While this list is by no means complete, it does have some real gems of patents which are totally ridiculous and serve only to stifle rather than stimulate free enterprise. The page is from the website of David K. Levine and Michele Boldrin. Note that both of these gentlemen in addition to being professors are researchers for the Federal Reserve.

Se puede leer un resumen de sus pensamientos en español aquí. Here is a good overview and commentary on Retroactive Copyright Extension, and here is their article entitled Property Rights and Intellectual Monopoly.

In Should Canada indict Bush?, The Toronto Star makes a few interesting points regarding the illegality of the invasion of Iraq. Specifically, the violations of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and that Kofi Annan has said that the war is illegal. Plus the smaller stuff, I guess.

Interesting article. Would Canada hold Bush for War Crimes? And if they did, would the American public stand for it? Maybe the response would be the same as the response to Iraq. But if Bush were held in Canada, and the new Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, said that Canada has weapons of Mass Destruction, she'd be right.

It's no secret that I'm on all sorts of email lists for the World Summit On Information Society (as related to Civil Society), and that I often get into discussions with people about legalities, rights, liberties, freedoms and what have you. But while everyone was caught up in the '4 countries + FBI = [Indymedia's Servers Seized]' fiasco/drama, I was focusing on something a little bit more - well - quiet.

Lawrence Lessig pointed out something sneaking through the United States Congress - HR4077. So I tossed it out on a few lists dealing with WSIS and Civil Society, and even discussed it to some degree with Stallman himself. But I don't think I got my point across; that laws in the United States are propagated sometimes by TRIPs, and I ventured that such things were of concern to the world instead of just the United States.

There's a whole lot of buzz about eDemocracy, eGovernment and eToothpicks. OK, not eToothpicks, but you get the point. As usual, the governments of the world are our anchor in the Bell Curve of fashionable titles, so it seems fitting that we have eToothpicks - which, of course, come with instructions.

The world is insane. But we're not. At least I'm not.

But a self-titled eLunatic - or a Raving Lunatic - adds some sanity in his weblog post Don't Cry For Me, America. And the cool thing about the whole thing is that the focus of the whole government/democracy thing is a challenge to the way these things have been handled traditionally.

The Christian Science Monitor talks about the Ethics of open-source campaign era, and there's a lot of food for thought as we consider democracy, government - and what they were originally intended to accomplish.

The whole concept of democracy was the people ruling through elected officials. The whole power of democracy isn't the vote - it's the free and open discourse that precedes the vote. The vote only measures the effect, and does so questionably - though a better system has not yet been devised.

It's no big secret that lobbying is a big part of technology these days - but it seems even CIO tracked down the creature after the nasty hobbitses... The hobbits, of course, being a part of the analogy for user rights.

Amazing stuff there:

This resource helps you determine whether a photograph is subject to copyright. A useful tool, and educational - it provides resources as it prompts you for answers.

Really interesting tool, and educational too.

ccValidator allows you to read a non-lawyer version of Creative Commons licenses:

ccValidator is an on-line service which parses Creative Commons licenses,
validates the RDF
and displays their
contents in human readable form.  It is usefull for ensuring that
your license accurately reflects the rights you wish to reserve (or
not).  The service is available from the Creative Commons at validator.creativecommons.org.