Archive for February, 2005
Penalties compared: Downloading vs shoplifting
Summary
| Stealing | Infringing | |
| Absolute Minimum |
$0 no jail |
$4,400 |
| Absolute Maximum |
$100,000 1 year jail |
$3,400,000 1 year jail lawyer fees and costs |
| Real World Example |
Winona Ryder*: $2,700 fine $6,355 restitution $1,000 court cost 3 years probation |
An Average RIAA settlement**: $14,875 |
from Off The Shelf — Penalties of Stealing vs. Infringing via Slashdot
How does our Singapoream jurisdiction compare with good ol America?
Read the rest of this entry »
And one more: Lokitorrent shutdown
First was Suprnova. Now its Lokitorrent.
Open Source biology
I won’t pretend to know much about science, it’s not my area of expertise. But I do know a little bit about law and economics, and this is really great news for free-marketeers and copyfighters.
Biological Innovation for Open Society, or BIOS, has developed a ‘new technique for creating genetically modified crops’. The technique, Transbacter, is being released on Bioforge as an open-source project.
The really interesting part is that the project license gives anyone the freedom to use and modify the technique, but improvements must be contributed back to the project, much like the GPL license for computer software.
Hopefully this all works out, and the open-source method of production can work in other areas of science too.
via Slashdot
