Wow, we hadn't seen that for a while...

From MSNBC:

French court rules against copy
protection

This is not even possible. How can this happen? The MPAA won't be able to sleep tonight...

The part I find interesting is this quote from the article:

Lionel Thoumyre, a lawyer for the artist rights group Spedidam, said the ruling
sets a new precedent in the European Union, where intellectual property laws are
nearly identical among member states.
"This is brand new," he said. "I think
this is the first judgment in Europe going in this direction."

No kidding, it's brand new. It's one thing to rule that say something like DeCSS is not illegal, it's another to declare copy protection altogether illegal. Let's just see how many days before the judgement gets reversed or laws amendended to make sure it returns to being legal.

Suing the spammers vs suing the P2P software users...

Microsoft has been getting some more positive press lately for their attempts to help curb the amount of spam that gets send.

On the other hand, the RIAA typically gets negative press when they sue potential infringers.

My question is, in both cases it appears that having a "big" guy sue helps get result.

So why the different reactions?

I can see some differences, but I think that if the overall concept is that just because you are big isn't a reason why you should succeed, then we shouldn't be happy in both cases.

Document retention policy...

from Slashdot today, they had an interesting discussion on "document retention policies". Some people will say that it's a way to destroy incriminating evidence, and some say it's just business as usual.

I have to say that one way to really bug a company and make them waste time is to ask them to produce all sorts of documentation for a lawsuit. At that point everyone has to stop working and has to look for every little email or document that relates to the lawsuit. It's a great way to kill productivity!

But, if like me you cannot wait for the transcripts...

read the post by Timothy Armstrong about the oral arguments.

Do you need to be able to make money only legally?

This was a very interesting comment from von Lohmann (again from the 9th circuit):

von Lohmann: Yes. And in particular there I would direct the court's attention to the Fifth Circuit's ruling in the Vault vs. Quaid case, where it was conceded that the noninfringing uses standing alone would not have supported a market for the product at all. Nevertheless the Fifth Circuit found that the product in question was capable of substantial noninfringing uses. In other words, the court refused to imagine a hypothetical product where the infringing and the noninfringing uses had somehow been segregated and then imagine a market and attempt to figure out whether one or the other would sell.

It's a very interesting point, if today somebody calculated that 90% of CD burners sold were used for illegal purposes, could we ban the CD burners because if those sale were removed, we would have a non-viable commercial product?

Still I think the issue will gravitate around the fact that Grokster has "evil" intentions and could potentially do something about the abuse that is used with the help of their software.