bruceb news

If you’re looking for more analysis, here’s a good article on the meaning and likely effect of the appeals court decision today.

If you want a headstart on tomorrow’s headlines, here’s an article about today’s appeals court ruling vacating the remedies ordered by Judge Jackson and remanding the case back to a different trial judge.

Microsoft also backed away from the controversies about the “smart tags” feature planned for Windows XP. (See the June 19 item below and this article about today’s decision.) People raised the specter of Microsoft trying to take control of the Internet. It was mostly nonsense, but Microsoft first decided to turn the feature off by default, and now has decided to leave it out of Windows XP altogether. […] continued

There’s a lot to learn about the copyright issues symbolized by the war against Napster. Copyright owners are waging a concerted battle with a single-minded goal: to make your every exposure to copyrighted material into an event that costs you money. In 1998 the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was presented as a benign update to old law, but its horrible consequences are going to reshape our world. The flow of information on the Internet may be constrained in ways that would shock you. Downloaded material – maybe even CDs and DVDs – may stop working after a fixed amount of time unless you keep paying. […] continued

My lawyer friends will appreciate this story. Last week jurors in a federal court trial in New York awarded $300,000 to an independent record label for copyright violations – delivered as 145 individual awards, one for each infringed song. The defendant, MP3.com, was ecstatic, since it’s already been stung with multimillion dollar verdicts in other cases, and the plaintiff in this case was seeking $8.5 million.

Over the weekend jurors read news accounts and started calling the judge to confess that they messed up. They meant to award three million dollars, you see, and just got tripped up by that hard multiplication and division stuff. […] continued

If you’re following the Microsoft hearings, the best part was the obvious distaste shown the by appellate panel for Judge Jackson’s outrageous anti-Microsoft ravings in the press. Here’s an article that quotes extensively from the oral arguments yesterday.

As we head into the arguments in the Court of Appeals, here’s a good article that presents the case for leaving Microsoft alone. A sample:

“STATED SIMPLY: Consumers want computers and applications that work together. They want a platform, and they want integration. Multiple companies have not been able to achieve this compatibility except with the presence of a powerful company to force standardization. Before Microsoft achieved its dominance, the PC industry was populated by vendors willing to forsake compatibility for competitive advantage–customers be damned.

“Computer users voted with their wallets to create a Microsoft standard.

“This has worked well for customers, whose constant dollar cost for software is significantly less than before Microsoft became the dominant player. […] continued

If you’ve been using Findlaw for its wealth of law-related resources (including free California cases and codes), then you may be interested to learn that West Group has agreed to acquire Findlaw. Here’s an article with all the information known to date. Reading between the lines, it looks like Findlaw was running out of cash and West saw an easy and cheap way to upgrade its current web offerings. They’re cagey about any planned changes to the Findlaw services, of course, but West says it will continue to let Findlaw users access cases for free. Really. It promises. Uh huh. Yup. […] continued