In the News Archive

"Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech is considered one of the most recognizable collection of words in American history. It's the rhetorical equivalent of a national treasure or a national park. The National Park Service inscribed it on the Lincoln Memorial and the Library of Congress put it into its National Recording Registry. So we might hold it to be self evident that it can be spread freely. Not exactly. Any unauthorized usage of the speech and a number of other speeches by King - including in PBS documentaries - is a violation of American law. You'd be hard pressed to find a good complete video version on the web, and it's not even to be found in the new digital archive of the King Center's website. If you want to watch the whole thing, legally, you'll need to get the $20 DVD." I'm probably too young and too non-American to really fully grasp just how important Mr King was to a segregated America, but the fact that his influential and world-changing speeches are locked up because of copyright, as well as the fact that EMI is actually actively pursuing its copyright, is downright insane. If anybody ever needed even more proof the content industry is a vile, rotting, stinking and utterly putrid clump of pure, concentrated evil, this is it. Absolutely unbelievable.

"Last weekend Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff wrote a column in the Salt Lake City Tribune supporting the pending SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy bills. In his article Shurtleff argues that the bills are a necessity if the US is to 'stop Internet thieves and profiteers'. An interesting take, but not very credible, as the Attorney Generally who may soon have the power to seize domains, simply passed off MPAA-penned propaganda as his own words." Unbelievable.

"In a few weeks Amelia Andersdotter will be the second Pirate Party member to take a seat at the European Parliament in Brussels. The 24-year-old Swede was voted in more than two years ago, but due to bureaucratic quibbles her official appointment was delayed. TorrentFreak catches up with the soon-to-be youngest MEP to hear about her plans and expectations."

The idea is for the Urban OS to gather data from sensors buried in buildings and many other places to keep an eye on what is happening in an urban area. The sensors monitor everything from large scale events such as traffic flows across the entire city down to more local phenomena such as temperature sensors inside individual rooms. The OS completely bypasses humans to manage communication between sensors and devices such as traffic lights, air conditioning or water pumps that influence the quality of city life.

Hewlett-Packard Co. , the world's largest computer maker, is in talks to buy Autonomy Corp. for about $10 billion and plans to spin off its personal-computer business, people with direct knowledge of the matter said. Is this an indicator of the Post PC Era?

Apple is now more liquid than the United States government, the Financial Post reports. As the government struggles to resolve the debt ceiling debate, the operating balance in Washington is at US$73.768 billion and falling. Meanwhile, Apple has US$75.876 billion.

"A payment system devised by online retail giant Amazon is too obvious to patent, the European Patent Office (EPO) has ruled. Amazon had hoped to patent the way its customers pay for products through the click of a single webpage button. The company was previously granted patent rights to the payment system in the US."

Apple is likely to replace Hewlett-Packard (HP) as the global number one notebook vendor in 2012 if tablet PCs are included in the calculation of global notebook shipments, according to industry sources.

As we reported earlier this week, Apple is busy sending out cease and desist letters to small, defenceless projects to defend its trademark application (it doesn't actually own the trademark yet) for 'app store'. This has prompted many a discussion over the trademarkability of such a generic term, and over the origins of the abbreviation 'app'. Who came up with it? How old is it? To my surprise - the abbreviation is much older than you'd think, and in a way, it illustrates quite well the demise of the programmer. What? Read on.

What about a little Nixonian intrigue? A respected public relations firm has been caught executing a secret smear campaign against Google to large media outlets, trying to make Google looks bad (or worse, depending on your point of view). Who hired this firm to do this? You'd think Microsoft or Apple, it's right up their alley - but no, it's actually Facebook.

"New Wikileaks cables indicate that the US has been keeping a close watch on IP enforcement policy in New Zealand, going so far as to propose funding anti-piracy efforts there to the tune of around $427,000. US diplomats have also offered to help New Zealand rewrite its 'three strikes' illegal file sharing law."

Between all this bickering over who's peniphone is the largest best, it's always nice to be able to post a positive story, a story which shows that for every abusive company, there's one that shows the world just how it's done. This time, it's Bose. Founder and primary stockholder of Bose, Amar G. Bose, has donated a large number of non-voting shares of the company to MIT, where he spent his university career. Dividends over these shares will be paid each year to MIT, which will use it for research and educational purposes.

"A major new report from a consortium of academic researchers concludes that media piracy can't be stopped through 'three strikes' Internet disconnections, Web censorship, more police powers, higher statutory damages, or tougher criminal penalties. That's because the piracy of movies, music, video games, and software is 'better described as a global pricing problem'. And the only way to solve it is by changing the price."

I would like to thank osnews user fran for submitting this as-is; a quick round up of other news happenings this week that OSNews missed. Read More for "Red Hat's 'Obfuscated' Kernel Source", "LibreOffice Enterprise Support From Novell", "Microsoft Want You to Stop Using IE6", "Facebook Can Screw With Google, But Google Can't Screw With Facebook" and lastly "Thom Has Three PS3s, Whereas You, Conversely, Have None".