In what will surely become a landmark case -- or at least a massive thorn in the MPAA and RIAA's clubbed, pygmy feet -- a judge has ruled that bypassing DRM via hacking, reverse engineering or any other means is not in itself illegal.

Our primary task is to help projects do what they want to do in making their software work with greater efficiency and increase the prospects that the software will be used by people around the world," says Eben Moglen. "Much of our work involves giving advice to clients."

Head of Microsoft New Zealand steps down, New Zealand permits software patenting only with the "device" trick, and Ben Sturmfels is working to marginalise software patents also in Australia

One of the many arguments against allowing patents for software (alongside the principle argument that software is made up of algorithms, which are essentially mathematics, which is pure knowledge and hence is not patentable) is the fact that software is anyway covered by copyright law.

Patents on rendering TrueType fonts expired in May, allowing Libfreetype 2.4 to offer better default TrueType font display

The standard for the OpenDocument office file format is approaching version 1.2. The draft of the standard is now available on the web for public review

Managing all this data would create a lot of work and expense for ISPs, which disadvantage smaller players and would have to be passed on to consumers.

The federal government has censored approximately 90 per cent of a secret document outlining its controversial plans to snoop on Australians' web surfing, obtained under freedom of information (FoI) laws, out of fear the document could cause "premature unnecessary debate".