legal

A court reads open-source licensing the wrong way

Mark Radcliffe writes cogently on his blog about a recent court decision that may have wide implications for open source. It's not a software case.

It revolves around model trains. Curiouser and curiouser....… Read more

'Facebook Secrets' blog gets DMCA takedown treatment

Facebook Secrets is no more.

The blog, which had been set up specifically to share the leaked source code that Facebook's front page accidentally displayed to a number of users over the weekend, has been taken down by host Blogger's parent company Google.

The company cited violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, evoking the similar takedown notices that plagued Digg when its users 'dugg' HD DVD crack code earlier this year.

Since the Facebook source code inevitably made its way into plenty of hands while it was public, the action probably won't do much--it'… Read more

Say what? Nevada judge loses post over MySpace 'bias against prosecutors'

Apparently, what happens on MySpace doesn't always float in Vegas: A substitute judge in the North Las Vegas Justice Court got sacked last week because of some nasty stuff he said on his social-networking profile about prosecutors.

The 34-year-old criminal defense attorney, Jonathan MacArthur, had been appointed as a judge pro tempore in anticipation of a full judicial post that would be available in 2009. Unfortunately, MacArthur wrote on his MySpace profile that his interests included "Breaking my foot off in a prosecutor's a**...and improving my ability to break my foot off in a prosecutor's … Read more

Death row inmate's fate turns on the word 'hacker'

A California death row inmate's fate depends in part on the word "hacker."

Enrique Zambrano, a former Berkeley, Calif., government bureaucrat, was convicted of murdering a fellow waterfront commissioner to prevent him from testifying against Zambrano in a 1988 assault case.

The killing was brutal. A hiker in the Lafayette hills found the headless body of Luis Reyna, the other Berkeley Waterfront Commission member, hacked to pieces. A forensic pathologist later testified that the neck vertebrae had been sawed off and the lower jaw was missing.

Now Zambrano is on death row and in the midst of … Read more

Foul-mouthed bureaucrat fired for too much personal e-mail

A longtime county bureaucrat whose ex-girlfriend turned her in for excessive use of personal e-mail has lost a lawsuit claiming she was fired unjustly.

Lynne Bray, who assigned work to road crews for Washington state's King County, was reprimanded in July 2003 for being customarily late for work. She claimed she was being treated for depression and irritable bowel syndrome, a disorder marked by constipation and diarrhea.

But what seems to have led to Bray's termination after 12 years as a county bureaucrat was a citizen complaint from her former girlfriend, Jennifer Bond, saying that she was using … Read more

N.J. police officer accused of trading child porn on work PCs

A New Jersey police officer in charge of the department's Web site and computer systems has been locked up on child porn charges.

To hear prosecutors tell it, Pennsauken Township police officer John Schenberger was a sick fellow who sent 1,071 still images and 11 movies to (whoops!) an FBI agent that included depictions of bestiality, child bondage and child pornography.

Schenberger allegedly engaged in this vice while on duty and using Pennsauken Township's computers. He's accused of writing to the FBI agent, who pretended to be about to engage in sexual acts with a 5-year-old … Read more

Report: Facebook axes third-party app Audio over copyright issues

VentureBeat reports that Facebook has removed a popular application from its third-party developer platform over potential copyright issues. The application, called Audio, allowed users to upload MP3 files and share them with their friends--yup, that's a recipe for copyright disaster.

Facebook had already axed the app once before, according to the article. It appears that Audio had been created by a single developer, not an existing company.

<>As VentureBeat's Eric Eldon points out, this shows that Facebook is taking terms-of-service violations seriously when it comes to the Platform, which was launched in late May and catapulted … Read more

Universities win Senate fight over anti-P2P proposal

Updated Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has withdrawn anti-file sharing legislation that had drawn yowls of protest from universities this week.

Reid, without explanation, on Monday nixed his own amendment that would have required colleges and universities--in exchange for federal funding--to use technology to "prevent the illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property."

Instead, Reid replaced it with a diluted version merely instructing higher ed institutions to advise their students not to commit copyright infringement and tell students what actions they're taking to prevent "unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material" through campus networks. The revised … Read more

Is watching cockfights in the comfort of your home OK?

When I woke up this morning, I wasn't sure if I would talk about the latest product for the home or the latest trend in the industry. But when I came across this article on Techdirt , I couldn't help but talk about it.

Over the past year, the American Humane Society has been targeting Amazon.com as an accomplice in the sale and distribution of cockfighting magazines and videos. According to Amazon, it wasn't the legal distributor of this material (which is true, a third-party merchant was) and the lawsuit should be brought up against those people … Read more