For at least a couple of decades we've been copyrighting software, and now I realize that I don't understand why we do. Talking with Doc Searls last night, who is a master of analogy, we kind of agreed that perhaps there is no suitable analogy for software, that software is a unique thing unto itself. First: Yes, software is unique. I don't want to go too deeply into that though as that's a very, very long story to do it truly correctly.

A follow-up to Damn DRM!, in which I refused to buy a book explicitly because of DRM issues: Rob Tsuk suggested in a comment that I try the Palm version of "A Fire Upon The Deep", as there is a Windows-(and Mac-)based reader available, which probably wouldn't have the licensing provisions I objected to. I have tried this, and it worked. I was worried that the PC-based reader might not read encrypted content, but it does.

Untitled markpasc post: Hint for Radio IM: deHTMLize an item with string.htmlToEmail. A few hints and tips regarding coding and decoding in tcp.im: Both AIM and Jabber have the ability to send HTML messages on the network, as do many of the other IM systems. (All that I know of can send formatted text, I don't know that they are all HTML as opposed to, say, RTF.) However, they are almost completely different.

With the (impending) release of tcp.im to the general public, this marks a transition of my Jabber only feed. If you are reading this feed solely to watch the status of the Jabber work as it goes public, you can unsubscribe now; it's done. I will continue to blog interesting things people do with Jabber in Radio and any further Jabber-specific work I do, if any.

Heads-up, some time in the next few hours (Murphy-willing) we're going to release tcp.im, which allows Radio and Frontier to be an instant messaging client or server (either can be either). It was a collaboration between Eric Soroos, Jeremy Bowers and myself; with Jake Savin doing the close. There may be some bugs and more docs to write over the next few days. Should be final on Monday. Excellent.

Paging Eliza: Patenting IM Bots [Slashdot] I wrote something that could fall under this patent, I think. And I went trolling through the archives, and damn, I think this is the first hint of its existance, Feb 21, 2001, six months after the patent was filed for. No claims of beating them to the punch for me. Have to admit I haven't read it carefully, though. I have a headache right now and reading Yet Another Dumb Patent is one of the most reliable ways I could think of to make it worse.

The RIAA, following its sue everybody strategy, is ready to go after the Librarian of Congress (via Michael Mussington). [John Robb's Radio Weblog] From the linked article, RIAA's second claim: The Librarian ignored 25 separate licensing agreements the RIAA had previously agreed to and submitted as evidence, as well as 115 similar deals signed by the individual record companies. If these agreements -- all of which represented rates born by a fair market -- were appropriately considered by the Librarian, the final royalty rate would have been significantly higher.

Dan Sickles points out this on the Microsoft site (when you search for DRM): Group Program Manager Location: Washington Are you interested in being part of Microsoft's effort to build the Digital Rights Management (DRM) and trusted platforms of the future (Palladium)? This is one of many like this.  Despite Microsoft saying that Palladium isn't DRM, it's clearly not the truth. It's mostly about DRM in the short term.  Longer term it is about personal data sharing (a requirement for the next generation of marketing: personal advertisements -- what I call demographic dystopia).

"You acknowledge and agree that Microsoft may automatically check the version of the OS Product and/or its components that you are utilizing and may provide upgrades or fixes to the OS Product that will be automatically downloaded to your computer," The preceding verbiage appears in the EULA for SP1 for WinXP and SP3 for Win2K. This is it. The bell hath tolled. The tax-man is here. It's time to pay the piper.

I am a Vernor Vinge fan. One of my favorite books is his "A Fire Upon the Deep". For a while I've been aware that there is an annotated edition of it on an obscure, totally impossible to get a copy of CD called The "Electric Science Fiction" 1993 Hugo/Nebula Award Anthology CD. The edition available on that CD claims to contain 500KB of annotations from the author. I, and many others, would very much like to see those annotations, but it seemed they disappeared, along with the CD itself.