Searching the Deep Web

Interesting Salon article by Alex Wright.

Bruce Perens’s critical examination of the SCO ‘case’

Predictably, he doesn’t think much of it. Quote:

“In 1985, concerned Unix customers asked A&T to clarify that particular term of the license. A&T agreed and published the license change in the Echo newsletter that got sent to all Unix licensees in August of that year.

Explaining the change, A&T wrote that the sentence was added to assure licensees that the company would claim no ownership in the software that they developed–only the portion of the software developed by A&T.

SCO is legally bound to honor the contract and publicly stated interpretation of A&T’s terms.

SCO conveniently overlooked this change when it decided to sue IBM. As A&T’s successor in interest, SCO is legally bound to honor the contract and publicly stated interpretation of A&T’s terms. That’s why I think SCO’s major claim against IBM and Linux will fail. The remaining copyright infringement claim is that Linux makes use of the Unix API (application program interface), and that copies of several header files defining that API were included in Linux.

SCO should know there is ample case law asserting that APIs can’t be restricted and are available for all to implement under “fair use” in copyright law. ”

How news travels through the Blogosphere

Lovely illustration by Stephen VanDyke. Thanks to Karlin Lillington for pointing me to it.

A Harvard case study on the political significance of Blogging

The Kennedy Center at Harvard has published a fascinating case study on how the Blogging community rather than the mainstream media exposed Senator Trent Lott’s speech honouring Strom Thurmond that cost him his place in the political sun. What’s interesting — and useful — about the case is that it’s exhaustively researched. Also interesting is that the PDF comes with pretty restrictive DRM measures. No cutting and pasting — even of short excerpts. Harvard is clearly not joining the Open Courseware bandwagon. Reminds me of Jay Rosen’s list of the ten differences between weblogging and traditional journalism.

GMO and IP: same story

“The question is as simple as this”, writes George Monbiot, in a terrific Guardian Op-Ed piece. “Do you want a few corporations to monopolise the global food supply? If the answer is yes, you should welcome the announcement that the government is expected to make today that the commercial planting of a genetically modified (GM) crop in Britain can go ahead. If the answer is no, you should regret it. The principal promotional effort of the genetic engineering industry is to distract us from this question.

GM technology permits companies to ensure that everything we eat is owned by them. They can patent the seeds and the processes that give rise to them. They can make sure that crops can’t be grown without their patented chemicals. They can prevent seeds from reproducing themselves. By buying up competing seed companies and closing them down, they can capture the food market, the biggest and most diverse market of all.”

The interesting thing about this piece is that it highlights what’s going also in Intellectual Property. We’re moving into an era when large companies want to own everything — including the human genome. And we don’t seem to have governments or electorates perceptive enough to realise what’s going on. Instead we have a lot of rhetoric about ‘consumer choice’, ‘property rights’, ‘theft’ and ‘free’ trade.

Some Like It Hot

“OK”, says Larry Lessig, “P2P is ‘piracy’. But so was the birth of Hollywood, radio, cable TV, and (yes) the music industry”. Nice excerpt from his forthcoming book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity.

What is Mac OS X?

Remarkable, detailed, informative answer to that question by an IBM programmer, Amit Singh. Thanks to Gerard de Vries for the link.

The Waste Land

This is just one of an astonishing (and sobering) set of pictures taken by a Russian biker and photographer who likes travelling round the Chernobyl area. Her English is delightfully wacky (though less so than my Russian), but the pictures speak for themselves.

The computer and the motor car: another intriguing similarity

My Observer colleague Simon Caulkin has a fascinating column today on the parallels between the US-dominated automobile industry in the 1960s and the US-dominated software industry in the 2000s. What’s the parallel? Well, in the 1960s, the automobile manufacturers were ‘relaxed’ about quality whereas the upstart Japanese were not. We all know what happened. In the 2000s, the software companies are, er, relaxed about quality (not to mention security) and — guess what? — the Indians are not. This is the really interesting aspect of the ‘offshoring’ debate. And the funniest thing of all is that Bill Gates drives a Lexus.

That SCO memo is authentic

When I posted that piece about how Microsoft was bankrolling, er investing in, SCO, the authenticity of the leaked memo hadn’t been established. Now, it has.