According to the Guardian, McDonald's is indeed filing such an application. Lord Sandwich must be spinning in his grave.

Thomson Reuters, maker of the EndNote bibliographic software, is suing George Mason University and the State of Virginia, see Courthouse News (via DigitalKoans). The issue is Zotero, an open source bibliographic tool that appears to rapidly increase its market share, as it is much lighter, platform independent, browser plugable and free. Of course, this is not the official reason, Thomson Reuters rather argues that Zotero developers reversed engineered EndNote to allow Zotero to import EndNote files.

This is a very serious issue for Thomson Reuters. Indeed, its clientele is essentially locked in, as researchers have built their bibliographic databases over the years and cannot export them. With Zotero this is suddenly possible, and they can drop EndNote for another product, including the free Zotero. Thomson Reuters must be especially annoyed as its product has become less and less practical, from what I hear, and very bloated. But customers had no choice but buy new versions. Reminds me of Microsoft products, on which EndNote relies heavily.

I reported previously on attempts to break the copyright over Oregon laws. It looks like the same thing is happening in California. And the person leading the charge is no other than Carl Malamud, who forced the SEC to put all filings online. Check out his public.resource.org site.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the first Mickey Mouse cartoons have ambiguous copyright claims, listing two other potential claimants between "Disney" and the word "copyright". Under interpretation of the law at the time, this does not constitute a proper copyright claim.

Given that previous copyright rulings against Disney were unsuccessful on the basis of the existence of previous copyright claims, and these claims now appear not to be valid, this is significant news to one of the biggest beneficiaries of copyright laws.

Two web server softwares dominate the market, the open-source Apache, a strong leader, and Microsft's IIS. As c|net reports, Microsoft has decided to support the foundation behind Apache. It seems to be an odd proposition to fund one's main (and winning) competitor. In this case, it seems the Apache license would allow such an oddity: it is not a General Public License (GPL), but rather one that allows to modify Apache then sell the results as one's own. If Microsoft wants to sell a good clone of Apache, having a good Apache to start with makes sense...

The library of Congress, along with others, has carried out a study on the impact of copyright on digital preservation link. The 200 odd page report comes to the conclusion that 1) laws were enacted in an analog era, thus do not understand digital preservation; 2) there is little in the sense of mandatory preservation of digital works, like there is for paper copies at the Library of Congress; 3) archives have resorted to piecemeal agreements to digitize works instead of having blanket approval, due to copyright laws.

The report recommends in particular that the law should define "preservation institutions" that can digitize at risk copyrighted material, that they should be allowed to preserve in various formats, that they should be allowed to harvest material pro-actively, irrespectively of the medium and the type of material. In short, the preservation institutions should be granted privileges that allow them to bypass copyrights in a wholesale manner, for the sake of preservation.

Hat tip: DigitalKoans.

In the endless saga about royalties from radio stations paid out to artists, Wired reports that a vote on this is expected on Thursday on this, and the two main opponents have been exchanging symbolic gifts in the lead up.

The question is whether radio stations provide a service to artists by promoting their wares on the air, or whether they are exploiting them. Seeing (or rather listening) that radio stations rarely mention who the artist is, the latter would seem to hold. But given that artists often give songs to stations for them to be played, one would argue the opposite. And if the station actually buys the CD, wouldn't it be allowed to play it like a library allows patrons to read its books?

I may be wrong on this, but I believe you cannot insure yourself against acting illegally. In that light, I interpret the following court decision as determining that software piracy is legal.

UNIK Associates was in the business of reselling software to businesses. Symantec sued and won a case against UNIK, alleging that it pirated its software products. UNIK then sued its insurance company to make it pay the fine, and has just won. The court argues that the policy covered copyright and trademark infringements.

As if we need further proof that RIAA actions are unscrupulous, a team at the University of Washington managed to elicit take down notices accusing them of downloading movies through laser printers. It thus demonstrates that the technology RIAA relies on to press charges is bogus.

Hat tip: Electronic Frontier Foundation

More and more journals adopt a policy of open access, i.e., they do not charge anything to readers. One recent adopter is "Economic Analysis and Policy," which is also publishing in 2009 a special issue on the topic. Consider sending a paper!

Details.