On August 7th, the California Sixth Appellate District
issued an opinion denying Matthew Pavlovich’s motion to
dismiss the case against him for lack of personal
jurisdiction over him.

Pavlovich, who was a college student in Indiana and now
lives in Texas, claims postings made to the LiVID mailing
list, which he ran from his home computer should not subject
him to defending himself in California. LiVID is an open
source development team working to build a DVD player
compatible with the Linux operating system that could
compete with the movie studios’ monopoly on DVD players. In
January 2000, a California judge issued an injunction
banning dozens of individuals, including Pavlovich, from
publishing DeCSS computer code.

Today, the court held that because Pavlovich knew the movie
business was in California, publishing information that
might have an effect on its profits was a sufficient
connection to find Pavlovich within the court’s purview.

This ruling magnifies the ability of Hollywood or other
businesses to successfully sue anyone in the world who
publishes information on the Internet which the movie
studios claim could hurt their profits. Pavlovich is
considering an appeal of the order to the California Supreme
Court on Constitutional Due Process grounds.

Text of ruling:
http://www.eff.org/Cases/DVDCCA_case/20010807_pavlovich_appelate_ruling.html

About EFF:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil
liberties organization working to protect rights in the
digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF actively encourages and
challenges industry and government to support free
expression, privacy, and openness in the information
society. EFF is a member-supported organization and
maintains one of the most linked-to Web sites in the world:
http://www.eff.org/.

Wired: “Bootleg CDs and cassettes have always been easy to buy in Russia’s markets. But now that confidential information is appearing on some of them, the police are cracking down. Never mind that it’s not against the law.”

An anonymous reader writes: “Netscape 6.1 is here to stay, hopefully! Download links and release notes on MozillaQuest Magazine. (mozillaquest.com). From MozillaQuest: “AOL-Time-Warner´s Netscape division placed its Netscape 6.1 (NS 6.1) browser-suite upgrade on its FTP servers today — for the second time this week.”

Wired: “U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson has been a thorn in Microsoft’s side for months. Now the software company wants the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out previous rulings and give it a new trial.”

IDG: “South Korea reported its first Code Red computer virus outbreak
Tuesday as servers at a cluster of government offices were hit, sparking a shutdown of some
systems to prevent it from spreading further.

The computer worm froze a computer network linking government offices in Taejon city, about
84 miles south of Seoul, the Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs said.”

Globe And Mail: “San Francisco-based Brightmail Inc., an e-mail
protection company, says its Internet-monitoring
network has seen the number of spam “attacks” jump
about 400 per cent to between 12,000 and 13,000 daily
today from about 3,000 or 4,000 a year ago. This rise in
spam is only the beginning, e-mail experts warn.”

GreasyDaemon: “Recently my new iBook arrived with a copy of MacOS X and I immediately dug in to find out what it could do for me. As a
member of the BSD faithful I want to have access to the fundamental tools that I find with the other major BSD platforms,
like a web and database server, compilers and network utilities. I also want a command-line interface since I feel I can
achieve greater control over a system in that way.”

Zoe Knipe writes: “Further research conducted by Idaya (www.idaya.co.uk), sponsors of the freeVSD project (www.freevsd.org), has revealed that the global top 1000 ISPs broadly welcome large IT companies embracing Linux, and feel that this trend would constitute a boost for the GPL market.
However, a fifth of respondents also felt that the rapid adoption of Linux-based services from the major IT solution vendors would squeeze opportunities for smaller players and freelance developers, an outcome which would contradict the spirit in which Linux was created. Opinion in the ISP community was evenly split as to whether Linux could ever become the desktop operating system of choice.
“This latest research from Idaya/FreeVSD was concluded in June 2001, and surveyed opinion amongst the global top 1000 Internet Service Providers – precisely the companies that have made the greatest investment in GPL technology and applications. Respondents were a mixture of business managers, technical heads and service managers.

Principal findings from this latest research project are:-

· 83% of respondents believe that the porting of key enterprise applications to Linux (Lotus Notes, Oracle, SQL etc) would constitute a boost for the GPL market. 13% believed it would pose a threat. The main reason for regarding such porting as a threat was firmly focused on the fact that the code would no longer be free at the point of usage under the GPL principle.

· 42% of respondents felt that the adoption of Linux by major IT solutions vendors (IBM, HP, Compaq, etc) would actively help improve opportunities for smaller players and freelance developers. In contrast, 21% felt that it would actually squeeze opportunities for smaller companies and freelancers. 37% felt that it would have little effect either way. .

· 50% of respondents felt that at some point Linux could become the desktop operating system of choice. However, a comparable 48% felt that this was unlikely to happen. This even split of opinion reflects the findings of a freeVSD/Idaya survey earlier this year which found 70% of respondents wanting greater convergence between freeBSD and Linux distributions in order to combine strengths and develop a standard set of tools for modern Unix platforms. .

Austin Delaney, founder of the freeVSD project comments, ?There is no question about the inexorable progress of the Linux platform and applications developed for it. The rapid adoption of freeVSD for secure virtual server web hosting and remote management is just one example of the trend we are all experiencing. Frankly, I think that the Linux support from the major IT solutions vendors has to be a good thing. Our previous research has shown that the main obstacle to Linux penetration in the large company back-office is the inertia of fear amongst corporate IT directors, especially with reference to support levels for mission-critical applications. The adoption of Linux by the big players must do much to allay those concerns. Surely, then, with the code being open source, the possibilities for small and freelance developers providing specialist applications and utilities must grow with the expanding market.

For further information please contact:
Zoë Knipe
Lindsell Marketing
Tel: +44 (0)207 434 2090
Fax:+44 (0)207 437 4130
E-Mail:zoe@lindsellmarketing.com
“

An anonymous reader writes: “In response to the escalating attacks on Open Source Software from proprietary software vendors, Lineo has announced a new tool which is intended to assist developers in identifying the licenses within system software components. The tool is said to identify up to 40 different software
licenses including GPL, LGPL, BSD, Artistic, and many others. The tool, along with a new Lineo “anti-FUD” initiative, is announced in an open letter from Lineo VP Tim Bird to the Embedded Linux and Open Source community.”

Jorrit Tyberghein writes: “Crystal Space: The Open Source 3D Engine (crystal.linuxgames.com) now accepts monetary donations via Tux Games (www.tuxgames.com, see the ‘Project Donations’ section there). This money is going to be used for various things related to the advancement of Crystal Space:

• Hardware and software for CS team members in order to better work on CS. Some examples are: 3D cards, sound cards, commercial compilers, debugging tools (Insure, …), …
• Promotion of CS in general. For example, ads in game magazines, CS presence in expos and shows, …
• Help with production of the CD-ROM for Crystal Space (for when the 1.0 release is ready).