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Comment It's typical (Score 1) 468

Most average slashdot summaries (even including summaries that don't include statistics) are less confusing and ambiguous than this summary. But that's only if we are talking about _average_ summaries, not _typical_ summaries.
Patents

Submission + - Tridgell recommends reading software patents (swpat.org) 1

H4x0r Jim Duggan writes: In a recent talk, Andrew Tridgell rejected the common fears about triple damages "If you’ve got one lot of damages for patent infringement, what would happen to the project? It’s dead. If it gets three lots of damages for patent infringement, what happens to the project? It’s still dead." Tridge then explains the right way to read a patent and build a legal defense: "That first type of defence is really the one you want, it’s called: non-infringement. And that is: 'we don’t do that. The patent says X, we don’t do X, therefore go away, sue someone else, it’s not relevant for us'. That’s the defence you want. [...] Next one, prior art: [...] Basically the argument is: somebody else did that before. It’s a very, very tricky argument to get right. Extremely tricky, and it is the most common argument bandied about in the free software community. And if you see it in the primary defence against a patent, you should cringe because it is an extremely unsafe way of doing things." — there are even some tips in the talk specifically for Slashdotters.

Comment info from http://en.swpat.org (Score 1, Troll) 204

Here's what I have already on them:

swpat.org is a publicly editable wiki, help welcome.

Comment A critic, but not direct opponent of swpats (Score 3, Informative) 628

Tim's critical of software patents, but his position is that there's just an implimentation problem - with good tweaking it could work. Kinda disappointing that he's not pushing for abolition. Surprising too given his experience in web dev and XML. Related info:

swpat.org is a publicly-editable wiki - help in expanding this info would be very welcome and useful.

Comment Good job wikileaks beat them to it! (Score 4, Insightful) 555

Sorry to criticise people who are clearly on our side. The Wikileaks folk are great, and the job they were doing was great, and it will be great again when they start back up...

...but it was not a good idea for them to take all the leaked documents offline without notice in order to show their value so that people will donate. It was last year, probably December, and everything's still offline :-(

For one example, they published the only (at the time) big ACTA leak. (There's since been a bigger one, hosted elsewhere) Everyone was pointing to them, and they took their copy offline. To my amazement, no one had a back up, so us anti-ACTA campaigners simply lost the only leaked draft.

At the implementation level, it was a bad idea to simply cause all pages to give error 404. A page of "We need donations, we'll be back up when we get them" would have been better.

Lesson: take backups of important docs, even ones published by groups of good people.

Comment Re:Context (Score 0, Troll) 452

> To say the ruling class owns the politicians is a circular statement.

You're assuming the politicians aren't puppets.

Look at ACTA. There's nothing in there for the citizenry.

And what do our representatives think is worth debatin? A: Whether instruments of infringement should be destroyed "promptly" (US/EU/Mex), or "without delay" (Canada), or whether a time shouldn't be specified (Aus). Wow, thanks guys.

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