Fresh action in the European Commission's antitrust proceedings against Microsoft: On May 24, the European Court of Justice conducts a hearing on Microsoft's appeal against the fine. FSFE has participated in the case for a decade and will intervene on the Commission's behalf.

The WebM Community Cross-License (CCL) initiative enables the web community to further support the WebM Project. Google, Matroska and the Xiph.Org Foundation make the various components of WebM openly available on royalty-free terms. By joining the CCL, member organizations likewise agree to license patents they may have that are essential to WebM technologies to other members of the CCL.

You want to fork the OpenJDK. If you don’t care about calling it Java, you can, under copyright law and the GPLv2, just cut the release, publish it, and go about your business. The catch is that there are tons of patents all over the JVM, and the GPLv2 does not include any patent protections.

The goal of the new directive is to consolidate the various consumer rights directives already in place in Europe. In addition, the EU wants to strengthen consumer protection while they're at it, and part of that is ensuring that digital goods are handled just like normal goods.

MPEG LA is blatantly trying to claim a monopoly on online video. The patent system is failing for software, and initiatives to “fix” the system are not working. A clear exclusion of software ideas from patentability is the only workable solution. VP8 is an attempt to free the software industry and all software developers from this patent troll.

The reason that ACTA was negotiated in secret among rich countries was that this was seen as the most expeditious way of getting a super-extreme copyright agreement passed with a minimum of fuss, and that all the poor countries who were excluded from the negotiation would later be coerced into agreeing to it.

The Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundations - two organisations fighting for the same cause, but traditionally in very different ways - have joined forces in an attempt to prevent Novell patents falling into Microsoft's hands.