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• Small print in big fat letters

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
  
  Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
  

  ---

Via Torrentfreak:

The IFPI (read: Hollywood) is increasingly pushing for placing the onus of prosecuting infringements of their imaginary property to internet service providers. I am happy to see Telenor refuse to do someone elses business. If I build a road, I should not be responsible for drunk drivers who might drive on it. Or as Telenor puts it,

“This would be the same as demanding that the postal service should open all letters, and decide which ones should be delivered.”

The court ruled in favor of Telenor’s sanity, against IFPI’s distorted view of society, property, justice, and business. The ruling is not about whether or not the Pirate Bay may remain online in Norway, it is about Norwegian and every other country’s critical infrastructure.

Applause!

Update: now the Danish Antipiratbyron is throwing in the towel, for another reason: courts in Denmark still require evidence before convicting anyone, and they remain unable to acquire it. This is a good move as well. Let’s spend the money to producing some good art instead of suing fans.

Note to self: when organizing a debate, pick a subject on which some of the participants disagree.

The supposedly big news yesterday was Skype suggesting that their Linux client will be liberated shortly. However, I feel that in communications, open, standard protocols are more important than client implementations, so the news did not make all that big an impression.

The correct way to handle VoIP calls is using open protocols such as SIP or XMPP, no matter how the client side is arranged. Gizmo and Google have gotten this right: both have their own respective desktop and mobile clients, while the protocols are standard enough to allow us to hack together our own client implementations such as Empathy or Ekiga.

I wanted to see how our distinguished community feels about this and decided to start a debate on #ubuntu-offtopic. I failed miserably, and the discussion ended up being rather short. Please allow topyli and gord to demonstrate, if you will.