The age of litigation

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Seems copyright infringement lawsuits are popping up like mushrooms these days. A couple of weeks ago I saw the movie the Island getting sued for beeing similar to an old movie called the Clonus Horrors. This week its the makers of the television series Lost who gets sued by a writer called Anthony Spinner who says he wrote something similar back in the 70’ties. And I have earlier blogged about the lawsuit against The DaVinci code book by Dan Brown. I have for a while held the belief that copyright was a good IP tool as it was weak enough to allow co-existence of a lot of similar works, which I think would be essential to avoid litigation hell in a world where huge amounts of books, songs and movies are made every year. Well hopefully the courts will prove me right and these lawsuits will fail, but if they don’t then I guess my beliefs about copyright are wrong.

Jonathan Schwartz’s thinking good thoughts

I think the Kodak Java lawsuit started a internal process at Sun where they are slowly re-evaluating their stances on a lot of issues
related to IP. Jonathan Schwartz for instance have been writting more and more blogs where he shows some good thinking, this last one showing the double standard of the content industries for instance. Good going Jonathan! Maybe its time to buy some of those Sun/AMD boxes :)

Pure pwnage

So I discovered the internet craze that is Pure Pwnage. Especially episode two is simply hillarious. I can even relate to Jeremy in the clips as I do tend to 0wn at Quake3 here at the office, of course it isn’t hard as everyone else here is a n00b. They also have a good Wikipedia entry.

GStreamer 0.9

We got two important pieces for GStreamer 0.10 in GNOME 2.14 in place yesterday. Wingo finished porting over the mixer interface which is used in things such as the panel volume applet and Ronald ported the FLAC plugin over getting us full coverage of the free codecs. To see if more people was interested to get involved I sent out a mail with a list of plugins that needed porting. Anyone out there who wants to get involved in GStreamer hacking, this is the time and place. Pick something on that list and start porting (or be 0wned)

SVG

Cleaned up my SVG test page yesterday. It now have four different versions and both rendering backend of librsvg on display. Rock on me!

5 thoughts on “The age of litigation”

  1. You should update your test pages to embed the svg in the page to compare it against the mozilla svg renderer. At least in the deer park alpha’s svg is rendered by the browser.

  3. Mmm what about JACK? It’s a wonderful system as it allows the audio apps to work together (I use it for example to take advantage of hydrogen and rezound functionalities in ardour)… Won’t gstreamer apps be able to communicate with jack-enabled apps?

  4. The Clonus Horror case has merit. The movies are almost identical, for example there are scenes that look similar down to prop/scenery placement.

    Your other examples are good, though.

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