Cody Taylor

Spanish copyright group SGAE has taken legal action in order to close down a site which offers links to copyrighted music hosted elsewhere. In seeking an injunction to close the site, SGAE said it was not necessary for the court to hear the site’s defense. The court disagreed.

Braedley writes “When [Ars] last took an in-depth look at USB flash drives in 2005, the landscape was a bit different. A 2GB drive ran nearly 0, and speeds were quite a bit slower then. At the time, we noted that while the then-current crop of drives was pretty fast, they still were not close to saturating the bandwidth of USB2. To top it off, a good drive was still going to set you back or –not exactly a cheap proposition. Since our first roundup, this picture has changed considerably, and it leads to a question: has the flash drive become an undifferentiated commodity, just like any other cheap plastic tsotschke that you might find at an office supply store checkout counter?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes “Founding editor of Boing Boing Cory Doctorow has written a report about ‘do-it-yourself’ digital licensing, which he’s touting as the panacea for piracy. Doctorow’s solution for content creators is two-fold: Get a Creative Commons license, and append some basic text requiring those who re-use your work to pay you a percentage of their gross income. Doctorow refers to this as the middle ground between simply acquiring a Creative Commons license and hiring expensive lawyers for negotiations. He calls do-it yourself licensing ‘cheap and easy licensing that would turn yesterday’s pirates into tomorrow’s partners.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

QuantumG writes “The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded a 0,000 grant to the University of Queensland, Australia to develop a vaccine against dengue fever, a disease spread by mosquitoes. Unlike other vaccines, the ‘altruistic vaccine’ doesn’t specifically protect the individual being bitten, but instead protects the community by stopping the transmission of the pathogen from one susceptible individual to another. The hope is to do this by effectively making their blood poisonous to mosquitoes, either killing them or at least preventing them from feeding on other individuals. Professor Paul Young explained how his work fell outside current scientific traditions and might lead to significant advances in global health — he said he could envision the vaccine being used around the world within 10 years, and would be designed to be cheap and easy to implement.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.