Brian Gongol

On this date in 2002, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Eldred v. Ashcroft, which contested the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, which creates a right of copyright that extends 70 years past the death of the author of a creative work. There is little to distinguish that length of copyright protection from perpetual protection, which prevents useful works from entering the public domain, where they can be used freely and built upon. The Congress that approved the extension, the President who signed it, and the Supreme Court that upheld the decision should all be ashamed of themselves. They've protected Disney's rights to old Mickey Mouse films at the expense of science, discovery, and progress.

The service's popularity in the Middle East has been driven by the privacy of its email system, but the system can't handle the traffic and it's causing the system to come apart at the seams

American Airlines is shutting down its pilot base in San Francisco because it just doesn't have the pilots there to justify the investment anymore

He seems to be quite a fan -- except for the way the system is designed to save your photos forever


Someone dredged up nearly 20-year-old footage and stuck it on the Internet for all to enjoy


Groups have a right to assemble, but there has to be a distinction between a protest assembly and a group of people just sitting around occupying public property -- property to which the rest of the public also has a right of access. If they're just assembling in the hope of getting arrested, then that's no longer really "peaceable" assembly, now is it? On a related note, even though the "Occupy ____" movement is rallying around a generally anti-capitalist banner, it turns out that they still understand property rights...at least when it comes to their own property.

A concurrent update to Apple's iOS has been blamed for wiping out lots of customer data.

Unix is behind the Android and Mac OS operating systems, among others. One developer said, "Ritchie's influence rivals Jobs's; it's just less visible." He's quite right.

The price is valid as long as the customer is willing to accept promotional ads on the screensaver, which seems like a decent trade-off for the $30 price cut

Though CNN goofed when it noted on its news ticker that "almost every planet" was being affected by the outages. Nobody's using a BlackBerry on Venus. The outage is really, really bad news (and timing) for BlackBerry, which is seeing its market share slip to rivals using Android and the iOS.