Dan’s noticed there’s not enough Green electricity to supply all those people who are buying it.

This looks like a job for the ACCC.

There’s uncertainty about whether or not 2Clix has dropped its action against Whirlpool. While the Sydney Morning Herald reported it earlier today, Whirlpool commented that they haven’t had any official notification.

Meanwhile ITNews.com.au quotes 2Clix MD David Morgan as saying that the case had been dropped and Turnbull and Co had been notified.

But Whirlpool’s legal people haven’t yet seen the notice of discontinuance, and have been unable to contact 2Clix’s legal people, and have therefore concluded that until they see it formally in writing, and it’s still in the court records, it’s not over. Indeed, there’s speculation from sources close to Whirlpool that it might just be a ploy to make them let down their guard.

Watching with interest.

Software company 2Clix has decided to sue Whirlpool (an Australian online news, forum and community site), for “false and malicious” forum posts about 2Clix’s software products.

Essentially it appears Whirlpool’s users have been critical of 2Clix in various threads, with such gems as:

As a user of 2Clix for over 2 years, and the primary IT support person for my company - I would advise you to AVOID this program at all costs.
and
We installed 2clix and ended up throwing it out two weeks after going live. This company has many problems and I would strongly recommend that any potential users look else where.

While 2Clix had a go at defending themselves on the forum, it seems they’ve also decided to sue the forum’s owners. Maybe they got angry that one of the threads is the top hit in Google. If the case gets anywhere, it could obviously have repercussions for other online communities, so it’ll be interesting to see where it goes.

Update Thursday: This story has hit the MSM.
The Age: Firm sues forum to silence critics
ZDNet: 2Clix scores own goal with Whirlpool case
Computerworld: 2Clix sues broadband forum for “false and malicious” threads
…and and more

Update Wed 2007-09-19: Media reports that 2Clix drops the lawsuit, but it’s not official yet.

A reader on my personal blog left this comment:

09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0

It’s a set of numbers that’s being spread around by a few people at the moment. According to this post:

…it is the HD-DVD processing key for most movies released so far, published on the net by the AACS (Advanced Access Content System) a couple of days ago by mistake.

…and the legality of even publishing it, at least in the US under the DMCA, is apparently in doubt.

This page quotes a Wikipedia article about it which, intriguingly, has been deleted from Wikipedia itself. It’s also caused a ruckus at Digg.

Interesting stuff. Though it’s not like 99.99% of people would have any idea how to apply the number to anything… though I suppose that could change rapidly.

Google Inc today lost a copyright fight launched by Belgian French-language newspapers which demanded the web search service remove their stories, claiming it infringed copyright laws. … They complained that the search engine’s “cached” links offered free access to archived articles that the papers usually sell on a subscription basis. It was unclear if Google would have to pay a fine.

— Wire story: Google loses case against Belgian papers

That’s just stupid. You don’t need to go around suing search engines to stop your stuff getting into their databases. Every web developer who knows anything about this knows you just need to drop a robots.txt file onto your web site and it stops all search engines and archivers stone dead.

To ignore that, and send the lawyers in instead just looks like you’re not looking for a solution, you’re looking for money.

Have you noticed that iPod pricing is suspiciously consistent across retailers?

The Trade Practices Act prohibits price coercion, doesn’t it?

How are Apple getting around this?

I suspect that there’s next to no margin on the iPods themselves, but the accessories are high margin. So there’s no room to discount, but the profit comes from the impulse upsell. But this theory doesn’t make a huge amount of sense to me, unless Apple’s making their money on iTunes rather than the iPods.

Oh, this is great. A software developer beats up a pirate in the boxing ring.

Regarding the case of soft pr0n merchant vs Google Images, can someone explain to me why they didn’t just put a robots.txt file in to stop Google picking up their pics, and be done with it?

Or could it be that [gasp] they were after a big payout and/or the publicity?

That’s it, ladies and gentlemen, it’s over: the High Court has ruled that mod chips for video game consoles are legal. All six judges of the High Court held that widely used mod-chips are legal and that playing a game on a consumer’s machine does not constitute an illegal copy.

This effectively clarifies that using mods to get around regional coding is legal — something important to consumers of video games and with clear ramifications for DVDs.

Pirated games, of course, are illegal. But mod chips are a legitimate technology.

Full judgement

There’s an interesting article by Richard Stallman on software patents in The Age/SMH IT section this week. It looks at the pending EU vote on software patent legislation, and points out the differences between patents and copyright — something some of the EU legislators seem to be confused by.

Examples of spurious patents already granted by the EU include those for a progress bar, and accepting payment by credit card. I’m reminded of the patent application an Australian put in a coulpe of years ago for… the wheel. Clearly there is no basis for giving any party the rights to such basic concepts.

You need copyright to protect investment in IT, and I’m not convinced that no patent protection should be available for software authors. But a line in the sand needs to be drawn so that the whole IT industry isn’t crippled by being unable to use and re-use established ideas. Perhaps the code/algorithms should be patented — but the concepts not.

Or at the very least, given the speed at which the tech industry works, the patents should have a much shorter lifespan.