● 08.07.12

● Links 7/8/2012: OpenGL 4.3, Nautilus Forked

Posted in News Roundup at 7:25 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• If you’ve followed Linux for any length of time, you know that it is finding many of its biggest opportunities at the server level, in mobile devices, and in embedded Linux deployments–all of them areas that lie outside the desktop. In recent years, Linux has also had a growing impact on cars, with big backers behind Linux-based automotive initiatives. With that in mind, The Linux Foundation is hosting its Automotive Linux Summit, taking place Sept. 19-20, 2012, at the Heritage Motor Centre in Gaydon/Warwickshire in the United Kingdom. Here is what’s on tap for this global meeting on Linux and cars.

• It may not look like a penguin. It doesn’t eat fish neither does it have a blubbery outer coating (unlike me). It is however about as tall as a Gentoo penguin and it does walk a bit like a penguin. What am I talking about? It is the new love of my life with two brains (well cpu’s) and penguin powered with the Gentoo Linux operating system and I want one!!

• The little friend I want is called NAO (not to be confused with Sodium Oxide) and comes from the country of love. Don’t worry, you will not have to learn French though (although the girls love it when you do…va va va vooom as NAO can speak several different languages, stands about 58cm high, has more sensors than the Borg, is more flexible and can dance better that I can.

• You should have guessed by now that I am talking about a robot. One of the most advanced robots for public sale that I have ever seen. The company which develops and makes these little beauties is called Aldebaran Robotics (not to be confused with the planet in Star Wars). You can access the main web site here to feast your eyes on the ultimate of geeky drool inducing technology. Did I mention NAO also runs on Linux?

Kernel Space

• Intel’s open-source hardware enablement under Linux of next year’s Haswell architecture continues. New HDMI audio patches have been published while the DisplayPort audio patches are still forthcoming.

• For the past few weeks I have been trying out the Apple’s Thunderbolt Cinema Display under Linux. While this 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt Display is beautiful and delivers stunning quality, it does illustrate another area where the current Linux hardware support currently comes up short. There’s both good and bad news about using a Thunderbolt-based display under your favorite Linux distribution.

• Linux kernel developer Arnd Bergmann is interviewed for this week’s 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks profile. Bergmann shares with us his focus areas at the moment as well as some specific advice for newbies.

Graphics Stack

• The open-source Freedreno driver — the reverse-engineered creation for supporting the Adreno-based Qualcomm’s Snapdragon graphics hardware — picked up a few more features this weekend.

• Over the weekend there was the push by Red Hat’s Ben Skeggs that effectively reworks/rewrites the Nouveau DRM kernel module for reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA graphics under Linux.

• Skeggs work rewrites a large portion of the Nouveau kernel driver code — it measures in at about 50 commits and thousands of lines of code have been changed. We knew a big Nouveau DRM rewrite was happening following minimal changes for Nouveau with the Linux 3.6 kernel but on Saturday was when the code finally landed within the Nouveau project’s kernel repository.

• Just as I reported last week would happen at SIGGRAPH and in late May first talked about OpenGL ES 3.0, today at the first day of SIGGRAPH LA 2012 the Khronos Group announced the release of the OpenGL 4.3 and OpenGL ES 3.0 graphics API specifications.

• It’s been twenty years since the release of the original OpenGL specification and this royalty-free multi-platform graphics specification keeps moving forward. New functionality provided by the OpenGL 4.3 specification includes: compute shaders leveraging GPU parallelism within the context of the graphics pipeline, shader storage buffer objects, texture parameter queries, high-quality ETC2/EAC texture compression as a standard feature, debug capabilities to receive debugging messages during application development, texture views for interpreting textures in different ways without data replication, increased memory security, and a multi-application robustness extension.

• While the OpenGL 4.3 specification was just released (along with OpenGL ES 3.0), there’s already a beta NVIDIA Linux proprietary driver supporting this latest desktop graphics API from Khronos. AMD will also soon be released a Catalyst beta with the GL 4.3 / GLSL 4.30 support. However, the open-source Mesa support will still be a ways out.

• The Mesa documentation was updated today to reflect what’s left in supporting the latest revisions of the OpenGL standard. Unfortunately, there’s a lot left with officially Mesa/Gallium3D still being limited to OpenGL 3.0 compliance.

• The Khronos Group has released the latest version of its OpenGL graphics standard, 20 years after SGI first opened up the code.

• The latest revision, OpenGL 4.3, adds the ability to harness the GPU for shading and draw commands, ETC2/EAC texture compression is included as standard, and an improved debugging system has been added, along with security enhancements aimed at stopping information leakage between applications.

Applications

• MediaBox is the most simplistic media player you’ll ever use. It uses GStreamer and is able to playback all the files supported by it.

• This means that you can play both music and video files using MediaBox to do it, using very little resources and a very simple way to choose the files you want to playback.

• Linux is a particularly strong platform for professionals that work within the graphic design and graphic arts industry. With low cost hardware, quality open source software, and an ounce of talent, artists can produce professional-looking computer graphics.

• Designers make use of graphic design software programs. The most common software used in the graphic design industry is Abobe Creative Suite which consists of Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Unfortunately, Adobe Creative Suite is proprietary software, and released only for the Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. It is also very expensive software. Fortunately, there is a good range of open source software to download without charge for the Linux platform which makes it possible to do remarkable graphics work.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Urban Terror is one of the most popular multiplayer FPS games for Linux. Created by Frozen Sand studio, the game features realistic weapons, gameplay and maps based on real world environments.

• Over the past few months, some of the most disruptive news in gaming has been from Valve. The company seems to be making a baffling sharp left-turn into completely new territory. On the surface it shows a few basic components of its master plan, leaving us to only speculate on what the rest might be. The most ambitious of these revelations, is the announcement that they are planning to try and get the entire catalogue of 2500 games on Steam ported to Linux.

• I bet that behavioral economists get rather excited when they see pay-what-you-want offers going viral. Assuming the seller is collecting some basic demographic detail, the resulting statistics might deliver some interesting insights into the relative altruism (or discretionary cash reserves) of different sorts of folks.

• The Humble Bundle team (responsible for the Humble Indie gaming bundles that we’ve covered before) is running a Humble Music bundle, accessible to all sorts of music fans. Featured artists include Jonathan Coulton, They Might Be Giants and MC Frontalot; a flexible portion of the purchase price goes toward not-for-profit cause groups like Child’s Play Charity and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE music player Amarok is getting a new UI for its context view. The new UI is written in QML that makes it fast as well as good looking.

• These updates are the fifth in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.8 series. 4.8.5 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.8 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.8.4 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come.

• Following the Qt 5.0 release, developers of this open-source tool-kit will aim to issue feature updates on a six-month cycle.

• Joao Abecasis reignited the discussion today concerning setting up time-based releases for Qt. “While releasing Qt 5.0.0 is an ongoing process, I think this is a good time to start planning future releases (5.0.1, 5.1.0, etc.) and, most importantly, we need to discuss *how* we’ll get them out on time. With the setup we now have we should quickly move to a strict time-based release schedule. A predictable schedule allows all interested to align with the project and contribute to make the next release the traditional Best Release Ever ™ of Qt.”

GNOME Desktop

• Once upon a time, the GNOME Linux/Unix desktop team could do no wrong. That was a long time ago. More recently, GNOME has lost many of their Linux desktop supporters. Now the GNOME developers’ proposed changes to Nautilus, the GNOME file manager, is losing them more fans. The Linux Mint developers have started work on their own fork of Nautilus: Nemo.

• Clement “Clem” Lefebvre Linux Mint’s lead developer told me, that the Mint, or more properly the Cinnamon desktop, itself a fork of the GNOME 3.x desktop, programmers reacted “to the upcoming regressions in Nautilus 3.6 (loss of the compact view, loss of some desktop icons, changes in paths hierarchy..etc,) by creating a fork in github called ‘nemo.’”

• The latest 3.5.x branch of Nautilus sports redesigned tool and menu bars but has also removed the dual pane, compact and sidebar views, the Go menu, and other features. Nemo currently includes very few visible changes from the 3.4.x branch of Nautilus, and the Linux Mint project has not yet officially announced what its plans for the new file manager entail, but it seems clear that its creation was prompted by the recent changes to Nautilus.

• After Cinnamon, Muffin and MDM, the Linux Mint team works on yet another fork: Nemo, a file manager forked from Nautilus 3.4.x.

• Nautilus 3.5.x, which will become Nautilus 3.6 stable and will be a part of GNOME 3.6, has got a new toolbar and menubar, but there were also some features that were removed, like the dual pane feature, sidebar tree view and others. And this, it seems, wasn’t what the Linux Mint developers want for their users, so they’ve decided to fork Nautilus 3.4.x, which still has these features.

• Red Hater David Zeuthen in his blog introduces all the new features in Gnome Disks 3.6 and also refers to the upcoming new options for Gnome 3.8. There are some nice additions; some are just optics and some are useful tools, but in my opinion not everything is perfect and complete.

• Sometimes, human minds get stuck without a reason between two options, jumping from the one to the other, never finding exactly what they are looking for.

• This is what happens to most people with today’s browsers. Almost no one completely likes Firefox and Chrome for their own personal reasons, but everyone keeps trying both when a newer version becomes available. Time to make a step towards something “greener” and give Midori a try!

Distributions

• Every once in a while I try some new version of Linux, some overhauled or updated “distribution” of the operating system that supposedly improves the user experience. And inevitably I get frustrated with it because, well, it’s just not Windows.

• IPFire, the hardened Linux distribution for firewall appliances, was recently updated to IPFire 2.11 Core update 61 and along with the enhancements, the developers announced that they are ending support for the Reiser4 filesystem. Rarely found in the wild, Reiser4 is an advanced filesystem, and sequel to ReiserFS, which offers an efficient journalling system, plugin support (for metadata or encryption), disk-layout optimisation and transaction support.

• I wanted to try out some Linux distros which are not Fedora or Ubuntu based. So, in came Calculate Linux 12 Desktop version and I liked what they have done with KDE here. The KDE ISO is big (2.3 GB) and I downloaded it from the calculate linux site. Just a day before Calculate Linux, I tried out Scientific Linux – given similarity in names and a large ISO size, my expectations were really high!

• If you still remember, Todd Robinson from On-Disk.com is trying to create and release 31 different usable and complete Linux distros everyday in August 2012. Three distros have been released, they are named SING, SOHO and Debian_live_VTWM.

New Releases

• Damn Small Linux is a experiment to fit all the necessary Linux apps and utilities in an CD image as small as possible. After a long time of being not developed, a release candidate was finally released of the upcoming 4.11 release.

• Following the MythTV 0.26 Alpha from last month, the first beta release of the MythTV 0.26 PVR/DVR open-source software is now available.

Red Hat Family

• Intersouth’s Katrin Burt is listed as a director and Lee Congdon, chief information officer of Raleigh-based Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), also is a board member at Adaptivity.

• For the most part using CentOS 6.3 was a pleasant experience. Installing codecs, Flash and various extras did require that I hunt down and install several additional repositories, which is a bit more work than is required from most other popular distributions. Further, some software isn’t available for CentOS, even with the extra repositories (searches for items such as the VLC media player failed to find any matches). However, when we consider CentOS isn’t aimed at the desktop crowd I feel the distro can be forgiven for the additional work required. Once the system was set up with the software and repositories I wanted it was smooth sailing from there. CentOS comes with good administrative tools, slightly aged, but still perfectly functional software and it will be supported for a good long time.

• One aspect of the default install I really appreciated was the fact that both GNOME 2 and KDE 4 were available. Most distributions these days put just one desktop environment on a disc while CentOS provides two, along with a full office suite and plenty of other popular applications and they still manage to keep their live disc under 2GB. The distribution doesn’t provide excitement or new, shiny features, it is pleasantly laid back and mature. The system is fairly light and stays out of the way. It’s a good option for people who want to install their OS and forget about it for the next several years.

Fedora

• But, Kororaa changed my view – it is definitely user friendly and offers a more complete out-of-the-box distro than Fedora with the usual smoothness that characterizes Fedora.

• Robyn Bergeron became the Fedora Project Leader earlier this year. In her tenure so far, the Beefy Miracle (aka Fedora 17) has been released. She’s also had to contend with Secure Boot and is now busy getting everything lined up for Fedora 18.

• I recently got the chance to chat with Bergeron, to talk about what she’s doing. She told me that there are a lot of good things about the job of Fedora Project Leader (FPL) One of those good things is the fact that people aren’t afraid to raise the flag if you’re something is missing.

• The feature freeze and branching of Fedora 18 is scheduled to occur tomorrow. The FESCo meeting happened today where a few of the last features were approved for the Spherical Cow release.

Debian Family

• The Debian Installer Team has released the first beta release of Debian 7 codenamed Wheezy. This is a development release for testing purposes only and not intended to be used in enterprise, business and production environments. It ships with a lot of bug fixes and new hardware support for a number of devices. The release announcement can be found here.

• Debian developers are planning to switch the default desktop environment of Debian 7 codenamed Wheezy from Gnome to XFCE. The move comes mainly to make the distro lightweight and also reduce the size of the installation image.

• Gnome developers have laid out plans to make Clocks a core application in future Gnome releases and there have been some impressive work on this app. Some screenshots:

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• In the previous article you were able to find out what Ubuntu software center is capable off. Today you are going to read a bit advanced theme: System Settings.

• Once when you get comfortable with Ubuntu you will want to: change desktop appearance, test sound, create accounts on your system for other people and much more.

• It was not long ago (February) when we heard a tad bit about Ubuntu for Android. It was basically a project from Canonical to bring the popular Linux system to Android smartphones. However, a video highlight for some of the system’s capabilities was filmed at the Forum Internacional Software Livre in Brazil last week. The aim was to provide us with an up-to-date look at the progress the project has been making, currently.

• Once upon a time, Linux was a small experiment running in the backrooms of NOC (Network Operations Centers) and MIT/Berkeley labs. Then came the Internet and the home computing craze and the advent of the OS for the consumer side. If Windows and macOS were the two mainstream choices you were thinking of, you’d be right. However, Canonical has changed that over the last 5 years with their OS, Ubuntu.

• Not a long time ago, we reported about the possible integration of two Linux ‘bros’- Ubuntu and Android into one device. We see the dream coming true, sooner than ever.

Flavours and Variants

• Well folks, this is it. After many months of looking for a suitable replacement for my setup of Linux Mint 9 LTS “Isadora” GNOME, I have found one and have followed through with it. There were two reasons why I wanted to make this upgrade/switch: I wanted to stay up-to-date and take advantage of the support promised in the latest LTS release, and I needed to either reinstall my current OS or install something else because my present installation of Linux Mint stopped recognizing my laptop’s ethernet card when I accidentally pulled out the power adapter cord from the laptop about 2 months ago. I got by with wireless Internet, but it was painful, and it had become so painful in the last few weeks that I couldn’t stick with it for much longer. The following is a log of my experience installing and customizing Linux Mint 13 LTS “Maya” Xfce on my laptop. As of the moment that I write this sentence, this will simultaneously be the last post that I write with the old version of Linux Mint and the first that I write with the new version. I have to confess that I’ve become somewhat attached to the way that I’ve customized the old version (and that’s what made finding a suitable replacement so difficult), but given that it looks like I can do the same things in the new version, I eagerly anticipate having the new version installed. Follow the jump to see what happens.

• It’s been less than a year since I first wrote about Bodhi Linux 1.2.0, but already the popular, Ubuntu-based Linux distribution has reached its second major milestone.

Devices/Embedded

• Sure, it costs almost twice as much, but look what you get for your $60.00!

• Hackberry A10 developer board: $60 PC board with Allwinner A10 CPU

• “A Hackberry A10 Developer Board with 512MB of RAM is available for $60. A 1GB model should be available soon for $65.

• Adafruit Industries has published a new Linux distribution called “Occidentalis” for hardware hacking and teaching electronics using the ARM-based Raspberry Pi mini-computer. Its developers say that they decided to create Occidentalis because Raspbian – a Debian-based distribution released by the Raspberry Pi Foundation last month – didn’t include many of the tools and software components that most hardware hackers would need.

• The credit-card sized $35 Raspberry Pi computer is gaining software support which should make it more usable by enthusiasts. As we have reported it is a device that is designed to be educational and to encourage a new generation of programmers.

• These latest additions by third-party developers are not for the faint-hearted. They are meant to be challenging. The tiny inexpensive computer, which is sold uncased, has been designed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation based in Cambridge U.K. The only version now available costs $35, but a a slightly lower-specified $25 model should be coming soon.

• Tactile Array turns digital barometers into opensource robot tactile senors

• Freescale Semiconductor’s MPL115A2 is a tiny thing that will sit quite comfortably on the tip of your finger. It’s hard not to marvel at the engineering that went into the creation of something so small, yet so sensitive. The little metal square is minute enough to be plunked into a cell phone, offering up location pinpointing technologies that supplement GPS, gauging positions based on changes in atmospheric pressure. Harvard’s Biorobotics team was clearly impressed when it discovered the technology, devising a fascinating implementation that extends beyond the walls of the cell phone. The sensors would go on to form the core of the department’s TakkTile open-source boards capable of bringing sensitive touch sensing to robot hands.

• Following on from the release of Zing 5.2 at the end of April, Azul Systems have announced that they are making their pauseless Zing JVM freely available to open source developers and projects for use in development and testing.

Phones

Android

• Thursday it was announced that an unofficial port of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean CyanogenMod 10 custom ROM was available for the discontinued webOS powered HP TouchPad, with a big early thanks to XDA-Developers forum member and Android developer James Sullins, aka jcsullins.

• Though it’s discontinued, and mostly a niche device, the HP TouchPad is no slouch in the hardware world. It sports a 9.7 inch, 1024 x 768 pixel display, a 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon dual-core processor, has 1GB of RAM, and 16GB to 32GB of storage. It is still a very solid tablet.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• It might have taken more than half of the year to come to fruition, but Samsung today announced the redesigned Galaxy Note 10.1. Details for the tablet include a 1.4GHz quad-core processor, 2GB RAM, 10.1-inch display, 5-megapixel main camera, and a 1.9-megapixel front-facing camera. Since we’re talking “Note” here then you might already know this guy has the S Pen capability for note-taking, markups, drawing, and more. Rounding on the specs, the Galaxy Note comes in three storage capacities, 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB, each with expandable microSD card slots.

• Samsung has taken its line of Note devices to full-fledged tablet territory, offering up the Galaxy Note 10.1. It’s a full-sized Android tablet that features both a touchscreen and a stylus for pen-assisted drawing, note-taking and input. The Galaxy Note 10.1 comes with an accelerometer, a digital compass, a light and a gyroscope.

• An Enormous Galaxy Note For Stylus-Wielding Arty TypesIf you were a fan of the original stylus-packing Galaxy Note, but always thought that 5.3-inches was just too small: good news. Samsung’s finally released the long-awaited quad-core 10.1-inch version of the Note, and you should be able to get your hands on it by the end of this month.

Free Software/Open Source

• The project moved to the Apache Software Foundation in 2010 and became a top level project earlier this year.

• Now after three years of effort, Deltacloud has finally hit its 1.0 release. A 1.0 release is usually a major milestone signifying that an open source project is mature and ready for consumption. In Deltacloud’s case, the effort has already been deployed and integrated into Red Hat’s commercial CloudForms effort that officially launched in June.

• The stock firmware included on many broadband routers takes advantage of only a fraction of the hardware’s capabilities. We explain how to use use powerful open-source firmware to unleash the beast in your router.

• I know why you’re excited this week … you’ve seen the “Kuratas”, a 13 foot tall, 9,900-pound robot you can ride in at speeds of up to 6 miles per hour and which is equipped with a water bottle cannon and Gatling guns that can fire 6,000 BBs per minute (the operator can fire the armaments just by smiling … no, really, watch the video).

• The Kuratas robot, built by Japanese artist Kogoro Kurata and marketed by Suidobashi Heavy Industry, can be controlled by the onboard operator, a remote control device, or a smartphone and runs V-Sido, a “next generation robot OS”.

• If you’re planning on getting into the design field and you have all these crazy-cool ideas, there are a few things you’ll need: A design engine, modeling software and an asset management suite. The first two are pretty easy to get your hands on, but the third can become a bit tricky, unless you decide to use TACTIC from Southpaw Technology.

• VMware has lost another high-profile employee: Dave McCrory, a senior technical marketer for the company’s open source cloud building platform, Cloud Foundry. The move comes amidst a growing number of questions around the platform, which was built to remake VMware as a cloud computing company capable of competing with the likes of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.

• Businesses, across all industries, yearn for highly reliable technologies to support their IT infrastructure. However, on the software side, high upfront costs, license limitations and support often become the barriers to implementation. Thus, free and flexible software have become the choice for an increasing number of companies, regardless of size.

• To cite an example of its unwavering promise, enterprises can always look at Google and RedHat as just two of the well known proponents of open source software. But considering that we are an SMB-dominated dog-eat-dog environment, what is the true value of the open source software? Are there risks to integrating open source codes to your system?

SaaS

• OpenStack, the open source “cloud operating system,” has stirred community excitement and attracted a vendor following, including Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, and Red Hat. But until now one thing has been lacking: A high-profile corporate customer willing to talk about its OpenStack implementation.

• Today, eBay is announcing that it’s using OpenStack to manage a high-volume dev, test, and experimentation environment where apps are created for eBay Marketplaces. According to Jean-Christophe Martin, Cloud Architect for eBay, the current OpenStack implementation is small, but eBay is looking at extending that footprint as the open source project matures.

Healthcare

• The joint efforts of the Department of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) to create an integrated electronic health record (iEHR) have made news over the past couple of weeks — some good, some bad.

Business

Semi-Open Source

Funding

• Are you involved with any open source efforts focused on K-12 or university-level students? Do you happen to have involvement with any projects in the rapidly growing field of open source robotics? If so, you may be a good candidate for a Google RISE (Roots in Science and Engineering) award. Through this annual program, Google makes grants of $5,000 to $25,000 to organizations around the world, and you can apply for a RISE grant today.

Public Services/Government

• The government of the Canary Islands will increasingly be using open source applications. It is moving to open source for its telephony needs and will install a handful of open source applications on governmental desktop PCs. “We are strongly encouraging the use of OpenOffice.”

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• Resistance to open data is much older than the concept of open data itself. Those who control—and/or benefit from the control of—data have traditionally resisted its open dissemination.

• This resistance is being steadily eroded by government policy (see open data policies in the US, UK, and a long list of other national, state and local governments), by growing social and political movements in Europe, by technological advances such as the move to “Big Data,” and by the continued work of the broader open source, open content, open access community.

Programming

• Shortly after the release of Cobra 2.0, the GNU/Linux Desktop (GUI Application) Testing Project (GNU LDTP) also released a new version of its Linux testing tool. LDTP 3.0 includes many of the new features that were included with the Windows version, including enhanced language support. Linux-specific additions include the ability to change the state of check boxes in Firefox and fixes to the program’s interactions with Qt and the Python-ldtp interface.

Leftovers

Security

Finance

• Goldman Sachs Asset Management has been accused of causing a pension scheme client’s money to be invested in sub-prime mortgage-backed securities in mid-2007 even though it knew, at the same time, that Goldman Sachs’ proprietary trading desk was short selling MBS “on a very large scale in order to profit from falling prices”.

Censorship

• Demonoid, one of the world’s largest BitTorrent sites and the largest that operates its own tracker has been missing in action for a week now. The site has been down due to a massive DDoS attack, but it seems there’s more than that to it.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• As I noted recently, net neutrality is back in the spotlight, so I thought it would be useful – and maybe entertaining – to look at an anti-net neutrality article for the insights it gives us about how the other side views things. It’s called “Pick Up On One and Let The Other One Ride”, and appears in the Huffington Post.

Copyrights

• Seldom does a fact bear repeating as frequently as the maxim, “There is no copyright in ideas”. And despite the regularity with which this fundamental principle of copyright law is cited, its application remains a bone of contention.

• Since the Statute of Anne (1710), the common antecedent of modern copyright law, this creature of statute exists exclusively for the protection of the material expression of ideas, and not the underlying ideas, facts or discoveries contained in the work.

• For this reason, copyright protection vests at the moment a work is recorded in physical form, and only to the extent that it is recorded. As a result, an author will hold the exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute his/her novel while the ideas that inspired the storyline (the general plot, setting and timeline) may be lawfully reproduced by another.

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