Dr. C. Scott Ananian (cananian) wrote,
Dr. C. Scott Ananian
cananian

Updates on American Law.

Updates on the Patriot Act and Echelon courtesy of Slashdot. If you've ever wondered why random keywords appear at the end of my emails, this posting from the ACLU may demystify you.

The RIAA filed 80 more lawsuits yesterday. And the SCO group has begun to infringe my copyrights on portions of the Linux kernel. In other news, I recently granted copyright for my original PPTP-linux client to the FSF, so they can prosecute other copyright infringement of my code. I also signed over my contributions to GNU Classpath and GNU libc. [The FSF's copyright assignment legalese is actually incredibly safe and friendly: they even allow you to reclaim your copyright if you eventually decide you'd rather resell the code or somesuch. Of course, the rights you've provided under the GPL persist, but it does allow you to go back and resell non-GPL'ed versions of the code if you like.]

I drafted a DMCA counternotice to MIT's Copyright Agent in response to Diebold's cease-and-desist letter. I'm getting it looked over by smart people right now =) and will post it when it is finalized. In the meantime, you may be interested in my advice on filing a DMCA counter-notice.

Tags: diebold, dmca, elections, legal
Subscribe

  • What's Wikileaks up to?

    A recent article in the Economist points out that Wikileaks is not unique: modern network tools have made anonymous communication ubiquitous. You…

  • Diebold Whines Again

    It's fair to say I'm not a big fan of Diebold -- even before they sent me a cease-and-desist letter over my small part in exposing some of their…

  • DMCA admitted not to "work out very well"

    One of the architects of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act acknowledged that "our Clinton administration policies didn't work out very well" and…

  • Post a new comment

    Error

    Anonymous comments are disabled in this journal

    default userpic

    Your reply will be screened

    Your IP address will be recorded 

  • 0 comments