rev. 15 April 2009; get the PDF The laws that protect the creation of content are manifold and complicated—even byzantine. America has copyright protection, which applies to concrete expressions of information, trademark protection, which protects distinctive symbols or verbiage associated with a legal entity, and patent protection, which protects “(1) processes, (2) machines, (3) manufactures [...]
As someone who spends a lot of time reading computer and security news, I’m no stranger to Kevin Metnick. I did an entire paper on social engineering, in fact, and you just know that I at least mentioned Mitnick. If that name has passed too far out of the cultural zeitgeist for you to know, [...]
The flame-wars between GPL and BSD proponents flared up again this weekend. Marcus Glocker, an OpenBSD developer, used GPLed driver code for the “bcw” driver (Broadcom wireless) he was developing, and which he had committed to OpenBSD’s public CVS server. First, it’s important to note that GPL and BSD are not necessarily compatible licenses. GPL [...]
I could go on for pages and pages of complaints against Big Media and its fascist take on intellectual property rights and fair use. But this is a bit more specific: I stumbled upon a very interesting blog post about BayTSP, a company that monitors download swarms for bittorrent downloads ostensibly containing data copyrighted by [...]