Pacific Views

Digital Happenings

Slashdot posting indicates that a draft trade agreement between the US and Australia could be damaging to public domain, free software, and fair use.

SearchEngineWatch reports on the new Yahoo! search engine, which will replace the Google index in Yahoo! search results.

Yahoo! currently has about 41% search market share through various outlets, and is planning to increase paid listing fees as it consolidates multiple inclusion systems.

This search engine share report explains what this will mean in terms of Google's search market reach. With Google supplying both AOL and Yahoo! with unpaid searches, they served up around 79% of all web searches. That will drop to 51% now that they will only be supplying AOL in addition to their site.

Microsoft is also beta testing its own search engine. The results they currently supply are a mix of paid inclusion listings from LookSmart and Overture, along with both paid inclusion and free Inktomi results.

Wired asks if Microsoft is behind SCO efforts to stamp out Linux, and the Seattle P-I's Microsoft blog has a news roundup on the issue.

Wired also notes that Congress is considering a bill that would allow database companies to own facts:

...Under the terms of the broadly written bill, a public-health website could be deemed in violation of the law for gathering a list of the latest health headlines and providing links to them on its home page.

Google would be in violation for trolling media databases and providing stories on its news page.

An encyclopedia site not only could own the historical facts contained in its online entries, but could do so long after the copyright on authorship of the written entries had expired. Unlike copyright, which expires 70 years after the death of a work's author, the Misappropriation Act doesn't designate an expiration date.

...Opponents of the bill include Yahoo, Google, the American Association of Libraries and a host of technology and financial-services companies such as Verizon, Bloomberg and Charles Schwab.

"All of the companies opposed to the bill produce some of the most massive databases in the world, yet they feel they already have adequate protections for them," [Joe Rubin, executive director of technology and e-commerce for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce] said. "There really is no necessity whatsoever for this legislation."

I note with alarm that such a bill would almost certainly make the majority of my blog posts (and most postings by other poli-bloggers) illegal. At issue, a portion of the bill explicitly stating that there is no difference between a 'subset' (which could be any size) of the database and the full set of information. It sounds like it would be the messy end of blogging as we know it.

Contact your representative to oppose HR 3261, the "Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act" today.

Update: link added on SCO-Linux issue.