Free Republic

The 'Creative' Technology Behind The AP's News Registry from the magic-beans dept The Associated Press' attempt to DRM the news is a bad idea for a variety of reasons, but its claims for the news registry's capabilities seem pretty misguided, once you examine the technology behind it (the "magic DRM beans"). Ed Felten dug into the details of the registry's microformat, hNews, which the AP announced a few weeks earlier, and here's where it gets really interesting: the hNews rights field is based on the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (ccREL). If the AP thinks it'll be able to build...

By Maggie Shiels Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley Giving up some rights means you still have protection under the law Advocates of open source software have hailed a court ruling protecting its use even though it is given away free.The US federal appeals court move overturned a lower court decision involving free software used in model trains that a hobbyist put online. The court has now said conditions of an agreement called the Artistic Licence were enforceable under copyright law. "For non-lawgeeks, this won't seem important but this is huge," said Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig. "In non-technical...

The owner of this blog cut-and-pasted my intellectual property, and is hosting it on their site, with trackbacks pointing to them. They licensed it, as if it was their work, under a Creative Commons license, without the required attribution. I even attempted to appeal to the conservative in him, explaining we're on the same side. When notified of the correct source link and asked to correctly attribute the article, the editor, JT Thompson responded "Go f%%# yourself, moron." He then proceeded to show how childish he truly is by blocking my IP address and issuing taunts via redirect. Gee, I...