key point

We've been talking about the Golan case, and its possible impact on culture, for years.

If you're unfamiliar with it, it's the third in a line of cases, starting with the Eldred case, to challenge aspects of copyright law as violating the First Amendment.

The key point in the case was questioning whether or not the US could take works out of the public domain and put them under copyright.

ComputerAddict points us to an interesting discussion of complexity of computer systems today, written by Jean-Baptiste Queru.

The key point is that, at the user level, the various technologies we use today seem incredibly simple, but the amount of things happening under the hood are awe-inspiring.

We've noted before the odd fact that various transit authorities around the globe have been trying to stop people from making useful transit apps, with things like schedules and whatnot.

The argument from those transit authorities is incredibly short-sighted. It usually has something to do with claims about how the scheduling data is "proprietary" and the authority's "intellectual property." The key point, of course, is that they're hoping to make money licensing the data.

But that's really short-sighted.

While a variety of folks have, over the years, suggested some form of a "private copying levy" or "internet levy" to tax users and hand it over to folks in the entertainment industry to distribute, we've spent a lot of time explaining why this is a terrible idea.

In the last few months, there's been a growing movement by the entertainment industry to blame Google for "piracy." One of the favorite talking points is the claim that Google is "profiting from piracy," by linking people to sites that point people to unauthorized infringing copies of content, and then placing ads on those sites.

Of course, this ignores the fact that the standard "pirate" out there isn't exactly the sort of person who goes around clicking on ads either -- and is probably a hell of a lot more likely to ignore the ads entirely or use something like Adblock.

We've been covering the Golan case for a while now. It's an important case in determining the contours of copyright and the public domain.

Many details of the case involve a lot of legal specifics, but the general point was to question whether or not taking works out of the public domain, and putting them under copyright violated the First Amendment.

Now, there's a lot more to it than that, and it would take way too much time to get into all the details.

Jay was the first of a whole bunch of you to submit the blog post by indie game developer Markus Persson that's been making the rounds, where he talks about why it's better to give people a reason to buy than to worry about "piracy":

Instead of just relying on guilt tripping pirates into buying, or wasting time and money trying to stop them, I can offer online-only services that actually add to the game experience.

We're seeing more and more analysis of the summary judgment motions filed by both sides in the YouTube lawsuit between Google and Viacom.

Unfortunately, many sites are basing their analysis on the out of context quotes Viacom pulled out of some emails -- despite the fact that the evidence doesn't actually support what it claims.

There's been a lot of controversy around the PHP Standards group that was formed around May of 2009 and how they've handled the decision making process.

They want to provide a standard that frameworks and other applications can follow to help making them all play nicely together a much easier process.

Unfortunately, they decided to go the "closed source" way. Greg Beaver has posted some of his thoughts on their approach.