Cody Taylor

The RIAA isn’t just suing tens of thousands of music consumers; they’ve also begun filing lawsuits naming the directors of and investors in tech companies that they believe contribute to copyright infringement. NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: “ZDNet urges the big recording industries to stop suing tech investors, and cites the draft legislation that I posted, which would immunize from secondary copyright infringement liability any work done by a director in ‘his or her capacity as a member of the board of directors or committee thereof,’ and any conduct by an investor based solely upon his or her having ‘invested in any such corporation, including any oversight, monitoring, or due diligence activities in connection therewith.'”

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An anonymous reader writes “ZeroPaid has an interesting take on the story of Nicolas Sarkozy being accused of copyright infringement. The irony, of course, is Sarkozy’s pushing of a 3-strikes law — disconnecting from the Internet those accused of file sharing — in France and across the EU. The French president had apparently offered to settle the copyright infringement accusation for one Euro, but the band rejected the offer, calling it an insult. The article notes that each year since 2006, a high-profile anti-piracy entity has been on the wrong end of a copyright infringement notice. In 2008, Sony BMG was sued for software piracy. In 2007, anti-piracy outfit BASCAP received a cease and desist order related to pirated software. And in 2006, the MPAA was accused of pirating ‘This Film is Not Yet Rated’.”

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Peace Corps Online writes “In the 1980s a deadly fungus called chytrid appeared in Central America and began moving through mountain streams, killing as many as 8 out of 10 frogs and extinguishing some species entirely. (The fungus has little effect on any other vertebrates.) Now a returned Peace Corps volunteer and her husband have opened the El Valle Amphibian Conservation Center in western Panama to house more than 600 frogs as chytrid cuts a lethal path through the region. Experts agree that the only hope of saving some of the more endangered, restricted-range species is to collect animals from remaining wild populations, establish captive breeding programs, and be prepared to conduct reintroduction projects in the future. But before reintroduction can even begin, scientists must find some way to overcome the chytrid in native habitats using vaccines, breeding for resistance, or genetic engineering of the fungus. Conservationists are budgeting for 25 years of captive breeding, long enough, they believe, to allow some response to chytrid to be found. ‘There are more species in need of rescue than there are resources to rescue them,’ says Amphibian Ark’s program director. ‘When you’re talking about insidious threats like disease or climate change, threats that can’t be mitigated in the wild, there’s simply no alternative.'”

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An anonymous reader writes “Three months after being awarded 3 million in a lawsuit against Atlantis Blue Capital for violating the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, Facebook earlier this week filed a federal complaint against ‘Spam King’ Sanford Wallace in San Jose District Court. Las Vegas night club manager Adam Arzoomanian and Scott Shaw are also named as defendants in the suit.” These filings do not mark the first time Wallace has faced legal action; last May, MySpace won a 0 million judgment against him.

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Kristina at Science News writes “A new way to process images reveals an extrasolar planet that had been hiding in an 11-year-old Hubble picture. After ground-based telescopes found three planets orbiting the young star HR 8799, a team took that information and reprocessed some 11-year-old Hubble Space Telescope images. Voila. There was one of the three planets, captured by Hubble but not visible until new knowledge could see the picture in a fresh light. The technique could reveal hidden treasures in many archived telescope images.” For reference, the first exoplanet to be (knowingly) directly imaged was 2M1207_b in late 2004.

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Synthetic Biology, a relatively new field, is seeking to find out what happened to a bunch of chemicals to make them capable of supporting a metabolism, replicating, and evolution. A Florida lab is showing some of the most promising advancements in this direction with their AEGIS (Artificially Expanded Genetic Information System) experiment. “AEGIS is not self-sustaining, at least not yet, and with 12 DNA building blocks — as opposed to the usual four — there’s little chance it will be confused with natural life. Still, Benner is encouraged by the results. ‘It’s evolving. It’s doing what we designed it to do,’ said Benner, a biochemist with the Gainesville, Fla.-based Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution. In addition to providing an example of how alien life might be cobbled together, synthetic biology has a broad array of uses on the home front.”

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CWmike writes to tell us that Sun’s Scott McNealy is pushing for the Obama administration to adopt a much more open-source friendly policy similar to what has been done in Denmark, the UK, and other countries. “Although open-source platforms are widely used today in the federal government — particularly Linux and Sun’s own products, Solaris and Java — McNealy believes many government officials don’t understand it, fear it and even oppose it for ideological reasons. McNealy cited an open-source development project that Sun worked on with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, during which a federal official said “that open source was anti-capitalist.” That sentiment, McNealy fears, is not unusual or isolated.”

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saccade.com writes “Bunnie (of XBox hacking and Chumby fame) has written an insightful post about how a new phenomena emerging out of China called ‘Shanzai’ has impacted the electronics business there. A new class of innovators, they’re going beyond merely copying western designs to producing electronic “mash-ups” to create new products. Bootstrapped on small amounts of capital, they range from shops of just a few people to a few hundred. They rapidly create new products, and use an “open source” style design community where design ideas and component lists are shared.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

saccade.com writes “Bunnie (of XBox hacking and Chumby fame) has written an insightful post about how a new phenomena emerging out of China called ‘Shanzai’ has impacted the electronics business there. A new class of innovators, they’re going beyond merely copying western designs to producing electronic “mash-ups” to create new products. Bootstrapped on small amounts of capital, they range from shops of just a few people to a few hundred. They rapidly create new products, and use an “open source” style design community where design ideas and component lists are shared.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over the last few years, Apple has been putting considerable effort into advancing Safari, and that’s one of the reasons for the renewed browser development landscape. Competition between Safari, Mozilla’s Firefox, Chrome & Internet Explorer has been good for Web users because it’s resulted in seriously useful innovations.