wjsullivan.net

I was finally on the correct side of the plane, during daylight hours. It was sunset, sort of.

I'm excited to be giving two presentations at Debconf 10, held this year on the Columbia campus in New York City.

The first is "FSF's Campaigns for Freedom" on Sunday, August 1st, from 14:00 to 15:00 in 414 Schapiro. I'll give an overview of some of the current FSF campaigns, like the GNU Project, Working Together for Free Software, Defective by Design, PlayOgg, Windows 7 Sins, and the High Priority Projects List; and resources like the Licensing & Compliance Lab, Free Software Jobs page, Hardware Directory, and the Free Software Directory. But I'm going to save plenty of time to talk with the room about things the FSF should or could be doing.

The second is "Patent Absurdity: How software patents broke the system" on Thursday, August 5th, from 14:00 to 15:00 in the Davis Auditorium. We'll be watching the Patent Absurdity film, chatting about what's happened since, and what the Bilski decision means for the future of free software.

I'll be around the conference all week, so drop me an email at johns@fsf.org or catch me in the #debconf channel (johns) if you want to chat about the FSF or GNU.

Is a good point...

The absence of any mention of copyright law in Glee illustrates a painful tension in American culture. While copyright holders assert that copyright violators are “stealing” their “property,” people everywhere are remixing and recreating artistic works for the very same reasons the Glee kids do — to learn about themselves, to become better musicians, to build relationships with friends, and to pay homage to the artists who came before them. Glee’s protagonists — and the writers who created them — see so little wrong with this behavior that the word ‘copyright’ is never even uttered.

And I get all teary-eyed when I read things like this:

Current law favors copyright holders. But morally, there’s nothing wrong with singing your heart out. Remixing isn’t stealing, and copyright isn’t property. Copyright is a privilege — actually six specific privileges — granted by the government. Back in 1834, the Supreme Court decided in Wheaton v. Peters that copyrights weren’t “property” in the traditional sense of the word, but rather entitlements the government chose to create for instrumental reasons. The scope and nature of copyright protection are policy choices — choices that have grown to favor the interests of established, rent-seeking businesses instead of the public in general.

Did the New York Times really just argue that it is a violation of their terms of service to sell an RSS reader that can access their news feed?

It sounds like they did, in a letter to Apple asking that such an application be removed from the App Store -- right after they themselves had reviewed the application positively and after Steve Jobs had given it a shout-out.

The app was later reinstated, without the NYT feed.

There is the added bit that the app used the NYT feed in its advertising. But... what RSS software wouldn't? And why isn't Google Reader + ads also a commercial use of the NYT feed? Or... Opera? Because they don't include the NYT feed by default?

Confused in Seattle,
John

(In other iPad news, there have been reports that people who appear Asian were asked strange questions when trying to buy iPads, as a result of an earlier Apple policy intended to discourage smuggling, because you know, that's what they do.)

I bet you didn't know that your average 8GB iPod is the most valuable object on the planet.

This is a brilliant graphic showing the absurdity of the RIAA — although it's not really the RIAA that should be targeted here, it should be US copyright law itself. That's where these numbers come from. The RIAA is just awful enough to actually make the claims with a straight face.

http://www.cracked.com/funny-4003-the-pirate-bay/

This is one, from http://www.apple.com/opensource:

As the first major computer company to make Open Source development a key part of its ongoing software strategy, Apple remains committed to the Open Source development model.

Not only is the overall statement false, but so is each component.

Also:

Apple believes that using Open Source methodology makes Mac OS X a more robust, secure operating system, as its core components have been subjected to the crucible of peer review for decades. Any problems found with this software can be immediately identified and fixed by Apple and the Open Source community.

If you believe this (which you should), then please apply the same lesson to the iPhone and iPad, which currently threaten people with jail time under the DMCA if they attempt to fix a bug.

More from the inexplicable iPad headlines department:

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/ptech/04/16/volcano.ash.norway.ipad/

Can't he run Norway with a...laptop?

Also, how is the Prime Minister of Norway using the iPad, which restricts all its software with Apple's "FairPlay" DRM, when Norway's Consumer Ombudsman only two years ago (rightly) said that FairPlay is illegal because it obstructs legal uses of media, such as moving it without restriction between devices or computers?

Oh right, because Norway inexplicably dropped the complaint in 2009 after iTunes dropped DRM on music.

They might want to re-evaluate that, since iTunes continues to use DRM on all other forms of media (ebooks and movies), and the iPhone and iPad have actually expanded this DRM to cover software as well.

Maybe Norway's government product placement is an effort to make amends.

(The title of this post is taken from the first comment on the CNN article, which nails it.)

I was pointed to this screenshot showing a snarky Vim ad displayed in the results for a search seeking Emacs help.

So I decided to see what might come up in a search for "vim."

The results may shock you. Or they may not.

I guess we always knew that the editor wars had a little too much to do with testosterone concerns. Apparently some marketers have caught on.

I understand this is not the only case of this sort of potential conflict of interest with a judge/Justice and his/her spouse, but this seems like a problem to me. Clarence Thomas's wife is running a "tea party" group.

Justice's wife launches 'tea party' group

Conveniently:

Because of a recent Supreme Court decision, Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, the group may also spend corporate money freely to advocate for or against candidates for office.

Justice Thomas was part of the 5-4 majority in that case.

Does Mrs. Thomas draw a salary from this organization? Is that salary funded by donations?

Oh, but don't worry, Justice Thomas is so squeaky clean he won't even come listen to the President speak:

Justice Thomas, 61, recently expressed sensitivity to such concerns, telling law students in Florida that he doesn't attend the State of the Union because it is "so partisan."

Except for maybe that time he helped Bush steal the election:

In 2000, while at the Heritage Foundation, [Virginia Thomas] was recruiting staff for a possible George W. Bush administration as her husband was hearing the case that would decide the election. When journalists reported her work, Thomas said she saw no conflict of interest and that she rarely discussed court matters with her husband.

I was incoherently trying to explain this heartening decision to friends over the weekend. Professor Moglen's article does it much better than my hand-waving. Dan Ravicher and PUBPAT continue to do amazing and important work, and as an ACLU member I'm glad to see them involved as well.

http://opensource.com/law/10/4/gene-patenting-and-free-software-breakthrough

The Public Patent Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the patent on the ground that the Act does not permit the patenting of "facts of nature." In a lengthy and carefully argued opinion granting summary judgment, Judge Robert Sweet agreed. Judge Sweet rejected the basic premise on which gene testing patents such as the one granted to Myriad have been justified: that the amplification of naturally-occurring DNA sequences is a patentable transformation of the DNA molecule. Instead, Judge Sweet adopted the view put forward by Myriad's own expert witnesses, that DNA is a special molecule, "a physical carrier of information," and therefore held that the reading of such naturally-occurring information is not patentable subject matter. Whether posed as a new composition of matter, or as a method for "analyzing" or "comparing" DNA sequences, Judge Sweet held, Myriad's attempt to gain a monopoly on looking at a particular DNA sequence to find out what it says falls outside the permissible scope of patent law.

The full opinion is at http://www.pubpat.org/assets/files/brca/brcasjgranted.pdf.

And see the FSF's End Software Patents campaign.

They don't even try to make these rules make sense, do they.

According to The Associated Press, the government agency said that most who travel will not need to remove the iPad from their bag, because the device is relatively small and doesn't have "bulky" accessories such as external drives. Those accessories can make it difficult for X-ray scanners, who see a cluttered image when a laptop and all of its accessories go through the machine in a bag.

Bulky accessories? What are they even talking about?

Apple's iPad can stay in bag for airport security screenings

I'm glad to see two such problematic institutions — the TSA and Apple — teaming up to make even less sense together.

Edit 2010-04-08: I guess the TSA official description of the policy is not as iPad as the AP made it sound -- they focus on the fact that the iPad is smaller than a "standard laptop" and talk about it in the context of other electronic devices. It's still a silly policy, and it still doesn't make any sense why an iPad would not have to be removed but a netbook would. Shame on the AP for reporting it this way, too.

I'm excited about the GNU Hackers Meeting in a few days.

We're going to meet for some curry on Thursday night with the people in town so far, then the bulk of the meeting will be on Friday. Things on the agenda so far include lightning talks from several of the people attending about the GNU projects they are working on, a discussion about the problems with Software as a Service and what GNU can do about it -- with a focus on the creation of a new GNU network services team, and longer presentations like David Sugar on Replacing Skype, Matt Lee on GNU FM (the software that runs last.fm replacement libre.fm), and Michael Flickinger on Savannah.

This is the first US edition of the GNU Hackers Meeting -- there have already been a few in Europe. One cool thing about this one is the range of contributors we have represented. We have people from the origin of the project, including RMS, John Gilmore, and Rob Savoye -- plus new contributors like Steven DuBois of GNU Generation (the awesome project started last year by FSF intern Max Shinn for high schoolers interested in GNU).

After Friday, the Meeting segues into the rest of the LibrePlanet conference, which promises to be awesome as well. The Women in Free Software track is particularly important to me because I think it's progress in one of the most critical steps we need to take to really make the free software movement work for everyone. As one of the conference organizers I'm sure I'm going to be bouncing around a lot during the days, but I'm definitely going to make a point to catch as much as I can of all of the presentations in that track -- I'm especially interested in hearing Karen Sandler of the Software Freedom Law Center, and the panel on Sunday with Chris Ball, Hanna Wallach, Erinn Clark and Denise Paolucci.

It's not too late to register for either the GHM (if you're a GNU maintainer or significant contributor), or the LibrePlanet conference -- just follow the instructions on the wiki. Drop me a line if you're reading this and will be there.

(w3m-decode-entities-string STR) is handy for replacing entities like — in a string with the actual characters.

I just got my tickets to come from Seattle to the FSF's LibrePlanet conference in Boston.

I'll be in town from the evening of the 16th till the morning of the 23rd.

Let me know if you'll be around and want to get together. And please make sure it's warm by the time I get there -- I don't even know where my heavy coat is anymore.

The themes here seem very...uncreative.

World Intellectual Property Day - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Apparently, being on April 26th, it shares the esteemed company of Confederate Memorial Day.