Last month, the Copyright Office held a closed-door session on the issue of statutory damages. A small affair, the roundtable was a response to the PRO-IP Act introduced in Congress late last year. In the wake of the meeting, eight public interest and industry groups have published a white paper (PDF) arguing against any changes to the "one work" rule and the increases in statutory damages that would result from such changes.

I thought you might like to see the court's order regarding Microsoft, extending the US District Court for the District of Columbia's oversight. There are actually two documents, one released for the public, a kind of executive summary [PDF], and then a much longer (78 pages compared to 6) Memorandum and Order, which is available from the US District Court for the District of Columbia's website's daily list of orders. I have them both as text.

In a surprising (to this Kat at least) turn of events, the Honourable Mr Justice Kitchin has ruled today that the current UK Patent Office practice of flatly rejecting patent claims to computer program products is wrong.

I know by now you've seen the notice by the guy claiming to "revoke" the GPL license on his code, because I'm getting email about it.

ECMA, the international IT standards association, recently published its responses to comments of the ISO National Bodies in response to Microsoft's Office Open XML application for ISO standardization (the actual 2,293-page response is closed to the public). The ECMA proposals will be discussed at a Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) in Geneva after which the National Bodies may reconsider their original vote. Microsoft's responses make clear that within one year, it will have four different OOXML specifications to implement and interoperate with, and each of those specs will be closed. Under no circumstances should such a flawed specification become an international standard.

A trademark lawyer writes about the reaction to the recent decision to grant trademark registration to the term "SLART", widely used to refer to art done in the Second Life virtual world. The registrant is reportedly trying to stop others from using the term. The article includes an overview of trademark law and discussion of its application in virtual worlds.

After years of watching the software industry twist itself in knots trying to differentiate “open” vs. “free” and having to re-invent code simply because it had the wrong comments at the top, I think it’s time to put an end to the madness. This promoted me to write the following letter to Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel

This is an editorial about file conversions. It starts with a story about Free Software Magazine and our struggle with article formats, and continues explaining why the world needs to get rid of Office Open XML, which could create more problems than the Microsoft monopoly itself.