• The UK, by hand of the Secretary of State is trying to out-do basically everyone by having a all powerful Copyright Czar by way of the Digital Economy Bill. This person would have powers not only to prosecute anyone on any copyright related grounds but also to pass new criminal law related to copyright. Yes, that’s right, he’d just write stuff into law. Take that France!!

• It’s not the apps, says Ray Ozzie that make your phone special. I’m pretty it’s got to be something and that MS has no clue about what it is.

• As I predicted like, a year back, Nokia is moving to Maemo. My guess is Symbian will be on S40 and some lower S60 phones like Xpressmusic and everything N will be Maemo pretty soon.

• Though times for SE, 4 sites and 2000 employees are getting the boot. On the plus side, seems like they figured out by now the market for 300EUR featurephones doesn’t exist.

• In Spain come 2011 broadband will be a universal service. That means, amongst other things, it can’t be just disconnected willy nilly.

• This is almost too funny to write about but older versions of MSWindows are banned in China cause Microsoft pirated a couple of fonts. Yes, Microsoft stole intellectual property and China is going after them for that.

• Speaking of which, ACTA is moving along and the EFF went through the leaked stuff.

• Bing goes to 10% marketshare, Ballmer doesn’t know how to capture the young market and MS linked professionals like MacBooks better.

• Google bought Gizmo5. That pretty much butters the rollout of GoogleVoice with full PSTN connectivity. Someone should be very afraid about now.

• Samsung is dropping Symbian for their own stuff. Or then again, Samsung isn’t dropping Symbian. They wuve everybody!

• Turns out the only people who apparently artists don’t lose with file sharing. Artists are doing great with all the extra publicity and exposure to their music. So RIAA, if you really love your artists, endorse music sharing!

• And on Democracy news, Brazil held a 3 day public hackfest on their evoting machines and they held up. So we learn two things from this, 1) the voting machines used in Brazil are far superior than the ones used in the USA 2) Brazil is serious about democracy as opposed to the USA. For comparison, USA employs voting machines with pathetic security and which seem to include result tampering features out of the box.

• And on more silly copyright, the RIAA shut down the free WiFi in Coshocton, Ohio cause allegedly someone downloaded something they allegedly didn’t have the rights to. RIAA doesn’t like artists! (see above).

You probably heard about ACTA by now. If you didn’t, ACTA is a secret treaty that’s being negotiated by nobody knows who, to cover nobody knows what in nobody knows where. Having said that, it seems to imply HADOPI for everyone. And it’s going to make me RICH RICH RICH.

The thing about 3 strikes laws is it doesn’t involve court proceedings or pesky things such as evidence. It only involves accusation by a copyright holder. And that’s excellent cause everything’s easier that way. The plan is simple. (this is prior art! don’t rip me off or I’ll go ACTA on you!)

1. Establish myself as a copyright holder. I’m already a copyright holder but it seems having some volume might help. Fortunately, computers help a lot in this cases and the random number generator can churn out a bunch of popmusic in no-time.
2. Send friendly letters to medium business telling them “we” (better to be an Association, sounds more credible) found them at fault but we’re the good guys and we’re all businesses and understand what’s at stake so we’d b e happy to settle through some licensing. A small payment and they’ll never hear from us again.
3. After funding myself with medium business it’s time to go for the meat. Chose a mid tier ISP and start firing infringement letters at them. I’d say 2% to 5% of their user base in a month. That will get their attention, afterwards “we” send them a nice letter saying we’re noticing a lot of infringement from them and understand how losing that much customers would hurt their business so we’d like to help them by settling for a reasonable amount. Rinse, repeat.

Let’s just hope it’s that easy. Otherwise I’ll have to put up a popular webpage, which is hard work. Said page would have T&C’s which would explicitly prohibit it from being browsed with say, Internet Explorer. Then, it’s just a matter of automating the letters and letting the cash run in.

• The Comcast COO says the new generation needs to be educated to respect subscription revenue. See, that’s how you can tell a company is f*ed in the long run.

• In a funky newspeak trick EU will use all open formats, including the closed ones. Meanwhile, the EU-wide 3-strikes regulation didn’t pass. It did pass a watered down version which doesn’t demand a full legal court proceeding but a fair and impartial procedure. There’s also an urgency clause that says a computer participating in say, a DDos, can be unplugged.

• In pirate news, the announced demise of Pirate Bay has decentralized P2P making it harder to track. Heh.

• And this week UK decided it should be more like France by having some Lord try to push ahead a 3-strikes law. He wants to punish you, your family, your dog and your dead great grandfather. The Guardian points out implementation costs for the spying apparatus would be twice the reported loss by the music industry. Not to mention the cost would mostly be payed by the people affected instead of the beneficiaries.

• After last week’s debacle Sequoia decided to plan to release source code for their voting machines. How’s that supposed to work ? How exactly do you verify the machine is running the code you saw ?

• Turns out MS didn’t like what Family Guy did for them. Yeah, turns out it was too much like Family Guy and too little about shoe commercials.

• China is accusing Google of censorship. Really. You can’t make this stuff up.

• And on more crazy news, Amazon patented a way of defending copyright by breaking it. This must be bizarro week.