Matthew Gifford

A Norwegian appeals court has acquitted Jon Johansen (via Lawrence Lessig), the author of DeCSS, of copyright violation charges. Unfortunately, Norwegian law allows the prosecutor to appeal to the supreme court.

Okay, I'm all blogged out. Good night.

Does anyone know if someone has figured out a good way for people to keep track of conversations on blogs? E-mail notification and RSS feeds for individual posts do not count.

There has to be a better way than writing an e-mail to the person on the other end of the conversation to inform them that you've written to them on your blog.

Lawrence Lessig points to two court decisions that could be signs that the copyright insanity of the past few years may be waning. Maybe it's time for some optimism. Even Lessig, the archetypical pessimist, seems to be leaning in that direction.

Don't try to install Mac OS X Panther on an original iBook. You'll end up frustrated at the end of a wasted day.

MINIUSA is using an image created by CMMC members Becky Critch and Gabe Bridger on its site. Cool. Congrats to both.

Something just occurred to me: Is it possible that MINIUSA would use an image created in part by an influential blogger knowing that he would link to them and, thus, promote their new pages? Not that the image doesn't deserve to be used. It does. I'm just wondering how crafty the marketing-types at MINIUSA are.

I just discovered that Safari finally supports <acronym>! When did this happen?

Steve Gillmor has written an interesting article about distributing RSS feeds via BitTorrent. (via Scoble)

Dave Winer writes:

The RSS 2.0 spec and its predecessors may not say clearly enough if you can or can't include markup in titles. But I don't think you should include markup in titles. Titles are like file names (not exactly of course). They are a happy medium between software and people.

I don't think I agree with Dave here. <title> doesn't seem like a file name to me. Wouldn't that be the purpose of <link> and <guid>? The reasonable thing to me is that <title> is a content field that ought to be able to contain markup.

Of course, I'm just a user of RSS, not an implementer. (Not totally true. There are a few sites out there that use my weblog software.) I'm certainly not familiar with the problems that come with parsing RSS. Maybe I'm missing something.

Sorry that I haven't been posting much lately. I'm buried in work, which is a good thing, I guess. There are a lot of people who don't have work to do.