I spend an unimaginable amount of time on the computer; it's just what I do.  So whereas there are ultimately plenty of more important issues, it's hard not to focus on the tech stories.


And here we have an amazingly absurd attack on Internet freedoms, programmer, client and just about everyone in contact with a computer's freedoms courtesy of the Société civile des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France (SPPF).


This group has taken upon itself to sue various US companies for copyright infringment.  The usual fare of peer-to-peer clients are in tow, but the SPPF has managed to push these suits to a whole new level of crazy by including Sourceforge in the mix.


Sourceforge, for the unenlightened, is a massive repository of open-source projects; some big name projects from the site are Audacity, K-Meleon, Notepad++, 7-Zip, and of the reason for the suit, programs such as ShareAza.


There is here an attempt to extend legal discourse to the hosting of a project of a program that uses potentially can use to infringe on copyright.  An explanation would be needed for the logic not to extend further to just directly suing Cisco, Seagate or the estate of Charles Babbage


But if only that was the only issue with the whole story.  It appears that the basis for the lawsuit is a requisite for these programs to filter materials protected by copyright.  We're not even in poor logic anymore, we've officially reached impossible standards.  That is not feasible, period.


Excuse me while I get started on my lawsuit against Dennis Ritchie, for creating the C Programming language, which was used to create PHP, which is the language used for MediaWiki, the framework used on Wikipedia, which hosts information about TCP/IP, facilitating the knowledge to create Internet connections used in every peer-to-peer software.  Easy money.
Posted by Ellyoda Sat, 15 Nov 2008 22:39:20 (comments: 2)
 
Sat, 15 Nov 2008 23:13:25

Oh no, I've visited SourceForge... that makes me an accomplice!

 
Sun, 16 Nov 2008 18:53:07
The french are cracking down on downloads and the UK government are following what they are doing as political parties often do, trying to 1up eachother.
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