CSIRO has had an important win in a court case in the US in its battle to be paid royalties for its Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) technology. CSIRO was granted a US patent for this technology in 1996. Yesterday, in the US Federal Court of the Eastern District of Texas, Judge Davis granted summary judgment in favour of CSIRO in regard to the patent’s validity. He also granted summary judgment that the defendant, Buffalo Technology, had infringed CSIRO’s patent
Sun is considering releasing its Solaris operating system under the General Public License, raising the possibility of cross-pollination with Linux. The server and software company previously made Solaris an open-source project called OpenSolaris in 2005, releasing source code under the Community Development and Distribution License (CDDL). However, Sun this week chose the GPL for its open-source Java effort
Piracy statistics are labelled self-serving hyperbole
in a draft government report. A confidential briefing for the Attorney-General’s Department, prepared by the Australian Institute of Criminology, lashes the music and software sectors
Peter Jenner, former manager of bands like Pink Floyd, T Rex and The Clash, states in an interview with the Register that music label executives have lost faith in DRM and dollar-per-track online music selling isn’t working too well as a model. He predicts that in two to three years time, many countries will have moved to a blanket licensing regime — via Slashdot
A new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research, a UK think tank, has some concrete suggestions on how to reform the UK’s dated intellectual property laws. The starting point for its deliberations is the notion that knowledge is both a commodity and a public good, and it recommends that the UK move from a model where knowledge is ‘an asset first and a public resource second’ to one where knowledge is primarily a public resource and secondarily an asset. Is that an anti-business attitude? The report’s authors don’t think so — via Slashdot
Forgent Networks has settled its lawsuit concerning the so-called JPEG patents for US$8 million, a fraction of what the company initially sought
Providing some information is better than giving none at all, search giants are saying, but human rights groups warned that filtering of web content is increasing in developing countries
MySpace has licensed new technology to stop users from posting unauthorised copyrighted music. The move comes amid pressure from major studios and record labels against popular online sites like MySpace and YouTube, which they accuse of infringing the copyrights of their artists’ music and videos. MySpace, one of the most popular sites on the internet, has licensed technology from privately-held Gracenote allowing it to review music recordings uploaded by community members to their profiles
A Perth-based company has been fined $5.5 million for sending millions of unsolicited emails, with a judge labelling the spam annoying, costly to combat, and a threat to the internet
The FBI has raided the home of Christopher Soghoian, the grad student who created the NWA boarding pass site. Details can be found on his blog including a scanned copy of the warrant. The bad news is that he really did break the law. The good news is that Senator Charles Schumer did it first, 19 months ago, on an official government website no less. The outcome of this trial should be at least academically interesting. At best, it could result in nullifying some portion of the law(s) that the TSA operates under — via Slashdot
A Texas judge has refused to allow the RIAA untrammelled access to the defendant’s hard drive in Sony v Arellanes. The court ruled that only a mutually agreeable, neutral computer forensics expert may examine the hard drive, at the RIAA’s expense, and that the parties must agree on mutually acceptable provisions for confidentiality — via Slashdot
In a stealth manoeuvre, President Bush has signed into law a provision which, according to Senator Patrick Leahy, will actually encourage the President to declare federal martial law. It does so by revising the Insurrection Act, a set of laws that limits the President’s ability to deploy troops within the United States. The Insurrection Act has historically, along with the Posse Comitatus Act, helped to enforce strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement. With one cloaked swipe of his pen, Bush is seeking to undo those prohibitions
23 year old Grant Stanley has been sentenced to five months in prison, followed by five months of home detention and a $3000 fine for the work he put in the private BitTorrent tracker Elitetorrents
The music, movie and software cartels claim piracy
is a number one problem not only for themselves, but for the world as a whole and so successful are their continuing dis- and misinformation propaganda campaigns that they’ve been able to dragoon entire governments and police forces into acting as industry enforcers. But far from being at the top of the pile, movie and music piracy rank 16th and 20th, respectively, on a global index of illicit markets. Software piracy ranks 7th. And even those positions are subject to considerable doubt
China is moving to require people to use their real names when blogging. The proposed solution, arrived at by the Internet Society of China (affiliated with the ministry of information) would allow bloggers to use a pseudonym when blogging as long as they used their real name when registering — via Slashdot
US customs officials have the authority to scrutinise the contents of travelers’ laptops and even confiscate laptops for a period of time, without giving a reason
Boy Scouts in the Los Angeles area will now be able to earn a merit patch for learning about the evils of downloading pirated movies and music. Nothing like getting early brainwashing from corporate America
ICANN has reviewed the Spamhaus-e360 case, according to a statement from the domain-name agency, and noted that it has no knowledge as to the merits of e360’s claim against Spamhaus and why Spamhaus did not appear in court to defend itself. However, ICANN did say that it would be unable to comply with a court order to suspend the spamhaus.org domain, if one is handed down
Aladdin has come up with a new way of restricting the data stored on optical discs. It’s XCD
format has a chip built directly into the disc and which fits into a USB port. So, a user needs to plug the disc into their computer to access a cryptophic key before being able to use the data stored on the disc (presumably in some sort of proprietary player) — via Slashdot
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, an international version of the MPAA, is breathing down the necks of 8,000 users of file-sharing software. The new cases cover file sharers in 17 different countries who have been allegedly using sites including BitTorrent, eDonkey, SoulSeek and WinMX. For the first time legal action is being taken in Brazil, Mexico and Poland. The IFPI said the actions affect a wide-variety of people: a laboratory assistant has been charged in Finland, while a parson has been served with action in Germany
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