Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

Yes, we've had the debate over and over and over again during the years (so much so that I'm not even going to dig up the links) concerning whether or not copyright is like "property." However, reading an article by Alex Cummings on "the end of ownership," it really drives home why copyright can often be anti-property rights, in that it takes away the standard types of "rights" that people have in property they've purchased. Cummings' piece focuses on the secondary market for copyright-covered content, and how the content industries have been trying for over a century to stamp such things out, but were long held back by important concepts like the first sale right. However, in an all digital world, they're having a lot more luck in killing off secondary markets:

Almost two-weeks after Bluebox Security announced a vulnerability in Android's security model that could enable attackers to convert most Android applications into Trojans, and more than a week after Google released the fix for it, the vast majority of Android OEMs has yet to patch the hole. So, Duo Security and Northeastern University's System Security Lab (NEU SecLab) have released an app, ReKey, which fixes it for you.

A couple of years ago, Linus Torvalds was discussing Linux version numbers and said, "I think I will call 3.11 Linux for Workgroups." It turns out he wasn't joking.

A new ARM-based Linux PC with a host of capabilities—including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, two Gigabit Ethernet jacks, and five USB ports—goes on sale next month starting at $99.

The precise amount of time the vulnerability was active is in dispute, with Cryptocat developers putting it at seven months and a security researcher saying it was closer to 19 months. Both sides agree that the effect of the bug was that the keys used to encrypt and decrypt conversations among groups of users were easy for outsiders to calculate. As a result, activists, journalists, or others who relied on Cryptocat to protect their group chats from government or industry snoops got little more protection than is typically available in standard chat programs. Critics said it was hard to excuse such a rudimentary error in an open-source piece of software held out as a way to protect sensitive communications.

If you’ve ever bought a digital comic book, your experience probably went something like this: You opened up an app like ComiXology, paid around $1.99 to $3.99 — likely, the same price as a print issue — but never downloaded the file for the comic to your hard drive. That’s because you don’t really own it — you’ve simply licensed the right to look at it in someone else’s library.

If you're not familiar with the world of big digital publishing, it works a bit like this: you can generally get digital versions of comics the same day they're released to brick-and-mortar stores, either through a subscription or a specialized app. Now when I say "get," I don't really mean "buy." Yes, money is leaving your bank account and going into the publisher's (with maybe a cut going to a middleman like Comixology), but the reality is that you're just renting the content. You buy a license to view the comic—you don't actually own it. Want to read it outside of the app you bought it from? Good luck with that.

Under the umbrella of claiming that policies of the Government of India favor domestic producers over U.S. Exporters – in other words, that India is protectionist – the Members of Congress claimed that “the intellectual property (IP) climate has become increasingly challenging in India.”

What's so challenging about it? Well, it seems that India actually practices some sort of quality control on patents, much to the dismay of American pharmaceutical companies looking to exploit the system the way they do domestically.

At its BUILD developer conference in San Francisco, Microsoft developer and C++ Committee chair Herb Sutter talked about what Visual Studio users can look forward to over the coming years. Sutter also outlined Microsoft's ambition to comply with both the existing and still current C++11 standard, and the forthcoming update to that spec that should be completed in 2014.

German antivirus company Avira is discontinuing its Linux products in order to focus more on developing its Mac OS X and Windows lines. The company says small businesses and consumer systems "almost exclusively rely upon Windows or Mac operating systems" and that "Linux installations have been declining steadily for years".

Last year, the Supreme Court ordered the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to reconsider the validity of a patent that broadly covers the concept of Internet users watching advertisements in exchange for accessing copyrighted content.

In a decision Friday (PDF), the appeals court recognized that the Ultramercial patent doesn't specify a mechanism for implementing the ad system—but still refused to invalidate the patent on the grounds that it is too abstract.

One of the more painful areas of cross-platform computing is data sharing. While networking between Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux has gotten a lot easier thanks to SAMBA, disk sharing still feels like it’s in its infancy thanks to proprietary file systems and the unique legacy needs of the respective operating systems they run on.

Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, the former U.S. District court judge who ruled in 2000 that Microsoft was a monopoly that should be broken up before his decision was overruled, died Saturday at age 76.

Filmmakers and TV producers have long been harassed by Warner/Chappell Music, a subsidiary of Time Warner that enforces the copyright on "Happy Birthday," probably the most popular song in the world. If that song pops up in any TV show or movie, the creators are sure to get a hefty bill. The makers of the critically acclaimed 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams had to pay $5,000 for a scene of one of the protagonists' families singing the song. By 1996, Warner/Chappell was pulling in more than $2 million per year from licensing.

The issue, as we've noted, is that it's just not cost effective for anyone to actually stand up and challenge Warner Music, who has strong financial incentive to pretend the copyright is still valid. Well, apparently, someone is angry enough to try. The creatively named Good Morning to You Productions, a documentary film company planning a film about the song Happy Birthday, has now filed a lawsuit concerning the copyright of Happy Birthday and are seeking to force Warner/Chappell to return the millions of dollars it has collected over the years. That's going to make this an interesting case.

Reactions to yesterday’s iOS 7 reveal were largely positive, but one current of criticism kept flowing: that Apple may have relied a little too hard on copying other operating systems—in particular, Google’s Android (though the stark flatness of Windows Phone 8 got cited, too).

Although emerging markets such as Indonesia and China have embraced open source in their classrooms, adoption has been much spottier in the US. Observers and practitioners cite three broad reasons: 1. Lack Of Market Share. 2. Unfamiliarity. 3. Technical Gaps.

A significant chapter has closed in the ongoing smartphone patent war between Apple and Samsung. A case that Samsung opened at the International Trade Commission (ITC) in 2011 concluded on Tuesday, with the ITC determining that a variety of older Apple products infringe the claims of a Samsung patent, US Patent No 7,706,348. If the decision stands, a "limited exclusion order" would go into effect that would ban the AT&T models of the iPhone 4, the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 3, iPad 3G, and iPad 2 3G.

It's amazing how frequently we still hear from entertainment industry folks or politicians pointing to Hadopi as an example of "success" in a three strikes program. Of course, the reality is that it has been a colossal failure by nearly every measure possible. The industry has had to seriously massage the statistics, but they can't deny the simple fact that it hasn't helped drive sales, which really seems like the key metric. In fact, the latest reports show that music sales -- including digital sales -- have continued to drop. Even more telling: the decline in sales in France has outpaced the decline elsewhere. In other words, nothing about Hadopi worked.

Here's one that touches on both patents and copyrights. Last year, we wrote about how some academic journals were ridiculously claiming that law firms, who made copies of journal articles to submit to the US Patent and Trademark Office to show examples of prior art, were infringing on their copyrights. Yes, they were arguing that you couldn't use their journals as examples of prior art without paying them for the privilege.