackdown, India’s ministry of home affairs said RIM had made “certain proposals for lawful access by law enforcement agencies and these would be operationalised immediately”. It did not offer any detail on these concessions and RIM, which is based in Toronto, declined to comment.

• Sensing Senators don’t have the stomach to try and pass a stand-alone bill in broad daylight that would give the President the power to shut down the Internet in a national emergency, the Senate is considering attaching the Internet Kill Switch bill as a rider to other legislation that would have bi-partisan support.

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• AT&T said Tuesday that any Net neutrality plan restricting its ability to engage in “paid prioritization” of network traffic would be harmful and contrary to the fundamental principles of the Internet.

• Telecommunications providers need the ability to set different prices for different forms of Internet service, AT&T said, adding that it already has “hundreds” of customers who have paid extra for higher-priority services.

• In a letter to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC), AT&T tried to rubbish points made by the group, calling them “not exactly true”. The argument revolves around the notion of “paid prioritisation” of Internet connectivity, something that net neutrality activists are fiercely against.

• AT&T claims that the Free Press, in supporting Diffserv, is in direct contradiction to its support of equal packet rights. Diffserv is one of a number of mechanisms proposed to provide differing quality of service (QoS), though typically it is run on customers’ routers.

• The telecom behemoth argues that paid prioritisation will not create an Internet ‘rich club’, saying that small to medium businesses voluntarily take AT&T up on the offer. However the fact that a few firms purchase managed connectivity from AT&T doesn’t really change the fact that applying such policies at the network core is something that will concern the majority of users. Judging by the lengths to which AT&T goes to promote it, those fears won’t be allayed any time soon.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Intellectual property exists to promote progress. Its purpose is not to ensure that no one’s ideas are stolen or that creative people can earn a living, unless those things are needed to promote progress in a field. The granting of temporary monopolies in the form of patents and copyrights is the price we pay for progress, not a goal in itself.

• It might be completely true that bartenders are shamelessly stealing from each other, and that’s certainly something we should condemn, but we probably shouldn’t get the law involved unless we can show that this theft is causing mixology to stagnate. Along with fashion, cooking, and even magic, we’re in an industry that’s arguably better off with weak IP. This decade’s boom in craft cocktails is a sign that we’re doing OK without stricter protections, and I’d be worried that additional threats of lawsuits would have a chilling effect on the sharing of new techniques and recipes.

Copyrights

• A long-standing issue over revenue terms between private FM radio stations and music labels here saw the Copyright Board issuing a directive Wednesday laying out a revenue-sharing model instead of the earlier fixed-cost structure.

• The Copyright Board, part of the Ministry of Human Resources Development, has been mediating a bitter dispute over the last couple of years between FM stations and music labels over establishing a revenue model between both parties. Private stations launched here over five years ago after the government auctioned licenses inviting private players in radio broadcasting.

• Access to Knowledge: Reports of Campaigns and Research 2008-2010The biggest barriers that consumers face in accessing copyrighti works are those created by copyright law. Even so, consumers around the world will choose original copyright works over pirated copies, provided that they are available at an affordable price.

• A law closer to the language of the WIPO treaties wouldn’t protect this practice. In the short term even the USA DMCA doesn’t protect this practise. Bill C-32 would legally protect this practise, given circumventing access control technical measures and even providing tools to change the locks on what we own are being made illegal.

• That is, piracy isn’t a real problem if you *out-innovate* the pirates, making your paid-for offering better than their free one. Indeed, if you do, pirated copies become like tasters, encouraging people to upgrade and pay for the full, latest version. Similarly, by the sound of it, part of the strength of this project will be the interweaving of other elements into the text – again, something that pirates can’t offer.

• An overlapping constellation of civil society and art actors focussed their submission on a single issue: file-sharing. Under the slogan “Compartilhamento legal! R$3,00 de todos para tudo,” this network is proposing to legalize non-commercial file-sharing in exchange for a levy on broadband Internet access. The idea is nearly as old as peer-to-peer file-sharing itself. It has been tested in technology and in law making a few times. Here and now in Brazil, it feels like it might actually become a reality.

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