Blackmoor Vituperative

I am a little late with this, but the last few months have been very busy. Even so, it brightened my day to read about it.

On 24 October a district court in Moscow has confirmed the “no copyright infringement” verdict.

Earlier this year, on 15 August 2007 AllofMP3.com was acquitted of all charges brought up by IFPI. Consequently the Federation filed a protest on behalf of the labels. This protest was declined last week. This time IFPI promised to go as far as the Supreme Court.

This was yet another victory for AllofMP3.com in court.

(from Court confirms legality of AllofMP3.com ,AllofMP3.com)

The JMRI Defense fund is a worthwhile cause. Think about sending a few dollars their way.

Net neutrality is a complex issue, but here is the main thing you need to know about it in order to support it:

The Digital Rights Mafia is against it.

In case you needed more reasons to hate the media robber barons, the Digital Rights Mafia, and their government shills, here’s an article from Crave.

Denis Kvasov, former head of the Russian download site AllofMP3.com (now MP3Sparks), has escaped damages sought against him by the international music industry. The Associated Press writes that a Moscow judge threw the case out on Wednesday, observing that while the Russian government passed laws aimed at the site last September, Kvasov ended his association with the company in December of 2005.

The case was filed by EMI, the Warner Music Group and the Universal Music Group, who together asked for $587,000 from Kvasov. The labels accused the executive of selling their artists’ music without permission, as well as reproducing it, the latter act indeed being illegal while Kvasov was in charge. Both arguments were rejected.

(from Electronista, AllofMP3 case thrown out of court)

The Digital Rights Mafia just doesn’t give up, do they? Regardless of the law, regardless of the ethics, regardless of the manifest failure of their outmoded business model, they just keep brandishing that buggy whip. As corrupt and demented as the media robber barons are, you have to admire their commitment.

Check out Scott Moschella’s Silent Protest at Plastic Bugs. This guy is braver than I am, but I applaud him and people like him.

He’s also the guy who hacked GIMP to make it usable by human beings: Gimpshop. The Windows version is pretty out of date, unfortunately. It’s a pity the GIMP developers have such a “not invented here” attitude toward Gimpshop. If they’d incorporate Scott’s improvements (and make no mistake: they are huge improvements), they’d see the GIMP community double in three months. I pretty much guarantee it.

UK denies copyright extension to British music publishers

Way to go, Parliament! Woot! Go, UK!

It’s been a really bad week for freedom. AllOfMP3, MP3Sparks, and AllTunes have gone under, and now this.

Happy Independence Day.

Microsoft is back with more vague threats and bogus claims concerning their patents being violated by open source software.

In an interview with Fortune, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, claims that the Linux kernel violates 42 of its patents, the Linux graphical user interfaces run afoul of another 65, the Open Office suite of programs infringes 45 more, e-mail programs violate 15, while other assorted free and open-source programs allegedly transgress 68.

(from eWeek, Microsoft Claims Open-Source Technology Violates 235 of Its Patents)

You first heard this noise back in 2004. It was piffle then, and it’s piffle now. The fact that a company would continue to make empty threats like this, year after year, should be enough reason for you to stop doing business with them.

That’s aside from the practical ramifications of using Microsoft’s software. Anyone who runs a mission-critical server on a Windows machine rather than a Linux or Unix machine, anyone who runs a web server on IIS rather than Apache, anyone who chooses to use Microsoft Office instead of OpenOffice, anyone who chooses to use Internet Explorer rather than Firefox — these people are all technological illiterates who shouldn’t be allowed near a computer keyboard or an IT architecture meeting.

Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq:AMZN -news) said on Wednesday the company will launch a digital music store later in 2007 with millions of songs, free of copy protection technology that limits where consumers can play their music.

(from Yahoo! News, Amazon to sell digital music free of copy curbs)

Way to go, Amazon. Great move.