The generally-accepted (by insano-Christian types, anyway) date for the creation of the universe is Archbishop James Ussher’s calculation of September 22nd, 4004BC. This makes the universe 6011 years old as of last September.

Assuming a 90-year copyright, the universe would have passed into the public domain in September 3914BC, or 5922 years ago as of last September.

Traditional Hebrew calculations of the age of the universe are slightly more favourable, since they place the Creation at sometime in September/October 3761BC (can’t really be more accurate than that without more research on my part). However, this still would have the universe passing into the public domain in 3671BC.

Of course, this assumes that the copyright period is 90 years; obviously, if it’s 75 years then it’s even less favourable.

This also ignores the fact that the universe was written in Perl and Lisp, which suggests that God is in favour of free software; in fact, since he’s a Lisp hacker with an obvious interest in artificial intelligence, he probably has quite a bit in common with rms.

Mark Pilgrim writes about the future of reading. Read it, think about it.

Also, read rms’ essay The Right to Read.

As I’ve already mentioned, and as anyone who pays much attention to the geekier parts of the interweb has probably already noticed, there’s been uproar over th publication of the above number, since it can be used to decrypt HD DVDs.

I’ve seen a lot of people claim that it’s crazy that the AACS can apparently copyright/patent/trademark a number. Which is true, of course; no jurisdiction in the world would allow it (even the USA doesn’t allow the patenting of numbers). The legal threats haven’t been because the number itself is protected, they’ve been because the HD DVD content is protected. This, apparently, means (under the DMCA in the USA, at least), that this number constitutes a “circumvention device”, which is illegal.

Of course, it’s ridiculous that US law makes it illegal to exercise even your rights under fair use, and the MPAA, AACS, and RIAA are no less full of shit. I’d love to see them send DMCA takedown notices to all the thousands of bloggers who’ve posted that number; it’d serve them right for introducing a technology that prevents you watching a film you buy legally on a monitor you buy legally unless the monitor is approved by some “licencing authority”.

Whilst looking into Solaris and OpenSolaris, specifically Nexenta (which is based on Debian), I came across this article, containig predictions of the year ahead. It’s dated January, but I missed it back then.

One of them, concerning which OpenSolaris distribution will be released first, says “Maybe Debian will adopt the Solaris kernel and eschew Linux, which is stubbornly staying with GPL2.”.

Nice try, Linux Magazine. Firstly, Debian isn’t just a Linux-based OS - it also has ports to the FreeBSD and NetBSD kernels, as well as the Hurd. All of these are currently unstable, however (as is GNU/OpenSolaris, so they’d neither gain nor lose anything).

Secondly, though the GPLv2 has its problems, I fail to see what the big deal with Linux not upgrading to the GPLv3 is, since it’d be lunacy for the two licences not to be compatible. And again, Debian wouldn’t be gaining anything by switching to Solaris, since that’s under the CDDL and would thus bring in a whole host of other problems (I remember uproar on the Debian-Legal maiiling list when Nexenta was new, because it wanted to use the GNU+Debian userland stuff, but Solaris kernel and libc; with the libc, the licence means GPLed stuff can’t be linked to it without violating the GPL).

(Via Rich)

Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple Computer, in case you live under a rock) posted an article on DRM. It’s quite an interesting read; Rich says he’ll go into more detail later, and he’ll probably give more insight into it than I will, but I’m just going to briefly comment now.

Jobs appears to be saying that the only reason Apple uses DRM is that iTunes wouldn’t be allowed to use most of the music it can at the moment, because the companies that hold the copyright to the music (or “own” it, as they seem to like to call it) won’t allow it. If those companies would allow the distribution of their copyrighted material without DRM, iTunes would do so in a flash - after all, Apple has nothing to gain from the DRM, since they don’t own the music.

He also points out that those companies do allow the distribution of their copyrighted material without DRM - on CD. They just appear to be too dense to realise that DRM on downloaded songs won’t make a dent in “piracy” if CDs can be copied without a problem (the discs that do have DRM technically aren’t CDs, since they don’t comply with the standards and won’t play in many standard CD players).

Ah, idiocy and hypocrisy from American big business; whatever next?

A few weeks back I signed a petition asking the government to “create a new exception to copyright law that gives individuals the right to create a private copy of copyrighted materials for their own personal use, including back-ups, archiving and shifting format.”

The result:

As you may be aware, in December 2005 the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, announced that there would be a review of the intellectual property framework in the UK, led by Andrew Gowers.

The findings of this review have now been published and recommend the introduction of a private copying exception for the purposes of format shifting. This would allow individuals to copy music which they have legally bought on compact disc onto an MP3 player without infringing copyright.

The Government welcomes this recommendation and is currently considering how such an exception should be created in UK law.

A copy of the Gowers report can be viewed on the HM Treasury website.

Not exactly a resounding victory, but it looks promising.

I feel rebellious. So I’m going to commit an act of civil disobedience by providing a link to http://www.captaincopyright.ca/, a website designed to educate young children about copyright, and run by [27]Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency. Now, this may not seem like civil disobedience, but when I point out that it’s a ridiculous load of arse run by a bunch of drooling morons with no clue about what they can and can’t stop other people including on their personal websites, and quote from their frankly ridiculous "Intellectual Property Notice and Disclaimer":

"…permission to link is explicitly withheld from any website the contents of which may, in the opinion of the Access Copyright, be damaging or cause harm to the reputation of, Access Copyright. In the event we contact you and request the link be removed, you agree to comply with that request promptly."

I agree to no such thing. I see no reason to agree to any licence, since there are no laws against mentioning a trademark, even without permission from its owner. Otherwise, I’d get sued for saying I had a drink of Coca-Cola yesterday (even if I didn’t). It’s also neither passing-off nor infringment, nor libel/slander (in case it’s not obvious, it’s an opinion, though I’m sure it’s also the opinion of anybody else with a clue who looks at that site).

What a load of arse.

Access Copyright are even too completely incompetent to allow the site to be accessible at both "captaincopyright.ca" and "www.captaincopyright.ca", and Access Copyright’s own site is completely useless with JavaScript disabled. Because, of course, nobody would ever want to disable Javascript.

Update — according to BoingBoing, the Captain copyright site quotes Wikipedia without linking back to the source or mentioning the licence (Wikipedia is licenced under the GFDL).

One of the controversies about the GNU Free Documentation Licence is that it allows the inclusion of "invariant sections", sections which are not relevant to the rest of the document but may not be modified or removed.

Now, the cynical would say that the only reason for this is to allow the inclusion of the GNU Manifesto in the GNU Emacs manual. Personally, I can’t see any reason why a section which may not be relevant to the main part of the document should be included in the document in the first place. But, I though, if I didn’t use any invariant sections, what would be the problem with using it? I’d still be using a licence which meets my personal standards of freedom (aside from the Invariant Sections, the GFDL is pretty similar to the GNU GPL)

So what happens if I write a document, licenced under the GFDL, with no invariant sections, and someone else takes over maintainership, corrects and updates what I’ve written, adds a substantial amount of content, plus an invariant section?

As I see it, I’d not be able to distribute the manual, even the sections I wrote (even if I wrote most of it) without including the invariant sections. I’d have to go back to the last version before the invariant section was added, and make any other necessary modifications myself. Exactly what happens when the author of free software decides to change to a non-free licence, in fact. It’d probably be okay to use the invariant manual as a reference for my updates to the free manual, but I’d be rather wary of that all the same.

I’ll stick to the GPL, ta very much.