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Court Ruling Clouds Open Source Licensing
JosefAssad writes "In a decision centering around a question of a violation of the Artistic License, a San Francisco court has denied an injunction against Matthew Katzer in the favor of Robert Jacobsen of the JMRI project. Importantly, the decision makes the point that the Artistic License is a contract, an interpretation that the Free Software Foundation has been keen to avoid as a legal stance. The JMRI project has a page up with the legal background and developments."
Don't be naive. The people who have fought hardest to have draconian copyright laws enacted (Disney, Sony, Microsoft, et al.) are also those who have the most to fear from open source. They will be delighted to have any legal precedent that weakens the power of authors to enforce copyright under the terms of any open source license, and will use such precedent any chance they get. Artistic, GPL, BSD, doesn't matter -- they hate the whole idea of open source, and this decision is a powerful tool for them.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Will people STOP trying to say that posting the latest South Park episode on YOUTUBE is fair use. It is not.