Intellectual Property Law Internet Law IT Law Computer Law

FACIL, a non-profit association, which promotes the collective appropriation of Free Software, contests the Quebec government purchasing methods for software used within public administrations. FACIL has filed a motion before the Quebec Superior Court in order to bring an end to these methods which the association believes not to be in the best interest of the Quebec government, but more importantly, not in accordance with the regulation for supply contracts, construction contracts and service contracts of government departments and public bodies

More details at www.facil.qc.ca website and in the article available at www.cbc.ca website.

I found Sam Varghese’s article at www.itwire.com website. He wonders why lawyers do not like Linux. Well… I know his question is asked for the purpose of this article. I know why some lawyer really likes Linux. It wasn’t easy acquaintance if one has started it with Bash and Polish legal studies force you to memorize a lot of materials instead of teching legal research techniques and empirical approach to problems. I hope it will change soon. Besides, I’ve got great mentors and friends such as Marcin Sochacki and Rafał Połoński. Other lawyers like Linux because it’s “trendy” and you can always find clients for your law firm and promote yourself. Good luck leeches! Thanks God I know there are others who do it because hacking is fun and even a lawyer can be helpful sometimes.

The state of Massachusetts has asked a federal judge for a temporary restraining order preventing three MIT students from giving a presentation on Sunday about hacking smartcards used in the Boston subway system.

You will read about the whole issue in article available at www.cnet.com website. the presentation is available at www-tech.mit.edu website, PDF file. As you may already know I fully support such actions. You may ask why? Because, for instance, I’d like to know as a potential consumer, that Apple had placed a hidden feature/switch in iPhone software that allows them to “secretly” delete installed applications. Read about that in the article available at www.itwire.com website.

Will the iPhone Dev Team now seek to delete this “kill switch” from future pwned versions of iPhone firmware, thus giving even more people a reason to pwn their iPhones?

Oh yes. Fu^H^HHack them all!

Skype has withdrawn the appeal against a judgment in the case LG München I, Az. 7 O 5245/07 - Welte/Skype, unpublished. Harald Welte has written more details.

The various arguments by Skype supporting their claim that the GPL is violating German anti-trust legislation as well as further claims aiming at the GPL being invalid or incompatible with German legislation were not further analyzed by the court.

The argument that GPL violates anti-trust law was already discussed before the US courts in the case Wallace v. IBM, 467 F.3d 1104 (7th Cir. 2006). Chief Judge Frank Hoover Easterbrook wrote explicitly:

The GPL and open-source software have nothing to fear from the antitrust laws.

According to series writer Matt Fraction, the battle between Tony Stark and new bad guy Ezekiel Stane is really just an allegory for the battle Bill Gates wages against smaller software providers every single day of his life:
“Zeke is a post-national business man and kind of an open source ideological terrorist… He has absolutely no loyalty to any sort of law, creed, or credo. He doesn’t want to beat Tony Stark, he wants to make him obsolete. Windows wants to be on every computer desktop in the world, but Linux and Stane want to destroy the desktop. He’s the open source to Stark’s closed source oppressiveness.”

More details in the article available at www.io9.com. Well, what can I say? Good luck to Anthony Edward “Tony” Stark. I hope he will survive without such suprises as the blue screen of death.

10 best Linux ads are available at www.prestigemarketinggroup.net website. I know that my post isn’t too ambitious but “free time” is in short supply here. ;)

Microsoft Corp. v. Novell, Inc., 2008 U.S. LEXIS 2612 (U.S. 2008).

Judges: Roberts, Stevens, Scalia, Kennedy, Souter, Thomas, Ginsburg, Breyer, Alito.

OPINION

Petition for writ of certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit denied. The Chief Justice took no part in the consideration or decision of this petition.

Previous case Novell, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., 505 F.3d 302, 2007 U.S. App. LEXIS 24101 (4th Cir. Md., 2007). As usually more details available at www.groklaw.net website.

On 8th March 2008, the Archives of Audio-Visual Records, founded 1955, have been transformed into the National Digital Archives (NDA). The conversion, requested by the Head Director of State Archives of Poland, has been approved by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. The founder of the NDA, Nikodem Bończa Tomaszewski has been assigned to run the institution.
The NDA is the central state archive. Its aim is to provide digital files as a response to the development of recording, storing and access technologies.

It is available at www.nac.gov.pl website. The National Digital Archives (NDA) is the first public office in Poland to develop and maintain applications in open source systems.

Federico Biancuzzi wrote an article “The Laws of Full Disclosure” which is available at www.securityfocus.com website. There is a little part where he asked me some questions regarding Polish and European legal regimes.

The team behind the social BitTorrent client Tribler is responsible for the core P2P technology for the project, dubbed P2P-Next. The project received $22 million (15 million Euro) from the European Union and another $6 million (4 million Euro) is brought in by some of the partners.

More details in the article available at www.torrentfreak.com website. So it looks like after couple of years of different attempts to penalize the technology as they tried in the US, finally we see more business approaches. Quite interesting.

I do not need to write a lot about that, just check http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov website.

A study “A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects”.

If you are releasing work under version 3 of the GNU GPL, LGPL, or AGPL, feel free to use these buttons on your site or in your application to advertise the license. These logos are immediately recognizable, and will assure your users that their freedom is being protected.

More details available at www.gnu.org website.

Planetary Motion, Inc. v. Techsplosion, Inc., 261 F.3d 1188 (11th Cir. 2001) is onf couple of cases dealing with Linux and trademark law. In brief, GNU GPL does not waive trade mark rights.

I would like to congratulate Microsoft on winning this very important award.

The team that makes the best effort to helping the International Standardization Organisation fight off Microsoft’s lobbying stands to win an FFII “Kayak Award” consisting of 2,500 Euro and the chance to present their campaign at the FFII’s annual conference in November.

Those are not fresh news but I am a little bit busy writing some articles. We got GNU General Public License 3.0 available since 2 days. Apple sells iPhone and I wasn’t sued by the whole brilliant Apple’s legal team. iPhone’s firmware is also available. You may read about it in a thread at www.hackint0sh.org websie.