I go to the url for the White House meeting going on right now, and nothing I own will do the live streaming. I can get the text running at the bottom, but no video. Can you guys figure out if it is possible? If it's just me, that's one thing. But if it is everyone who isn't using Microsoft products, that is something else.

Even though the New York Times reported that the White House statement "all but kill[s] current versions of the legislation," the Senate is still poised to bring PIPA to the floor next week, and we can expect SOPA proponents in the House to try to revive the legislation—unless they get the message that these initiatives must stop, now.

"The House Judiciary Committee approved legislation that would make changes to several federal statutes in order to strengthen enforcement of intellectual property rights against domestic and overseas piracy.

WhiteHouse.gov released custom code used to develop their open platform built on Drupal. The majority of the code used in the web site of the White House is already open source, but developers are now releasing new code -distributed as Drupal modules- in order to benefit others.

For open source and Linux, 2009 has been another year of big and surprising milestones, from the White House adopting open source technology to Microsoft submitting code for the Linux kernel."

Tough week to the Web due to security issues (mostly Microsoft-imposed)

In this interview, Microsoft India Chairman talks about Software Piracy (we call that sharing) in India and why it's bad, why "Intellectual Property Rights" are important. The contrast in thoughts of the Free Software community about the same issues is particularly interesting to note.

The United States' newly-created "Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator" asked for public comments on a Joint Strategic Plan to make copyright enforcement more effective. The FSF submitted an argument that the government should adopt free software and encourage its use elsewhere to provide more freedom to computer users and reduce the need for such enforcement.

In the United States, the White House has led the march towards open source and free software by switching the http://www.whitehouse.gov/ website to the Drupal content management system. The government of the United Kingdom has decided to follow their lead.