As a follow up to Charlie's post on Harry Potter's publishers pursuing what they view to be copyright violations, take a look at this piece in the Boston Globe from the Sunday Magazine of 6/25/03, "Taking Liberties With Harry Potter" by Tracy Mayor.

According to this piece in Slate http://slate.msn.com/id/2084727/, Flipping the Switch: Linux's new popularity may hurt Apple more than Microsoft, by Paul Boutin:

Business Week columnist Alex Salkever dropped the bomb last week that next year, "Linux should pass Apple in market share for desktop operating systems on computers."

Boutin's piece goes on to argue that Linux's growth in the consumer market comes in large part because of the price. A new Mac: $1,999.00, a new PC running Linux from Walmart: $298.00. If you don't care about Microsoft compatibility and aren't doing professional graphics work where you have to use Quark or Photoshop, then a new computer for $300.00 that let's you write, use the WWW, and other odds and ends is a good deal.

Could that price be a key to some of the access issues teachers worry about?

In this ZDNet Q&A, David Sorkin, a cyberlaw expert and anti-spam advocate, argues that most cyberlaws aren't needed and that those which are passed do more harm than good. He makes an interesting comparison between judges and legislators. Judges he says have done a good job of learning about the technology and how it works before rendering decisions; legislators tend to listen to the lobbyist or interest group who fund them most. Judges view cases through an adversial process, where both sides have relatively equal footing and the ability to present evidence; legislators, well, not all.

The article also touches on spam, privacy, intellectual property, and the stupidity of sites that try to prevent deep linking. (Linking, says Sorkin, is "an inherent part of the Web, in the same way that nouns and verbs are essential parts of speech." -- very cool analogy.)

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-958783.html

http://www.salon.com/tech/letters/2002/03/19/chained_melodies/index.html

In response to an aritcle by Damien Cave titled "Unchained Melodies" (see previous Kairos News entry), readers of Salon Magazine wrote numerous letters. They offer a range of insight and opinion on copyright, fair use, and the future of the computer desktop.

If you're teaching IP issues, this is a useful link, and the discussion is lively.

http://chronicle.com/free/2002/03/2002031901u.htm

Quote from the article:

"This is a typical tactic of the large-scale software systems that are in use in education -- attracting our business with a product [at a low price] to prevent us from developing a product in-house, and then raising the price later," says James Hammond, associate vice president for information technology at Winthrop University, which has purchased software from WebCT for several years.

Available at http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/03/13/copy_protection/index.html, this article by Damien Cave for Salon Magazine discusses the recent push by Disney's Michael Isner, Hollywood's Jack Valenti, and others on legislation that would require computers to have unbreakable digital rights management systems. They're supporting a law that would not only require such coding, but that also dictates the specifications of that coding, in essence, reducing the operability and value of computers and turning them into something very similar to a television without a VCR, a tape deck without the ability to record, and so on. Cave explores the issue, but suggests that even if such a terrible bill were to pass, that wouldn't be enough to stop copying.