Stop SOPA!
For those of you who haven't heard of SOPA it's an act in Congress designed to stop piracy. This is a good thing however, it's designed in a way that will result in sensorship without review. For instance, if you have a business all a competing company has to do is accuse you of piracy and your web hosting company will have to drop your account. There is NO review process. This by far the wrong way to accomplish this. If you feel the need to speak out against SOPA you might want to consider signing Google's takeaction site.
If you want to know more about SOPA check wikipedia. Be aware that today January 18th wikipedia will go off the air against SOPA. So check back tomorrow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/
Thomas Jefferson's view on Intellectual Property Rights
I just ran across this quote of possibly this country's smartest founding father - Thomas Jefferson. It concerns copy writes and patents.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of
the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
Interestingly he believed that as soon as you released an idea of your own it belongs to everyone. Much in the way the GPL lays it down.