Archive for January 2006
Open Source GPL Being Rewritten
“A major revamp of the General Public License is scheduled for public release next week, a move that’s expected to kick off a long and vocal debate over the key foundation of open-source programming.
“[Free Software Foundation] founder Richard Stallman released the current version 2 in 1991. Since then, it’s been used to govern Linux, Samba, MySQL and thousands of other open-source projects. The new version is expected to address a host of technology issues that have arisen in the last 15 years, including patent issues and software running on a remote server.
Stephen Shankland. Overhaul of GPL Set for Public Release. News.com. Jan. 11, 2006.
See also:
The Free Software Foundation. First International Conference on GPLv3. Jan. 16-17, 2005.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
The Effect of Web 2.0 on Legal Information
Dennis Kennedy, a lawyer and technology consultant, recently led a roundtable discussion on technology’s influence on legal practice. Portions of that article are published in this month’s edition of Law Practice Today, a magazine for the Law Practice & Technology division of the American Bar Association.
There has been a lot of discussion in the world of technology in the last few months about “Web 2.0.” Last month, in Law Practice Today, we wrote a roundtable article using an Internet tool called Writely, a free collaborative writing service that allowed all of the authors to work together on the article. We were so enthused with the process that we decided to use it again to write a roundtable article on Web 2.0 to discuss the tools now available and the potential implications for the legal profession.
We wrote the article by putting a draft with the questions up on Writely and inviting people to visit the site and add their comments to create the article in a couple of days.
Law Practice Today. Does Web 2.0 Point Us Toward Law 2.0? January 2006.
IPTAblog. Law 2.0. Dec. 12, 2005.
WiredGC. Web 2.0, Heading West to Law 2.0. Dec. 6, 2005.
Tim O’Reilly. What Is Web 2.0? O’Reilly. Sept. 30, 2005.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
Love Spawns pearLyrics
“Necessity may be the mother of invention, but can love be the mother of code?
“In an interview with Wired News, the Austrian developer who wrote the controversial PearLyrics widget for iTunes said he created the app to win the heart of a would-be girlfrien”d who moved to Hong Kong.
Many mopey love songs later, inspiration hit. Ritter set to work on PearLyrics, a little program that serves as a helper tool for Apple’s iTunes. When a song is playing in iTunes, PearLyrics hunts down the lyrics on the internet and adds the text to the digital music file.”
Xeni Jardin. PearLyrics’ True Love Story. Wired News. Jan. 10, 2006.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
Competing Open Source Licenses Often Incompatible
“No one would confuse cyber-lawyer Lawrence Lessig with Homer Simpson — symbol for all that is dumb about America. But Lessig, a professor of law at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA, has spent a good deal of time lately trying to figure out how to resolve a ‘doh!’ moment of his own: realizing that the various intellectual property licenses that he helped design over recent years to encourage the sharing of intellectual property — a movement collectively known as ‘copyleft,’ in contrast to copyright — may actually prevent it.
“The problem is that the copyleft licenses, like the ‘free software’ licenses from which they’re drawn, require that derivative works be licensed under identical terms. And those terms differ from license to license. So the collections (or ‘mash-ups’) of free text, audio, and video that Lessig and others have championed as the vanguard of a new ‘free culture’ can’t combine works created under different licenses — even if all of the licenses are meant to encourage wide sharing. For example, text from Wikipedia, which uses a license called the Free Documentation License (FDL), could not be used as narration in a documentary film designed to be shared under a Creative Commons license.”
Michael Fitzgerald. Copyleft Hits a Snag. Technology Review. Dec. 21, 2005.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
Nikon Pulls Plug on Film Cameras
“The Nikon Corporation, the Japanese camera maker, said Thursday that it would stop making most of its film cameras and lenses in order to focus on digital cameras.
“Nikon said it would halt production of all but two of its seven film cameras and would also stop making most lenses for those cameras. The company will halt production of the film camera models ‘one by one,’ though it refused to specify when.”
Martin Fackler. Nikon Plans to Stop Making Most Cameras That Use Film. The New York Times. Jan. 12, 2006.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
NPR Analyzes Television’s Evolution
“Over the holidays, millions of Americans received video gadgets as gifts, from pocket-sized video iPods to flat screen high-definition TVs. Both technologies are the first signs of a sweeping television revolution — undoing nearly 60 years of viewing habits, and forming new ones.
“As with most other things related to technology, it seems teenagers are at the cutting edge when it comes to next-generation television. And it’s increasingly clear they want two main things from their sets: complete control and choice.
“In the first of a three-part series of reports on the future of television, Rick Karr looks at the ways technology is changing how viewers consume programming.”
Rick Karr. Video Programming Wherever, Whenever. National Public Radio. Jan. 4, 2006.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
Next-Gen DVD Format Remains Unsettled
“For consumers, a device that could play both HD DVDs and Blu-ray discs would take a lot of risk out of adopting the new video players–but one may not arrive for a while. Legal agreements, intellectual property issues and technological pride will likely keep the two camps backing incompatible next-generation technologies from coming together in the near future, executives and analysts said.
“HD DVD and Blu-ray are competing video and storage formats for succeeding DVDs. While some movie studios said in mid-2005 that they were open to merging the two formats, by late summer, such talk had fizzled out. Meanwhile, the technological world is bitterly divided.”
Michael Kanellos. A DVD Combo? Don’t Hold Your Breath. News.com. Jan. 10, 2006.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
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