MIT, Boston College Refuse DMCA Subpoenas

MIT, Boston College Refuse DMCA Subpoenas

Posted by michael on Tuesday July 22, @06:48PM
from the offer-they-could-refuse dept.
phreakmonkey writes "Here's an interesting change of pace- According to today's Boston Globe, MIT and Boston College have both refused to turn over the identities of students to the RIAA under subpoenas. Citing failure of compliance with court rules and student privacy concerns, both colleges have refused to give out the names, addresses, or phone numbers of students based on their Kazaa screen names and IP addresses. I wonder how long the schools will be able to keep the RIAA's pack of lawyers at bay..."

[Slashdot]

11:38:03 PM    

Wells Fargo Warns Of Email Hoax. A new email hoax is targeting customers of Wells Fargo, implying that the customer's account has been hacked and carrying a Trojan-infested payload. [Extremetech]

Hey, I got one of these!  Since I don't do business with Wells Fargo, I figured it was evil.

12:36:28 PM    

IBM, Industry Respond to New SCO Threats SCO announced today that all commercial Linux 2.4 and higher users must buy a UnixWare 7.1.3 license tailored to support run-time, binary use of Linux for all business uses or face the possibility of a law suit. In a company agrees to buy this license, SCO will allow them to continue to use Linux in a run-only, binary format and will not seek damages from the Linux customers against their past copyright violations for their use of Linux.  [Linux Today]

12:34:17 PM    

Buy.com launches digital music service. Hoping to reprise Apple's early iTunes success, the company offers a catalog of more than 300,000 songs from major and independent labels--for computers using Windows. [CNET News.com]

Very cool.  Most songs seem to be about .99, not bad. 

12:26:39 PM    

Digging Holes in Google

Digging Holes in Google

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday July 22, @11:11AM
from the i'm-feeling-lucky dept.
Kurt LoVerde writes "Though google has become synonymous with searching, the folks over at MSN have written up an interesting article on our favorite search engine's pitfalls. Included among these are a tendency to skew results toward shopping, a lack of diversity for searches containing synonyms and its impact on research."

 [Slashdot]

Let the games begin!  First we had news of the MSNbot spidering the web.  Then came word of MSFT hiring a raft of math gurus to develop algorithms to go after Pagerank.  This is the first shot across the bow in the Search Wars.

12:17:20 PM    

How SCO Helped Linux Go Enterprise

How SCO Helped Linux Go Enterprise

Posted by timothy on Tuesday July 22, @08:04AM
from the giveth-and-taketh-away dept.
An anonymous reader submits: "SCO may now have filed for UNIX copyrights and made various allegations about code-copying, but the actual complaint against IBM still seems to be focused around allegations UNIX-based enterprise technologies (such as RCU, JFS and SMP) being improperly added to Linux. Yet, reviewing the Linux kernel archives reveals some interesting and surprising background on just who helped put these technologies into Linux. PJ's GROKLAW blog has uncovered that 'Caldera Employee Was Key Linux Kernel Contributor,' including what looks like a lot of work on the early stages of JFS. The same employee's name also crops up when we look at RCU. When IBM posts RCU improvements, did he complain? No, he requests further improvements even helpfully providing a link to inspire the IBMer!"

[Slashdot]

See, this is what I've been saying: the Linux kernel is very well documented and open to inspection by all.  If SCO code got in, SCO could very well have it there.  Of course that was under a different regime at SCO, so the current CEO is certainly free to take his toys and go home.  However, he can't blatantly disavow prior actions of the corporation and then sue over them.

9:23:16 AM    

The Inquirer: Of Liabilities and Double Dealing [Linux Today]

Good article on how IP stuff really works when it comes to litigation.

7:38:41 AM    

SCO Copyright Claims Questioned. Free Software Foundation, Red Hat Inc. raise issue with SCO's call for enterprise Linux users to pay for UnixWare licenses. [Technology News from eWEEK and Ziff Davis]

The article raises this point: "Eben Moglen, a professor at Columbia Law School and general counsel for the Free Software Foundation, told eWEEK in an interview on Monday that those business Linux users who are not modifying, copying or distributing the Linux kernel can not be targeted for copyright infringement. "

6:24:22 AM