NewsScan Daily, 2 Jul 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 2 Jul 2003 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Consumer-Linux
        Court Says Piggy-Back Parasite Ads Are Legal
        Listen.Com Reports 100% Increase in CD Burning
        Pentagon Eyes Urban Surveillance System
        Affinity Matchmaking

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Worth Thinking About: An American Original (For Good & Bad)
        An Open Letter To SCO (Guest Column)

CONSUMER-LINUX
Does the Linux operating system have a future? Eight major consumer 
electronics companies think so: Hitachi, Mitsubishi, NEC, Philips, Samsung, 
Sharp, Sony and Toshiba have forged a new alliance called CE Linux Forum, 
or CLEF, and IBM has expressed interest in joining the group as well. The 
goals of the alliance include numerous extensions for Linux to make it a 
more effective platform for consumer devices. (Information Week 1 Jul 2003)
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=10817852

COURT SAYS PIGGY-BACK PARASITE ADS ARE LEGAL
Some companies have been creating Internet ads that that attach themselves, 
without invitation, to the sites of competitors. Case in point: a company 
called WhenU has been delivering competitors' ads to visitors to a site 
operated by U-Haul International, which rents trucks for moving. Legal? 
Yes, according to a federal court ruling that decided that pop-up and 
pop-under ads may be presented by third-party companies without trademark 
infringement when they the ads come as part of free "helper" software (such 
as peer-to-peer download applications). WhenU CEO Avi Naider says: 
"Ultimately the Internet-enabled computer desktop is a competitive medium 
where advertisers can impact consumer-buying decisions up to the moment." 
Naider says that lawsuits against his company like the one brought by 
U-Haul are "attempts to preclude that evolution, the future of Internet 
advertising." (CNet News.com 1 Jul 2003)
http://news.com.com/2100-1024_3-1022791.html

LISTEN.COM REPORTS 100% INCREASE IN CD BURNING
Listen.com says the number of CDs burned by subscribers to its Rhapsody 
online music service has nearly doubled since it dropped its price from 99 
cents to 79 cents per song. RealNetworks acquired Listen.com in April for 
$36 million and reduced the per-track fee in late May, sparking a 
significant increase in the number of subscribers and corresponding growth 
in music downloads. Rhapsody is considered to be one of the easiest-to-use 
music subscription services. (Reuters 1 Jul 2003)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=581&ncid=581&e=5&u=/nm/20030701/tc_nm/media_rhapsody_dc

PENTAGON EYES URBAN SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is developing an urban 
surveillance system dubbed "Combat Zones That See" (CTS), which is designed 
to track and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a city. The 
centerpiece of the system is proposed software that would be capable of 
identifying vehicles by size, color, shape and license tag, and would issue 
instant alerts when a vehicle on a watchlist was detected. The CTS 
technology could also be used to comb through months of data to locate and 
compare vehicles spotted near terrorist attack sites. Although the military 
has emphasized that it plans to use CTS in hostile foreign cities, critics 
are concerned that such technology could be deployed domestically for 
nonmilitary use. "One can easily foresee pressure to adopt a similar 
approach to crime-ridden areas of American cities or to the Bowl or any 
other site where crowds gather," says Steven Aftergood of the Federation of 
American Scientists. (AP 2 Jul 2003)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20030702/D7S173M00.html

AFFINITY MATCHMAKING
Yahoo Personals has launched a new feature on its Web site that mimics the 
affinity recommendations offered on retail sites like Amazon. Yahoo users 
in search of soulmates now have the option of clicking on a link that says: 
"People who liked this person also liked these people." Yahoo Personals 
spokeswoman Rochelle Adams says her company realizes that quantifying human 
relationships is a bit trickier than tracking book purchases, but says the 
new feature will expand users' searches in a "dynamic" way -- sort of "hey, 
check this guy out, I thought he was cute, too." In any event, affinity 
matchmaking appears to be the wave of the future -- on Match.com, when 
users send an e-mail to a prospective date, a screen now pops up offering 
the option to peruse profiles similar to the intended recipient's. And 
MatchNet, which operates sites such as JDate and AmericanSingles, says it's 
adding "certain profiling technologies" based on "traits such as 
personality types or mutual interests," says a company spokeswoman. The 
affinity features reflect online personals sites' need to differentiate 
themselves in an increasingly competitive marketplace. The industry 
generated $228 million in subscription revenue in 2002, and Jupiter 
Research is forecasting that amount will rise to $478 million by 2005. 
(Wall Street Journal 2 Jul 2003)
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB105700373949695300.djm,00.html (sub req'd)

*****

FLASH CARD
      "The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a 
century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt." (Henry George)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL (FOR GOOD & BAD)
      Historian Douglas Brinkley takes pains to explain that automaker 
Henry Ford, though a simple man, possessed a complex and quite 
contradictory personality.
      "From the early days of his youth, the wheels in Henry Ford's head 
were turning, in his fascination with farm tools and engines, gadgets and 
machines, and automobiles. And after that, with business, industry, and 
society; always, in sum, with how the world, and everything in it, works. 
Some of the flawed notions his mental gears ground out may detract from 
Ford's legacy as a human being, but even his worst failings cannot lessen 
the impact of his brightest ideas or of Ford Motor Company, which he 
founded to express them. Through the company or his own constant activity, 
the influence of Henry Ford was felt on American history and on human 
civilization, for good and ill.
      "The Reverend Samuel S. Marquis, an Episcopalian minister who for 
many years would head Ford Motor Company's sociological department, wrote 
of Henry Ford in 1923, 'There are in him lights so high and shadows so 
deep, that I cannot get the whole of him in the proper focus at the same 
time.' W.C. Cowling, the company's sales manager from 1931 to 1937, 
likewise had trouble penetrating his boss's mercurial temperament. 'I 
think,' Cowling explained in reminiscences taped by the Henry Ford Museum 
and Library in 1951, 'Henry Ford's personality was almost ethereal. You 
might not see him for months, but the spirit of Henry Ford was in that 
organization always. His personality dominated people whether he said 
anything or only sat there. He dominated a group because of his 
personality, not his money, but his personality I can't describe. I think 
he would have been the same if he'd only had twenty cents.'
      "Populist to his core, Ford preferred fortunes born of production 
rather than the paper-shuffling kind that benefited only the stock 
manipulators and financial speculators who contrived them. He disdained men 
like railroad baron Jay Gould for being greedy 'city slickers' helpless in 
a machine shop, research laboratory, or manufacturing plant. 'Did you ever 
see dishonest calluses on a man's hands?' Ford once asked. 'Hardly. When a 
man's hands are callused and women's hands are worn, you may be sure 
honesty is there. That's more than you can say about many soft white 
hands.' Ford, like his fellow automotive pioneers, had to either thread 
every rod and bore every cylinder himself or get an associate to do it. He 
also had to invent his own ignition system, and he did it all with midnight 
zeal. Ford saw himself as heir to a tradition of innovation that started 
with Benjamin Franklin, changing our national character and the world with 
it. As historian Willis M. West put it, 'The American invents as the Greek 
chiseled, as the Venetian painted, as the modern Italian sings.'"
                            ***
See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067003181X/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for Douglas Brinkley's "Wheels For The World: Henry Ford, His Company, and 
a Century of Progress, 1903-2003" -- or look for it in your favorite 
library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult 
literacy programs.)

AN OPEN LETTER TO SCO (GUEST COLUMN)
      Dear SCO,
      I am sending this to you with copies to The Register 
(www.theregister.co.uk), The Inquirer (www.theinquirer.net), and NewsScan 
(www.newsscan.com) in case they are interested in publishing it.
      In recent months, your company has made claims that Linux contains 
proprietary material belonging to SCO.  You argue that Linux thus violates 
your legal rights, and that users of Linux may therefore be liable.
      However, consider your own situation.  You, as a Linux distributor, 
asserted that the code in your distribution could be redistributed under 
the terms of the GNU General Public License.  It is certainly possible to 
see how misrepresentations by others could have led you to mistakenly 
include proprietary code in your distribution, just as it is possible (and 
perhaps even easier) to see how other Linux distributors could be misled by 
the same misrepresentations.  But unless and until the specific code 
involved is identified, your original license claiming that all of the code 
in your distribution may be redistributed under the GNU GPL is the only 
clear statement of the legal status of any particular piece of code 
contained in that distribution.  Under the doctrine of mutual mistake, it 
seems quite reasonable that SCO be given an opportunity to identify which 
code it mistakenly included under the GNU GPL and inform the Linux 
developer community that that code does not in fact belong under the GNU 
GPL.  That is no more and no less than I would expect of any company, 
whether software or otherwise, if it inadvertently represented the terms 
under which material may be reproduced.  And I certainly would not want to 
see SCO deprived of its legal rights merely because it believed the 
misrepresentations of someone who claimed material belonging to SCO as his 
own work.
      But your deliberate refusal to identify to the Linux community which 
code does not belong under the GNU GPL is an entirely different 
matter.  Even granting that the original act of distributing proprietary 
code under the GNU GPL was an accident due to the wrongdoing of others, the 
act of refusing to identify the code to all parties with a vested interest 
is clearly deliberate.  And by deliberately refusing to correct your 
license terms in a timely manner to identify which code does not in fact 
belong under the GPL, I contend that you are giving implicit consent for 
your code to remain a part of Linux and subject to the GPL.  That is all 
the more true given the double standard by which you reassure your own past 
Linux customers instead of holding them to the same standard as others in 
demanding that your proprietary code be disentangled from their copies of 
Linux.  After all, leaving your proprietary code as a "legitimate" part of 
Linux for your own customers while refusing to allow it as a legitimate 
part of Linux for everyone else is a clear violation of the GPL.
      In any situation involving a mutual mistake, it seems proper and just 
that both (or all) parties involved be considered obligated to work to 
correct the mistake in a timely manner and with a minimum of harm.  If 
someone misrepresented code belonging to SCO as his own, SCO is not the 
only victim; the entire Linux community has been victimized.  If SCO does 
not live up to its obligations to correct its part of the mistake in a 
reasonable and timely manner, I contend that justice would be served best 
by a judge's or jury's saying, "You had your chance to correct your 
mistake. You refused to take it, and now it's too late."
               Sincerely,
                     Nathan Barclay

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