"For examples of materials with high merit and difficult rights status, Bruce Hartford of the American Civil Rights Movement website highlighted the sheer impossibility of determining rightsholders for many archival materials: internal documents created by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s are orphans because SNCC no longer exists. A photograph taken by an unknown prisoner in a Southern jail of another prisoner is an orphan because the copyright is held by the unknown prisoner who took the original photograph. In a similar vein, Rick Prelinger aired a color video, possibly shot by an employee of the War Relocation Authority, of the 1944 release of Japanese-Americans interned at the Jerome War Relocation Center in Arkansas.

This is a crucial point that is rarely noted: orphan status may be most common for materials generated on the margins of society — by people whose names and presence were never recorded, sometimes because of persecution; or by informal or transient organizations, groups, and movements that never had an opportunity to create their own legacy. For this content — which includes some of the most important artifacts that a society is likely to produce, documenting both its struggles and those who speak without a recorded voice — formal interventions are unlikely to make a meaningful difference because there is so little ownership data to work with. In these cases, Fair Use is often the appropriate apparatus."

Laws are more often than not an annoyance, despite their aim to improve the legal framework in any given field. Free Software (AKA "Open Source") has thrieved despite the absence of any legal recognition by the law, if not in spite of rules that clearly are shaped around proprietary software. In many jurisdictions it has passed the enforceability test. So, no laws seem necessary to make it work. Yet, can some legal principle be put forward, and included in some laws, to help?

aka "Group Exemption Letters"

"Where most of an organization's members are entrepreneurs or independent contractors, the organization does not meet the requirements of IRC 501(c)(5). Rev. Rul. 78-288, 1978-2 C.B. 179."

A discussion of "contributing" work and stuff to a charitable organization.

social welfare groups

Business Associations

"Granting broadcasters and cablecasters intellectual property rights that apply independently of copyright in the programs being broadcast, together with legally enforceable technological protection measures, raises concerns for access to public domain works. These measures would add complexity to copyright clearance regimes for creators of podcasts and documentary films, and interfere with consumers’ ability to make home recordings permitted under national copyright laws. Granting broadcasters and cablecasters exclusive rights to authorize retransmissions of broadcasts over the Internet will harm competition and innovation by allowing broadcasters and cablecasters to control the types of devices that can receive transmissions. It will also create new liability risks for Internet intermediaries that retransmit information on the Internet."

"They leave us with some strong statements and suggestions:

A private foundation clearly has the legal right to spend money however it wishes within the limits of the law; yet, in an environment where private foundations influence the future direction of, for example, what programs will be introduced into a foreign community, in a manner that does not necessarily involve directorship or voting from the community members themselves, it is reasonable to subject the decision-making processes of these entities to public debate, especially if these funds were to have otherwise been collected for public redistribution through federal taxation."

"The spread of anti-filesharing measures across the United States and Europe appears to be accelerating at a somewhat dizzying pace. On an almost daily basis during the last few months stories about controversial and sometimes draconian measures to deal with online infringement have hit the headlines.

Say what you like about the big movie and music studios – they certainly know how to coordinate their lobbying to perfection. Timing like this, with legislation being mulled in many major markets simultaneously, sends a powerful message."

"What I’d like is that the two Rutgers students have to work in everything they do for a more humane culture, for a wiser use of communicative media. I’d like them to have a special charge to live and teach the Golden Rule to their children, their friends, their neighbors, their co-workers, their communities, to any stranger who will listen and maybe even those who’d rather not."

"Are "willful and flagrant violation" of safety and "intentional disregard" of safety criminal acts? Can they be criminal only if someone is injured or dies? These are questions that need to be addressed."

"Google and the USPTO have entered into an agreement to make the following USPTO products available to the public at no charge:

Patents (grants, applications, assignments, classification information, and maintenance fee events)
Trademarks (grants, applications, assignments, and TTAB proceedings)

All data originated from the USPTO. Google is hosting this data unchanged, except for repackaging into zip files."

"What is striking is that caveat emptor arises as a legal principle mainly because of the tangle the courts would get into if they tried to enforce a more ambitious standard of right and wrong.
Chief Justice Marshall’s logic surely applies with even greater force to modern deals between investment banks and sophisticated qualified investors, both of which will be simultaneously working on many deals, each involving sensitive proprietary information."

"We will be safe so long as the present crisis is fresh in our minds and caution is the order of the day in the financial marketplace, but it won't be too long until we forget and that's when the danger begins.…"

"Of course, you could avoid all such troubles in the first place by not stealing GPL code to begin with. But if something happens inadvertently and some rogue employee sneaks some GPL code into your proprietary product, the sky isn't falling. It's a manageable risk and a solvable problem. No one wants to steal your code in retaliation or force it to be something you don't want it to be. The GPL is unequivocally a license, and that's the truth."

"And that, I think, is why some Oklahoma legislators have voted to insulate homophobic violence from the “hate crime” label. At least on a subconscious level, I suspect they see a connection between homophobic violence and the beliefs to which they cleave. To call gay-bashing a hate crime would mean they couldn’t merely condemn the gay bashers. They’d also have to condemn themselves, their churches, and the broader cultural forces with which they identify.
My challenge to conservative legislators is this: If you really think your belief system is innocent, then you have no need to protect it in this way. And if you suspect that your belief system is not innocent, then it shouldn’t be protected. Either way, you ought to call a hate crime what it is."

"Copyright for Librarians is a joint project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL), a consortium of libraries from 50 countries in Africa, Asia and Europe. The goal of the project is to provide librarians in developing and transitional countries information concerning copyright law. More specifically, it aspires to inform librarians concerning:
copyright law in general
the aspects of copyright law that most affect libraries
how librarians in the future could most effectively participate in the processes by which copyright law is interpreted and shaped."

"I strongly implore you on behalf of myself, independent inventors like me, and for the good of our country to support the patent reform legislation before you. And if upon reflection you recognize how truly vital the Patent Office is to the future of our country then I would ask you to do more and to consider the issue of “revenue diversion”.

The U.S.P.T.O. is unique in American government in that it costs the taxpayer nothing while providing the best dollar for dollar value in the intellectual property industry. The U.S.P.T.O. should have the authority to set its fees so that they are appropriate to the services provided and “in the aggregate” sufficient to fully optimize the functioning of that office, and to reasonably budget for the capital expenditures that will be required in the future for it to continue to do so."

"I agree that Kerr’s point about utilizing the judiciary system to determine who, precisely, constitutes an enemy combatant and who does not is a vital point. But an equally vital point, at least to my mind, is summed by another portion of Kerr’s retaliation wherein he revisits the John Adams analogy that has been floating about (emphasis mine),

When Adams agreed to represent the English soldiers, he was not fulfilling some sort of obligation: No one had to represent the Englishmen. Adams acted — and was criticized then, but celebrated now, for it — because he agreed to represent the soldiers out of a personal conviction that no person should face a trial without counsel."

"Now right now, consumers are facing a range of financial products, from student loans to credit cards to mutual funds, that are much more complicated than they faced in 1933. Some of this complication is innovation, some is meant to synthetically create opacity in the product innovating product differentiation, and some is just regulatory arbitrage. As Dan Geldon has written, the regime of disclosure has been turned into a weapon against consumers instead of the mechanism to let information and competition do its job. So it’s time to update that regime to handle the 21st century."

"While most people don't realize this, they've given Facebook a license to use any content they upload onto Facebook for whatever purpose they choose and the power to transfer that that right as long as the content remains within your profile. They try to make clear what sorts of uses they currently put this license to in order to make their users at ease with posting their content on the service."

"[T]he broad impact of the recession is clear in hundreds of thousands of new cases across the judicial system, including people challenging their real estate taxes, home foreclosures, contract disputes and family offenses."

"We've been meaning to post this list of links to the language essays of Robert Cumbow for ages. He's a lawyer in our home town of Seattle. Enjoy!"

"Franken's amendment is driving the Republicans crazy because they basically voted to protect rapists and are now paying a political price for that. And now they are whining that Franken was somehow "uncollegial" because the amendment put them in an embarrassing position (which makes me wonder how many other things issues are swept under the rug because it would make members of the opposition uncomfortable.)"

"But health care is not zero-sum villainy. This post is not arguing that insurers are better than you think and providers worse. This post is arguing that nature of both groups is beside the point. They work within the market the government constructs. And both the market for insurance and the market for health care need reform. But we're comfortable reforming only the market for insurance, and so we are leaving half -- or maybe more than half -- the job undone."

"Scholars have long asserted that social structure is an important feature of a variety of societal institutions. As part of a larger effort to develop a fully integrated model of judicial decision making, we argue that social structure-operationalized as the professional and social connections between judicial actors-partially directs outcomes in the hierarchical federal judiciary. Since different social structures impose dissimilar consequences upon outputs, the precursor to evaluating the doctrinal consequences that a given social structure imposes is a descriptive effort to characterize its properties. Given the difficulty associated with obtaining appropriate data for federal judges, it is necessary to rely upon a proxy measure to paint a picture of the social landscape. In the aggregate, we believe the flow of law clerks reflects a reasonable proxy for social and professional linkages between jurists...."

"That said, the internet is pretty vast, and some of its denizens are smarter than others… and I suspect Wragge and Co’s fees for hunting down anonymous commenters will reflect those realities. It also remains to be seen how much they can achieve when working on sites hosted in countries where the jurisdiction isn’t so clear-cut, or sites like Wikileaks which are geared toward protecting their sources. What we can be sure of is that when lawyers can see a paycheck, there’s dirty laundry waiting to be washed… and we can expect the corporate (and political) world to wise up to the web pretty fast now that the full extent of its power is becoming apparent."

"It makes a huge difference who can say "take it or leave it" in a negotiation. Right now publishers tend to hold that privileged position. But as prices and cancellations keep rising, the positions are reversing. Even apart from the average balance of bargaining power, slowly shifting to universities, there is the bargaining power over specific titles. The desirability of journals is a matter of degree, despite the binary sound of "must-have". Some high-demand journals may be unthreatened by all recent developments. But the set of unthreatened journals is shrinking, and set for which universities could modify basic terms to better serve research and researchers is growing. For a growing number of journals overall, universities could cancel, threaten to cancel, or bargain effectively, if they wanted to. "

"We plot explicit support for allowing same-sex marriage broken down by state and by age. Seven states cross the 50% mark overall as of our current estimates, but the generation gap is huge. If policy were set by state-by-state majorities of those 65 or older, none would allow same-sex marriage. If policy were set by those under 30, only 12 states would not allow-same-sex marriage."

"Well, those copyright assertions are back, this time by the Attorney General, who asserted ownership over the (for real!) Attorney General's Public Record and Public Meeting Manual. I spent last week in Oregon meeting with law school faculty and giving lectures at 3 universities on the topic of who owns the law."

"I just read the most plausible of law review papers suggesting the potential for protection of a private space within social network sites (SNS). Fellow UNC grad student Woodrow Hartzog proposes the use of Promissory Estoppel as a means to protect self-disclosure in online communities. It would create a type of contract or agreement between users of a site whereby a protection would exist for information disclosed in that community or site. If someone else shares the disclosed, private information, with a few caveats, they can be held accountable."

"The Supreme Court is going to decide if corporations have First Amendment rights that allow "direct, unlimited corporate participation in campaigns." Let's hope the decision is that they don't:"

"A trade secret is proprietary but unpatented information that confers a competitive advantage on its owner. If someone impermissibly uses a trade secret, the owner of the secret is entitled to a remedy that may include, in addition to damages, an injunction that forbids the unauthorized user from manufacturing a product that employs the owner’s secret. Courts disagree, however, over whether such an injunction should continue after the trade secret becomes public knowledge—for example, through a patent application or marketing. Even when courts agree that the injunction should continue after the trade secret becomes public, they still disagree over whether the injunction should be perpetual or limited in duration. This article uses real option theory within a Schumpeterian framework of innovation and competition to clarify the conflict regarding the proper duration of an injunction to remedy the unauthorized use of trade secrets.…"

"‘The law is built around cause and effect, but it’s bad at assessing systems, where each individual part is harmless but the whole might be harmful,’ he said. ‘It’s still in the age of automation, where the role of a human operator is well-defined.’"

"If there is no signed written agreement, then the work isn’t for hire, and you start out with all the rights. If there is a written agreement, it should be entered into before you create the work. Beware of after-the-fact attempts to take away your rights by calling the work “for hire,” for example by sending you a check whose endorsement line says that your signature is your agreement that the work was for hire."

"Why work-for-hire is hurting the creative industry"

"Look for this stinker to be reversed on appeal. And if it isn’t--whoa, nelly. Strap on for a wild ride. Increasingly the Law says administrations have academic freedom--and you don’t.

Here’s your homework assignment for the day. Ask yourself what “academic freedom for administrators” means."

"An important addition to the growing international dialogue about the commons can be found in the new anthology, Genes, Bytes and Emissions: To Whom Does the World Belong? (discussed in this previous blog post). Recently released in German, the essays in this book are now available online in English.

The book was edited by Silke Helfrich and published by the Heinrich Boell Foundation; Helfrich is the former director of the Foundation’s Mexico City office, which hosted a major conference, Citizenship and Commons, in December 2006. The collection, whose title in English is To Whom Does the World Belong? offers a thoughtful and provocative array of viewpoints on the commons. (The links below connect to pdf files of the essays.)"

"Oddly, certain kinds of workers in Massachusetts cannot be shackled by noncompetes: doctors, social workers, and broadcasters among them. But why should a TV anchor be allowed to jump from one station to another, while we make an EMC engineer take a year of unpaid leave before he can form a new company? How does that benefit our economy? My biggest concern is that new legislation only requires noncompetes to be “reasonable,’’ rather than nixing them entirely. To ensure that we get there, individual employees will have to dive in to this debate - rather than leaving it to big companies who know how to lobby. And CEOs who are willing to think about the good of the state’s economy - beyond their own firm’s desire to avoid spawning potential rivals - should speak up."

"Back to Sam’s question. Few authors publish in true xhtml mode, fewer still include inline svg images in their xhtml, and fewer still include titles or descriptions in those images. But in theory, you can imagine a situation where a web author publishes in true xhtml mode, and the author includes an inline svg image within an xhtml page, and an end user is using a browser that supports true xhtml, and that user is using a hypothetical screenreader-of-the-future that implements support for the <title> and <desc> elements within inline svg images within xhtml pages, and that user stumbles across that page. It’s theoretically possible, therefore you have to do it. Period. End of discussion."

"EPO's president, Alison Brimelow, has been quoted as saying: "Huge backlogs change the nature of the patenting system and create ambiguities which can be exploited in ways unforeseen by those who established the patent system."

In response, the European Union has funded a project called PATExpert which uses semantic web technology. PATExpert is a multimedia content representation system for the retrieval, classification and generation of concise parent information. The system supports multiple languages and provides tools to assess patent material. The system has been demonstrated and the probable next step is commercialization for general use."

"In fact, one food giant, General Mills, has essentially conceded that cooking their food in a microwave isn't good enough."

"The US public domain is filled with creative works you can use any way you want to. No need to ask anyone’s permission. No fees necessary.

You can find photos, books, music, software — and more — that you’re free to recast, remix, and build upon. But how do you find these works? And how can you be sure they really are copyright-free?

Copyright law is complex (as complex as the tax code, some say) and there’s a lot of misinformation and hype out there about what is and what isn’t “public domain.” It can get confusing."

Actually quite a bit of interesting meta-info here

Excellent visualizations of legal and government datasets, with analytical discussion

"The TAPR Open Hardware License ("OHL") provides a framework for hardware projects that is similar to the one used for Open Source software. This isn't as straight-forward as it seems because legal concepts that work well for software (such as copyright and copyleft) don't neatly fit when dealing with hardware products and the documentation used to create them."

"So we have now filed the required written request with AATA, as specified in the Michigan Open Meetings Act, in order to ensure that in the future The Chronicle is notified in a timely way of special meetings of the board. Here is the relevant section of the act:..."

"Trade associations and professional associations are business leagues. Chambers of commerce and boards of trades are of the same class as business leagues, but rather than promoting one or more lines of business, their efforts are directed to promoting the common economic interests of all commercial enterprises in a given trade community. The requirements for exemption of these organizations are the same as for business leagues."

"If I get enough named supporters so it looks like a real show of force, I’ll include the list in the spot at the bottom. If I don’t get a big response, I’ll probably leave the list of supporters off. Either way, your expression of support will be appreciated.

Note that I am very upset over the proposed rule and the text and tone of my comment reflects this as best I know how without using profanity. And the proposal deserves profanity. If you work for an alphabet organization or otherwise have a relationship with the TSA that requires not angering the TSA, this is not the comment with which you want to be associated. Only the brave and the independent need sign up here."

"What makes this case particularly nasty is that a large company successfully forced its will on another company based solely on a specious claim of trademark infringement. The next step for an ambitious company, of course, is to demand further control over how a site links to its content. After all, if you can get a judge who doesn't seem to understand the concept of hyperlinking, who knows what you can get away with under the guise of trademark infringement."

"Call to Action: We therefore urge every U.S. law school to commit to ending print publication of its journals and to making definitive versions of journals and other scholarship produced at the school immediately available upon publication in stable, open, digital formats, rather than in print."

"So that's my guess about why Hulu blocked Boxee: those ads you see on Heroes are higher margin when you see them on your TV than when you see them on Hulu, and the only reason they're on Hulu is to make money from Heroes when you watch it online, so Apple or Google doesn't make that money instead. They were meant for your "portable computing devices" and not your precious TV. Now go back to the couch until we call for you again."

"There's also an unspoken class bias at work here, a bully mentality that chooses its targets based on who's likely to fight back and win. Consider commercial TV, which is filled with programs that routinely air copyrighted material without permission for purposes of journalism, satire or simple entertainment. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report don't ask permission to air any of the news clips they slice and dice each night for yuks; they consider a network's onscreen logo to be acknowledgment enough, and their assumption is almost never challenged."

"With cost plus a fixed fee, the client signs a contract for the $60,000 plus the cost of construction, which is priced at the builder’s actual out-of-pocket cost. Whether the house costs $350,000 or $500,000, the client still pays $60,000 for the builder’s overhead and profit.

The advantages are obvious. If the cost exceeds the estimate, the builder isn’t making a fatter fee. Getting the job done and moving on to another one will be to his advantage. However, the builder will not be taking such a bath that he is likely to walk off the job or go bankrupt, a real risk for smaller builders."

"I’m saying that, like a real eviction, there should be practices in place. When you open your doors to hosting user content, you should have rules in action that, unless it’s a complete and total fire sale and you have no hope of even staying open that long, then you should be required, yes by law, assholes, to make the data available to customers for an extended period of time.
...
If you tell people they can upload their content, you should have a clear and distinct way for them to retrieve their content. People do it ad-hoc as they can, but the abilities of most people, the people without an engineering degree or years of experience, to get back what they put up is minimal. It’s not that important. We should make it important."

"I won't even get into what she has to say about the hell that is commercial publishing, with its ignorant editors and unkept promises, and the terrible financial pressure that makes writers stifle current work they're excited about to try and sell long-finished work they're bored or nauseated by, because it gets me too upset. Why do zillionaires give zillions to museums and operas and never think of, as she says, sponsoring an admired writer's travel expenses or offering them six months' writing time at a vacation home? If I were a zillionaire, that's the kind of thing I'd want to do... but of course to become a zillionaire I'd have to care about money and the making of same in large quantities, and then I'd be a different person and probably never think about the problems of writers. It's a conundrum."

"High school students in Maryland are using speed cameras as a tool to fine innocent drivers in a game, according to the Montgomery County Sentinel newspaper. Because photo enforcement devices will automatically mail out a ticket to any registered vehicle owner based solely on a photograph of a license plate, any driver could receive a ticket if someone else creates a duplicate of his license plate and drives quickly past a speed camera. The private companies that mail out the tickets often do not bother to verify whether vehicle registration information for the accused vehicle matches the photographed vehicle."

"We see generally about ten areas you should consider in terms of what you should publish, such as (1) improvements to core technology, (2) innovations you might normally document elsewhere, like in a paper or conference, remember we want the PTO examiner to see these documents, or (3) where you might think others will patent, or (4) innovative concepts you see that “link” well know ideas or patents together , or (5) around your key new ideas you have, or (6) new uses for existing ideas, or (7) new potential technical standards, or (8) industry directions, or (9) how users use your idea or (10) the directions of open source"

"Nesson argues that the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999 is unconstitutional because it effectively lets a private group — the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA — carry out civil enforcement of a criminal law. He also says the music industry group abused the legal process by brandishing the prospects of lengthy and costly lawsuits in an effort to intimidate people into settling cases out of court."

"As explained by the Court, the test serves as a proxy for assessing the more fundamental concern – ensuring that the claim does not seek to impermissibly "preempt the use of a fundamental principle." This might make sense in the context of so-called business method patents, where the fundamental principle implicated is typically characterized as an abstract idea or mental process. But it is unclear to what extent this test will prove applicable to patent claims arising out of the life sciences, where patentable subject matter challenges more often allege preemption of a natural phenomena or law of nature, rather than an abstract idea or mental process."

"ICANN recently has wanted to make a lot of changes to its standard Registrar Accreditation Agreement. It found that it was was constrained by an even earlier version of the consensus policy process idea, and has found this frustrating. So it wants the flexibility to make changes without going through a policy process, and it’s (initially) saying that although those changes can be overridden in some ways they will automatically become effective if they are *not* overridden."

"Correcting Inventorship: An issued patent is presumed to name the correct inventors. Thus, an inventorship challenge must bring "clear and convincing evidence" that the newly surfaced inventor "contributed to the conception of the claimed invention." "Simply reducing to practice that which has been conceived by others is insufficient for co-inventorship." Under the clear and convincing standard, the inventorship challenge "must be corroborated by independent evidence.""

"Further, the word confidence keeps coming up, we must restore confidence in the American financial system. It is not enough that we hand over our money, we must hand over our trust as well. Surely, then, if this is a new era of trust, there should be no problem with requiring sellers to disclose at precisely what value the assets for sale had been booked on their financial statements, with criminal penalties for misstatement. We should be able to evaluate, in the light of day, how forthright financial institutions have been in representing their true condition to potential investors and the public-at-large. We may find that some have played things relatively straight, while others survived by sleight-of-hand and exaggeration. The former group will have earned our confidence. The latter will have earned something else."

"The public doesn’t like a blank check. They think this whole bailout idea is nuts. They see fat cats on Wall Street who have raked in zillions for years, now extorting in effect $2,000 to $5,000 from every American family to make up for their own nonfeasance, malfeasance, greed, and just plain stupidity. Wall Street’s request for a blank check comes at the same time most of the public is worried about their jobs and declining wages, and having enough money to pay for gas and food and health insurance, meet their car payments and mortgage payments, and save for their retirement and childrens’ college education. And so the public is asking: Why should Wall Street get bailed out by me when I’m getting screwed?"

"...But those who speak for the Princes of Wall Street--well, they really believed that the Princes earned their fortunes by virtue of their virtue--their intelligence, their nerve, their skill, and their willingness to run great risks for great rewards. The idea that there is a public safety net to catch the Princes when they all fall off the tightrope at once--that they are not actually rugged Randite individualists running great risks--that they are people in the right place at the right time with enough low animal cunning to cover themselves with glue and then step outside at 57th and Park or on Canary Wharf as the money blows by so that a bunch of the money sticks to them--well, this strikes those who speak for the Princes of Wall Street on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal or in Investors' Business Daily as a betrayal of the moral order."

"Our regulators have been stunningly inept. The up-tick rule has been abolished. Niggling distinctions between "abusive" naked short-selling and acceptable naked short-selling become the basis for a tentative approach to possible regulation. A state official, Eric Dinallo of the NY Insurance Department, was the only regulator to come to the defense of MBI, when he finally wrote an article in the Financial Times, noting the illegality of Ackman's defamatory attacks.
Meanwhile, the huge credit default swap industry, a totally unregulated business of insurance, continues as an arena of toxic machinations. Here, in total obscurity, bets are placed: which of the remaining financial companies should be the next victim? Would you be comfortable if strangers could legally place bets on your longevity? Or on whether your house would burn down?"

"What to do? Not to socialize capitalism with bailouts and subsidies that put taxpayers at risk. If what's lacking is trust rather than capital, the most important steps policymakers can take are to rebuild trust. And the best way to rebuild trust is through regulations that require financial players to stand behind their promises and tell the truth, along with strict oversight to make sure they do.

We tell poor nations they have to make their financial markets transparent before capital will flow to them. Now it's our turn. Lacking adequate regulation or oversight, our financial markets have become a snare and a delusion. Government only has two choices now: Either continue to bail them out, or regulate them in order to keep them honest. I vote for the latter."

"Malamud is spoiling for a major legal fight.

He has begun publishing copies of federal, state and county codes online -- in direct violation of claimed copyright.

On Labor Day, he posted the entire 38-volume California Code of Regulations, which includes all of the state's regulations from health care and insurance to motor vehicles and investment.

To purchase a digital copy of the California code costs $1,556, or $2,315 for a printed version. The state generates about $880,000 annually by selling its laws, according to the California Office of Administrative Law."

"In an interesting decision, the CAFC held that open source license conditions are enforceable under the copyright laws. Jacobson's open source license at issue here allowed anyone to use his software so long as his conditions are met (such as making any modified code freely available)."

"I have retold the joke about the man who meets a pirate in a bar without ever once explicitly acknowledging that I was not its author."