Blackmoor Vituperative

Remember Worlds.com? The 3D pioneer is still around and they’re ready to sue. In fact on Christmas Eve, the company sued NCSoft, for violating patent ‘690, a system and method for enabling users to interact in a virtual space.

NCSoft’s games, such as Dungeon Runners, Guild Wars and Lineage, are all said to violate the patent. And NCSoft is just the start. World.com’s IP lawyers feel that they have a “very robust patent,” reports Virtual Worlds News.

(from Worlds.com patent litigation could ripple through virtual worlds, ZDnet)

Even if patents on software were not inherently absurd (and they are), this is a patent on something which had been widely implemented and had even appeared in movies decades before Worlds.com applied for their patent in 2000. Even EverQuest was using virtual avatars for a year prior to Worlds.com’s patent application. Surely the USPTO had heard of EverQuest? How clueless could they possibly be? What technologically illiterate boob signed off on this?

In a stunning about-face, the Recording Industry Association of America is set to abandon its long-held policy of mass lawsuits against file-traders, opting for deals with ISPs that could eventually result in users’ Internet access being terminated.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that the RIAA has reached preliminary agreements with major ISPs. Under the deals, the RIAA would email an ISP when it detects a user illegally serving up music. The ISP would forward the note and ask the user to stop. After a few follow-ups, the user would notice his broadband service is appreciably less broad, and ultimately would simply be cut off.

Helping to transition the industry to this point has been New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, whose office kept the RIAA and ISPs talking. “We wanted to end the litigation,” said Steven Cohen, Cuomo’s chief of staff. “It’s not helpful.”

But the RIAA will not be dropping the many, many cases still outstanding. Recording Industry v The People, Ray Beckerman asks:

Meanwhile, what about the unfortunates who are presently entangled already in these unjust lawsuits? Why won’t the RIAA drop those cases too? If it was bad business to start them, why isn’t it bad business to keep on throwing good money after bad? I hope consumers will remember this 5 1/2-year reign of terror, and will shun RIAA products, and I hope the legal profession will place a black mark next to the names of those “lawyers” who participated in this foul calumny.

For its part, the RIAA says the litigation strategy was a success. Chairman Mitch Bainwol, said, “Over the course of five years, the marketplace has changed,” meaning people are much more shy about engaging in P2P filesharing.

(from RIAA to drop mass lawsuits against filesharers, ZDNet

Is this an improvement? Perhaps, but only if it means that RIAA has decided that suing their customers is now and forever a vile, business-impairing practice. Frankly, I do not give them that much credit. And remember, sharing is not piracy.

More misdeeds of the Digital Rights Mafia…

The Recording Industry Association of America has done a number of distressing, disgusting, and disgraceful things in its never-ending quest to fill its coffers with ill-gotten gains from every American with an internet connection. The news out of Pittsburgh, however, carries what we have to class as the most depraved stunt we’ve seen them pull so far.

According to the Pittsburgh ABC-affiliate, the latest amusement for the vampiric-nitwits in the RIAA’s legal department has been to sue nineteen-year-old Ciara Sauro for allegedly sharing an industry-crushing ten songs online. […] The evil file-sharer they’ve decided to go after is no iPod-toting high school student with a P2P fetish — she’s a disabled pancreatitis patient who has to be hospitalized weekly while she waits for an islet cell transplant. Now, thanks to the RIAA’s steamroll-for-justice campaign, she’s on the hook for $8,000 — in addition to the mounting medical bills she and her mother already can’t afford to pay.

[…]

Although we really didn’t think it possible, we’re left with an even lower opinion of the RIAA than we had before — and a few choice phrases we’re too polite to print. The acrid taste left by their actions is tempered, though, by the knowledge that Ciara Sauro now has an experienced advocate of her own. We wish her a speedy resolution to the matter at hand, a healthy transplant, and a rapid recovery.

(from Linux Journal, RIAA preys on teen in need of transplant)

It has long been obvious to anyone paying attention that the Digital Rights Mafia (aka “DRM”), the media robbers barons, and their government shills would happily twist our legal system into a pretzel in order to serve their own interests. It should come as no surprise that they are now working behind closed doors to subvert the governments of the world on a grand scale. It’s called ACTA, and it’s a significant step in the elimination of what we generally call “civil liberties” — the rights guaranteed to US citizens by the documents on which our government is founded.

SPECTRE could only hope to have this kind of influence.

A companion to Sharing is not piracy, to help convey the difference between copying and piracy. Feel free to use it as you wish.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

I whipped this up today to help convey the difference between sharing and piracy. Feel free to use it as you wish.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

Pirates chased and shot at a U.S. cruise liner with more than 1,000 people on board but failed to hijack the vessel as it sailed along a corridor patrolled by international warships, a maritime official said Tuesday.

The liner, carrying 656 international passengers and 399 crew members, was sailing through the Gulf of Aden on Sunday when it encountered six bandits in two speedboats, said Noel Choong who heads the International Maritime Bureau’s piracy reporting center in Malaysia.

The pirates fired at the passenger liner but the larger boat was faster than the pirates’ vessels, Choong said.

“It is very fortunate that the liner managed to escape,” he said, urging all ships to remain vigilant in the area.

(from The Associated Press)

Folks, this is what pirates do. They shoot people. They hijack ships. They are violent, vicious criminals.

College students who share DVDs are not pirates.

Friends who share their music with each other are not pirates.

People who use unlicensed software are not pirates.

DefectiveByDesign.org brings us another reason to avoid Apple:

Starting this Black Friday and over the next 35 days leading up to the end of 2008, we want your help in promoting a consumer boycott of Digital Restrictions Management. […] For today, we’ve chosen the first product to be avoided this holiday season — Apple’s MacBook computer. Apple have pushed their DRM agenda even further, with the release of the latest revision of their MacBook laptop computers. The new MacBooks contain a hardware chip that prevents certain types of display being used, in an effort to plug the analog hole.

I am so sick of the Digital Rights Mafia and the media robber barons depicting ordinary consumers as “pirates“. A college student who buys a CD and then shares it with her friends is not a pirate. A single mother who earns $15,000 a year who uses an unlicensed copy of Adobe Photoshop to eke out a living is not a pirate. A gamer who pays good money for Bioshock and then hacks it so that it won’t install a rootkit on his computer is not a pirate. Have they violated a license? Maybe, maybe not — but they are definitely not pirates.

• Pirates hijack ships at gunpoint
• Pirates kill people
• Pirates hold multimillion dollar cargos for ransom

Enough of this “pirate” bullshit. Enough.

I have wanted to get away from Outlook for a number of years now — ever since I dumped Microsoft Office for OpenOffice. So why haven’t I? For the first few years, it was simple expediency: there really was no functional alternative to Outlook. Then, it was convenience: between myself and my spouse, we keep the calendars and address books of three or four desktop machines synchronized by hotsyncing them through my Palm. For the last few years, this task was not feasible with Thunderbird.

However, I recently got a T-Mobile G1, and with its ties to Google, I thought surely that I would find some way of replacing Outlook while still keeping our contacts and calendars all in sync. As it turns out, I did, thanks to some very clever programmers.

Contacts

First off, I installed Thunderbird, Lightning, Enigmail, and gContactSync, and set up Enigmail to use my GPG keys (I won’t go into all of that here, but the Enigmail folks are very helpful getting that up and running).

I then needed to import our contacts from Outlook to Thunderbird. That was fairly simple. I set up gContactSync to synchronize our contacts with Google, and that was that — for the contacts, anyway.

Calendar

Setting up our calendars was a little more complicated. First, I needed to get to get our calendars into Google Calendar. I exported the calendar to a PST file, and then attempted to upload that file to Google. Every time I attempted this, it failed about mid-way through. I kept having to delete the items from the Google Calendar and start over. What finally worked was exporting specific date ranges. I did it year by year, and then individually imported each of those PST files to Google Calendar. This worked perfectly.

Next, I needed to synchronize Thunderbird (actually Lightning) with Google. The way I chose was to use GCALDaemon. GCALDaemon is a cross-platform application that keeps a local iCal repository on your computer, and then periodically syncs that with your Google Calendar. Then, you point Thunderbird at the local iCal file, and there you have it: synchronized calendars.

Once I had my laptop set up, it was very easy to set up our other computers the same way, as well as setting up the G1 to connect to the same Google account (I do not use Gmail for email, but that does not prevent using a Gmail account’s address book).

At last, after far too many years, I have eliminated Outlook from our desktops. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.