Category Archives: Legal

Microsoft – put up or shut up

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So Steve Balmer said:

for the appropriate fee Novell customers also get essentially the right to use our patented intellectual property. And I think it’s great the way Novell stepped up to kind of say intellectual property matters. People use Red hat, at least with respect to *our* intellectual property in a sense have an obligation to eventually compensate us.

Now, Mr Balmer, precisely what “patented intellectual property” are you talking about here ? Please be specific, patent numbers would be very handy..

Or are you just trying on a shakedown with vague threats to see what easy protection money may come your way now that Vista and Office 2007 aren’t selling so well ?

Thanks Novell, for nothing..

SCO files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection

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From Groklaw:

Here’s the title of the press release: “The SCO Group Files Chapter 11 to Protect Assets as It Addresses Potential Financial and Legal Challenges”, which you can find here. They say reorganization “ensures business as usual.”

It may also act as a useful extra delaying tactic in the determination of how much they owe Novell in their trial..

Some of SCO’s remaining claims were yet to be decided at trial, which was to begin Sept. 17. The trial will be stayed under bankruptcy law, according to Novell public relations director Bruce Lowry. “We’ll be looking at our options,” he said.

Windows DRM breaks – declares all XP & Vista installs pirated

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Yet another reason to not bother with Windows or other DRM crippled software, Microsofts Genuine disAdvantage servers all crashed..

The result? Every single Windows XP and Vista installation — except possibly those with volume license keys — is being marked as counterfeit when it tries to check in. Installations which are flagged as counterfeit switch to a “reduced functionality mode” which results in features like Aero and DirectX being disabled.

Talk about Defective by Design..

SCO, Novell, Sun and OpenSolaris

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Back in 2004 Sun’s then CEO, Scott McNealy, stated in an interview with Jem Matzan (NewsForge reprint) about CDDL’ing OpenSolaris:

We had to pay SCO more money so we could open the code — I couldn’t say anything about that at the time, but now I can tell you that we paid them that license fee to expand our rights to the code

However, now that Judge Kimball has ruled that Novell actually owns the copyrights and not SCO I presume it’s now up to Novell to decide whether or not that deal is still valid, probably at least partly dependant on whether or not SCO can find the cash to pony up the dues on it they illegally withheld from Novell.

Could be interesting given Novell’s stake in Linux.

Australian Internet Censorship pilot to go ahead

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So it appears the Federal governments attempts to censor the internet at ISPs is not dead after all..

Coonan said one privately funded trial had been cancelled, but the planned pilot managed by the ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority) will go ahead as planned. The tender for companies wishing to take part closed last week and three bids were received, according to the government.

What they are going to be testing out is..

Under the ACMA scheme, ISP-level filtering products will be tested on blocking “inappropriate and illegal content”, whether such products would clog ISPs’ networks and if such products have improved since the government last examined their capabilities in 2005-2006.

Bah

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The ABC is reporting:

A Sydney court has heard that a woman charged with stabbing her father and sister to death and seriously wounding her mother was denied psychiatric help because of her parents’ belief in Scientology.

The Australian reports:

“She had a history of being diagnosed with a psychotic illness in late 2006 at Bankstown Hospital, but follow-up from the mental health team was apparently declined by her parents because of their alleged Scientology beliefs,” Dr Cross said. […] The report said that instead of receiving follow-up treatment by Bankstown Hospital’s mental health team, the woman had instead seen a private psychiatrist as well as a psychologist. She also was prescribed an anti-depressant as well as an anti-psychotic treatment that she took until January this year. The report said after she stopped taking her medication she began to feel anxious, and depressed. She also experienced poor sleep and felt unsafe at home. “She stated that her parents did not want her to take the prescribed medication she had been on in 2006, and apparently started her on medication they got from America – which was not psychiatric in nature,” it said.

Court Rules Restaurant Review “Defamatory”

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So now you can’t criticise bad, expensive food and service ?

The Court of Appeal agreed, finding that it was defamatory to say the food was unpalatable and the service bad.

It appears that only Justice Kirby had any common sense, saying that the jury was far more likely to know what the community standards were than the judges, saying:

Astonishing as it may seem, judges may occasionally lack a sense of irony or humour

Or even common sense, in this case..

Mabo versus Queensland – 15 years ago today

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From the decision, handed down on June 3rd 1995.

The common law of this country would perpetuate injustice if it were to continue to embrace the enlarged notion of terra nullius and to persist in characterizing the indigenous inhabitants of the Australian colonies as people too low in the scale of social organization to be acknowledged as possessing rights and interests in land. Moreover, to reject the theory that the Crown acquired absolute beneficial ownership of land is to bring the law into conformity with Australian history.

The dispossession of the indigenous inhabitants of Australia was not worked by a transfer of beneficial ownership when sovereignty was acquired by the Crown, but by the recurrent exercise of a paramount power to exclude the indigenous inhabitants from their traditional lands as colonial settlement expanded and land was granted to the colonists. Dispossession is attributable not to a failure of native title to survive the acquisition of sovereignty, but to its subsequent extinction by a paramount power.

There is a summary of the (very long) decision at Wikipedia and a news report on the anniversary at the ABC.