Letters to the editor

Pleasant Supreme Court decision

In a pleasant indication that the U.S. Supreme Court has not
completely lost its collective mind, it decided 8--0 that the Lanham
Act (part of trademark law) does not lessen the public's right to
public-domain works. (Decision at
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/02pdf/02-428.pdf.)
 
The case is a bit tortuous, but briefly, a book was published, and
a TV program was made from it, the publisher having sold the TV
rights. Years later, the publisher renewed the book's copyright, but
the video was allowed to pass into the public domain. A decade after
that, the publisher re-sold the book's TV rights to a video
distributor. When another company repackaged and sold the original
(public-domain) video the distributor sued under the Lanham Act,
claiming that the repackager was ``reverse passing off'' (selling
someone else's goods under your own label).
 
The court observed that since the repackager had taken a PD work
and resold it, the distributor was SOL. The distributor has rights in
its own, newly-slapped-together, version, but cannot use the Lanham
Act to reach back and gain rights in the public domain, which ``would
cause it to conflict with copyright law, which is precisely directed
to that subject[...].''
 
We've gotta take our victories where we can.
--
 
                         Best wishes,
 
                                  Max Hyre
  

Comments (none posted)

CNET succumbs to FUD or were allways part of it

 
As reported here: http://www.sys-con.com/linux/articlenews.cfm?id=779
CNET is quietly getting out of the linux download business.
(I first discovered this link at the Netraverse web site)
I am wondering if this is simply more fallout from the Source Challenged
Obfuscators or part of a bigger assault on Linux. At any rate CNET was
never a big player in the linux download business in my opinion so they
are safe to continue to be irrelevant.
 
--
David Hartley
penguin@linuxweb.org
Peace, Love, and Penguins
 
 

Comments (4 posted)

Security site

I'm fixin' (damn, but it's nice to live in the South :-) to flang up a
bunch of websites for friends and clients using WebGUI, and it occured
to me that if there was an automated tester for website security,
that'd be a good thing to play with.

In my search therefore, I came across a pretty spiffy site that
apparently *used* to be called Ideahamster (and indeed, that's the
domain name still) which includes the "Open Source Security Testing
Methodology" manual.

http://www.ideahamster.org/

Hain't read it yet, but it's got a groovy name, no?

If anyone has pointers to any *other* frameworks for this sort of
thing; I'd appreciate hearing about them.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra@baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff     Baylink                             RFC 2100
The Suncoast Freenet         The Things I Think
Tampa Bay, Florida        http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

   "If you don't have a dream; how're you gonna have a dream come true?"
     -- Captain Sensible, The Damned (from South Pacific's "Happy Talk")

Comments (1 posted)

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