Thursday's Integument

We cover the news. Happy Birthday to You was first published on this day in 1924. The current copyright is held by AOL-Time Warner which earns several million a year from the song, and will continue to hold the copyright until 2030 - unless Congress extends the term yet again.

1. Open source advocate Eric Raymond has published a document purporting to be an internal SCO memo confirming that Microsoft helped arrange financing for the company's jihad against Linux users to the tune of $86 million.
2. Meanwhile the judge in the SCO vs IBM case has issued an order for SCO to show her the code. Judge Brooke C. Wells says SCO hasn't produced sufficient proof of its claims that IBM stole proprietary code and put it into Linux. The one year anniversary of SCO's billion dollar lawsuit is Saturday. Seems like longer, doesn't it?
3. Our buddy Kyle Bennett of HardOCP is suing the manufacturer of the Phantom gaming console for harassing him over an allegedly defamatory article HardOCP published last year. This has been brewing for a while.
4. More consolidation in the web search biz, Ask.com is buying Excite. MyWay, and iWon for $343 million. Will the new company be called "Ask Jeeves if he's Excited because iWon it MyWay?" No.
5. Piling on: a New York judge has also banned DVDXCopy. The Fight for Fair Use continues.
6. Hands off that database. The House Judiciary Committee has approved and the Commerce Committee is reviewing today HR3261, the Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act. The law would bar redistribution of information from publicly available commercial databases, jeopardizing sites like Google News and even making it difficult for you to receive sports scores and weather forecasts on your pager. It's being pushed by Lexis/Nexis and Weslaw. Read the excellent backgrounder on Wired News then write your member of Congress.
7. Survey says, people are still swapping at work. Blue Coat, a company that sells P2P control software for businesses, says 38.6% of respondents said they use work computers to download music from services like Kazaa.
8. Watch out Sony and Nintendo, cable set-top box giant Scientific-Atlanta says it's planning on putting high-performance video gaming in its next generation consoles.
9. The new rash of viruses may be motivated by a "worm war" between competing virus authors. Bagle.J contains the message ""Hey, Netsky...don't ruine our bussiness, wanna start a war?" Netsky.F responds "Bagle - you are a looser!!!!" Since Friday 25 new variants of the viruses Netsky, Bagle, and MyDoom have been released. Now now children.
10. Bill Gates told Charlie Rose last night that Microsoft has no interest in joining Comcast's bid for Disney. "We're very focused on software," said Chairman Bill.
11. Americans underestimate their use of media by half, according to a new study by Ball State University. Computer usage estimates were off the most. When asked by phone, respondents said they averaged 21 minutes a day. When actually followed around it turned out to be 64 minutes - a 205% difference.