Posts by Antartica

It is serviceable, but not the optimal solution

From what I've gleaned from the mozilla blog post and the phoronix forums:

1. Supposedly Cisco is already paying close to upper limit of rowalties, as they are capped anually (this year was $6.5M).

2. Cisco is covering the royalties for copies of the binary module downloaded from their site.

3. Cisco has said that they will be releasing not only the source code, but also the makefiles (flags, configurations, etc) used for compiling, so their binary is independently reproducible.

4. Mozilla has said that the procedure with firefox will be: download the binary module, check its checksum with the "known good version" and if it matches, use it. The checksum of the "known good version" is the checksum of the software compiled from sources.

5. Cisco has said that they will provide binaries for all platforms/architectures that can be reasonably supported.

So it is a useful stopgap, although not as nice as using a patent-free/royalty-free codec.

You can use the old interface by editing the URL

There is a trick to bring the old interface by editing the URL, change the url from:

http://es-mg42.mail.yahoo.com/neo/launch?

to

http://es-mg42.mail.yahoo.com/neo/b/launch?

That is, add a "/b/" between "neo" and "launch". It will go to the javascript-less version, which is mostly like the yahoo mail of old.

Maybe just require that orphan works must have author?

AFAIK, the legislation at the EU level on orphan works was sold as providing access to works whom copyright holder cannot be determined or contacted. Readers beware: I say copyright holder, not author. The problem is that the author is not the copyright holder in most of the culture-relevant works, that is, the ones that the legislation is trying to "get back" into publishing.

But in no place I've read that it seeks to "legalize" stripped works.

So, for the purpose of the legislation, they just have to:

- Require that the orphan work has author (and require that any use of the orphan mentions the original author). In this the orphan would be distinct from public domain.

- Additionally, require that the orphan work is older than XX years (perhaps 14 years, just as a homage to the original US copyright term), so as the original author has had some "automagical" protection.

Anyway, legislators following an easy to understand policy like the one above? Nah...