In particular, one of the companies Unisys is chasing down is Accuweather, a weather forcasting service. As a result, Accuweather has committed to changing over to the graphic format known as PNG, for "Portable Network Graphic", which is a free and open alternative.

More Patent Madness: Patent demands may spur Unisys rivals in graphics market: "Unisys is expanding its efforts to license the technology behind the Web's most popular graphics format, as it continues talks with major Internet portals to pay for the right to use so-called GIF files."

(And enough with the companies with the same name as their only product! I'm sick of the confusion!)

It might seem despicable to "let" them get away with what they're doing, but Napster-the-company is not the problem, it's the ones distributing the MP3's. It's not like it's hard to find the distributors with the right tools.

Adding to yesterday's essay... consider the lawsuits against Napster. (Metallica and a probable one by Dr. Dre) The thing is, all Napster does is blindly index what's being made available on the service, by file name. If we hold them responsible for the use their service is put to, we'll open the door in this country to what I talked about in the essay.

"I raised this objection to make a point," Moore says. "Interception proxies increase the complexity of the Internet and cause more problems than they solve. This is not something that we want to encourage."

That provides one small real-world explanation of the pragmatic anti-proxy argument, as expressed in the article:

We've since corrected those issues, but it was months before someone told us about them. Our browser logs indicate that the person who told us about the problem was far from the only visitor from AOL... what did the rest of them think, as they left our site, most likely never to return?

The damage done by these things is quite real; even at the website I work at, which is mostly internal to Michigan State University, we've had some trouble with people using AOL to access the Job Postings page (our most popular public page by nearly an order of magnitude ). AOL's interception proxy was rendering our pages unreadable, even though the AOL browser was perfectly capable of rendering the page, because AOL processed the graphics and destroyed them in the process. In addition, the AOL proxy was serving old copies of the job postings page, causing people to apply for jobs that had already been filled; and worse, not applying for the current jobs.