I recently wrote about the World Book and Copyright Day. Well, that was not enough, it seems. Yesterday was “World Intellectual Property Day”, apparently. ‘[A]n initiative to educate young people about how intellectual property rights foster innovation, creativity and economic opportunity.’

via Slashdot

Apparently, today is not only the birthday of FreeCulture.org but also World Book and Copyright Day.

By celebrating this Day throughout the world, UNESCO seeks to promote reading, publishing and the protection of intellectual property through copyright.

This might be old news(?) but I just discovered that Lawrence Rosen’s excellent book Open Source Licensing, Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law is now available online under the Academic Free License version 2.1.

According to Lawrence Lessig, the international student movement at FreeCulture.org is one year old today. Happy birthday!

For more information about how to join or start your own a chapter seet the web site, join the mailing list and visit the #freeculture channel on the Freenode IRC network.

The European Parliament’s rapporteur Michel Rocard has published his views (PDF in French) on the software patent directive and outlined the direction which his amendments will take.

Hartmut Pilch of the FFII comments:

Rocard’s outline contains all the necessary ingredients for a directive that achieves what most member state governments say they want to achieve: to exclude computer programs from patentability while allowing computer-controlled technical inventions to be patented. Already in the title of his paper, Rocard proposes to replace the misleading term “computer-implemented inventions” by “computer-controlled inventions”, and the report itself goes to the heart of the matter.

FFII: Rapporteur Rocard publishes preview of Parliament’s Software Patent Directive Position
via Slashdot

SvD rapporterar: “I ett öppet brev från 114 svenska artister för musikskaparna fram sin ilska över att deras musik laddas ner från internet.”

Listan över artister känns lite pinsam. Kära ni, det är inte er musik vi vill ladda ned ändå, liksom. (Copyriot)

Rasmus har onekligen en poäng där. De flesta namnen på listan är folk jag aldrig hört talas om.

Artisterna frågar sig varför rätten till ägande inte ifrågasätts i något annat sammanhang än när det gäller konstnärligt material.*

Kan det vara för att det finns en betydande skillnad mellan materialla ting och immaterialla fenomen som konstnärliga verk? Jag tycker naturligtvis att den som skapar intressanta verk ska kunna få betalt för sitt arbete. Däremot är jag inte övertygad om att en “äganderätt” till verken är den bästa lösningen.

Uppdatering: Jag såg just att i dag (19/4) är denna nyhet på löpsedeln. Nicklas Lundblad länkar till själva brevet.

Harald Welte reports:

Yesterday, the Munich disctrict court granted a preliminary injunction against Fortinet’s GPL incompliant use of Free Software.

Fortinet is shipping a series of Firewall products (FortiGate and FortiWiFi) running on Linux without complying to the GPL.

via Slashdot

A survey shows that most Americans do not think that blogs should be completely free. ZDNet Australia reports:

Most Americans believe bloggers should not be allowed to publish sensitive personal information about individuals, according to a new survey.

Web hosting company Hostway this week released the results of its poll of 2,500 respondents on blogging. Eighty percent of respondents did not believe that bloggers should be allowed to publish home addresses and other personal information about private citizens.

via Slashdot

Personally, I think that there is usually no need to publish that kind of information and I think it is unfortunate that any kind of regulation is automatically labeled censorship. I see no real problems with rules that prohibit the publication of that kind of information. After all, you can choose to break them (and pay the price for that) if you think the publication is important enough. I think that there is a difference between this and real, pre-publication, censorship.

Piratbyrån planerar en ny demonstration. Så här såg det ut förra året.

Slashdot | ISPs in Argentina Must Log Everything

According to a new presidential decree, and effective July 31, 2005, telecom carriers in Argentina will have to log every activity, including Internet chats, website visits, e-mails, phone calls, etc, made in Argentina. The data must be stored for 10 years, and must be available to the police and intelligence agencies within one hour, 24 hours a day.