The Substantially Similar Weblog

Or, as they like to call themselves, “OpenOffice.org”:

I don’t know… Will a silly logo help or hurt? It’s certainly possible to argue that the semi-silly Linux penguin has been helpful in advancing open source software. Maybe a silly seagull will be more effective than the serious shadowy seagull they used before (still visible in the background of the logo above).

Update: Oops! A commenter points out that this is just the education mascot. Apparently I didn’t read the website closely enough, I just noticed that the silly gull is the first thing you see at OpenOffice.org.

The Boston Globe, among other newspapers, did not run today’s Doonesbury comic strip, apparently because it includes the word ‘son of a bitch’:

A search of the last year of Boston Globe articles reveals 33 articles where the word ‘bitch’ appears. I suppose there’s some argument that the comics page is supposed to be especially kid friendly, but I can’t help but think the political overtones in this week’s story (where a major character loses a limb in the war in Iraq) played some part in the decision to censor today’s strip. I also don’t suppose there are many kids who read the newspaper who would be traumitized by exposure to the word ‘bitch’. If there are any such kids reading my blog, I suggest they go to the handful of sites registered in the government sponsored and sanitized kids.us domain.

On the other hand, the Globe ran this photo on the front page:

Two employees of a contractor in Iraq were just fired for providing a similar photo to the Seattle Times; however, this photo was the result of Freedom of Information Act request filed by Russ Kick, maintainer of The Memory Hole, a site dedicated to preserving and disseminating censored documents. I don’t know how the Bush Administration expected its media blackout on casket photos would really work in the modern information age.

In other news, we want to see Pat Humphries and Sandy O (now Emma’s Revolution—website not up yet), our favorite folk/justice/peace folksinging duo. Listen to some of their MP3s if you’ve never heard of them. They performed at Club Passim and gave a fantastic show with lots of audience participation. Coincidentally, Pat and Sandy’s Song Peace Salaam Shalom was mentioned yesterday during a Democracy Now story on Mordechai Vanunu, a nuclear whistleblower who was just released from prison 18 years after revealing that Israel was building a nuclear arsenal. Supporters of Vanunu sang the song from behind a fence set up to keep them away from the prisoner of conscience.

Finally, I highly recommend Monday’s show celebrating the 55th anniversary of Pacifica Radio. It’s a great story, and should be particularly relevant to all you copyright activists among my readers. Lewis Hill, the founder of Pacifica, encountered great resistance and skepticism about the idea of noncommercial radio. No one could believe that people would willing pay for something they could just turn on their radio and get for free. Listen to the whole documentary for an illuminating history of a precursor to the modern Free Culture movement.

I’ll admit outright that I loved Kill Bill Vol. 2, even more than I loved Kill Bill Vol. 1. I would love to see a Tarantino lecture on the film—or even better, I thought that a semeter-long film course could be designed around Kill Bill, looking at the works of each great director to which Tarantino pays homage.

Uma Thurman’s defense of the film’s alleged violence was a little less intellectually profound than I might have hoped, though:

She said, “People have to have creative freedom. I love violent, sexy movies.”

As I come perilously close to becoming a real live attorney, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I might practice intellectual property law while still working to change some of the most broken parts of the regime. Erik J. Heels discusses this dilemma cogently in Am I a Copyfighter?: “One practitioner’s struggles with practicing — while fighting to change — the law in the dark ages of the Internet.” Highly recommended for anyone in a similar situation.

If you’ve emailed me in the past 72 hours and haven’t heard back from me, please resend your mail. It’s been a rough three days.

More details this weekend, once I’ve recovered.

Seen in my server log today:

“Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; Linux Rulez)”

Looks like someone can’t make up their mind.

If you thought yesterday’s news that “realtor” is not a generic term was counterintuitive, check out this patent application.

Can anyone say “prior art”?

(not to mention that the enablement requirement leaves something to be desired…)

I appreciate Groklaw’s timely and incisive coverage of SCO v. IBM; however, the site’s primary author (a paralegal) sometimes makes subtle erroneous statements of law. For example, in yesterday’s posting, What’s Wrong with Enderle’s “Legal” Strategy, she writes:

Mr. Enderle, SCO’s true believer, has written that if he were on a jury, he’d vote for SCO. That, of course, does not amaze you. He has also given us a heads up on what he believes they will tell a jury and why he thinks it will convince them. Unfortunately for Mr. Enderle’s theory, he doesn’t understand that when you ask for a declaratory judgment, as IBM has on its counterclaims, the jury doesn’t decide it. Declaratory judgments are decided by the judge.

This is wrong. See, e.g., Beacon Theatres v. Westover, 359 U.S. 500 (1959):

The District Court’s finding that the Complaint for Declaratory Relief presented basically equitable issues draws no support from the Declaratory Judgment Act, 28 U.S.C. 2201, 2202; Fed. Rules Civ. Proc., 57. See also 48 Stat. 955, 28 U.S.C. (1940 ed.) 400. That statute, while allowing prospective defendants to sue to establish their nonliability, specifically preserves the right to jury trial for both parties. [..] It follows that if Beacon would have been entitled to a jury trial in a treble damage suit against Fox it cannot be deprived of that right merely because Fox took advantage of the availability of declaratory relief to sue Beacon first.

(emphasis added)
The issue is not whether it is a declaratory judgment action, but whether there are disputed issues of fact for the jury and the nature of the relief sought. Equitable (or injunctive) relief must be granted by a judge, but claims for other sorts of relief can be heard by a jury, whether it is a declaratory judgment action or not. I haven’t examined the papers carefully enough to answer that question definitively in this case, but I suspect there are disputed issues of fact in the counterclaim apart from any requests for injunctive relief. Thus, IBM’s declaratory judgment counterclaims may, in fact, go to a local jury.

This is similar to a Groklaw error from this past summer, in which the author confused a preliminary injunction or summary judgment (both of which are decided by a judge) with declaratory judgment. See my explanations at the time.

I just opened an account at ING Direct·, an online-only bank that provides 2% interest in an “orange savings account” (vs. 0.5% at my regular bank) with no fees, minimum balance, etc..

What’s really surprised me is their privacy policy·:

ING DIRECT’s privacy policy exceeds the standards required by congressional legislation. One requirement of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Modernization Act of 1999, or GLB, requires financial institutions to provide customers with the ability to “opt-out” of information sharing. ING DIRECT has adopted an “opt-in” privacy policy, which means that we will not share your data unless you explicitly request that we do so.

I don’t think I’ve ever received a privacy policy from a financial institution that say much more than “we promise we’ll comply with the law!” Compare my credit union, whose privacy policy says: “We share member information with discretion. We may share some or all of the non-public, personal financial information we collect about you, but we pledge to share such information with prudence and only as permitted by law.” Great—prudence—I’ll definitely be able to enforce that one!

The mailing I got from ING Direct is even better:

Banks have assumed for too long that they can share information about you, and then ask if you mind; requiring you to tell them not to, or “Opt-Out” of their information sharing. ING DIRECT will not share your information unless you ask us to, or “Opt-In” to us sharing your information.

The only thing I find a little irritating so far is that they always answer the phone with, “ING Direct, how can I help you save more money?”

So what I want to know is: what’s the catch?

Spam gets more clever all the time. Yesterday, this· appeared on the debian-mentors list·:

 Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2004 22:36:41 -0700 (PDT) From: rasheed badmus  Subject: free game boy To: debian-mentors@lists.debian.org Hello: I'd like to request for someone to sponsor the following unofficial packages I have: snes9express (1.39-beta) - a GUI frontend for SNES9x (as far as I know this is still an orphaned package); and visualboy advance (a gameboy/gameboy color/gameboy advance emulator for Linux). The said packages can be obtained in this apt source location: anything that u want to send,send it by this below. P.O box 1103 agodi Ibadan, Oyo state, Nigeria. 

Although list members quickly figured out that this was actually spam·, someone made a good point: if spammers start using text from a typical posting to a list in the body of their message, it’s going to be very hard to use content-based filters reliably. I can’t see how, for example, a Bayesian filter would be able to drop the above message in the right bin.

Also, see this fairly technical but fascinating description of how an Internet cafe technician in Dublin caught a spammer red-handed·. The best part is where the spammer tries to eat his USB memory stick so the police won’t get it. (Sorry, this is one instance where my civil liberties instincts are overcome by my harsh justice instincts).

(this is another case where this post would ideally be filed under two categories—”Debian” and perhaps “spam”—which is not yet a category.)