You may recall that I devoted substantial effort, some months ago, to exposing the excesses of pending anti-piracy legislation. My intention was to suggest that the proposed cure was worse than the disease. But you will be forgiven if you drew from my articles the conclusion that I was pro-piracy.

I am not pro-piracy, as it happens. I support the ownership rights of those who create intellectual property. (I’d be a hypocrite not to, as I myself am one of those people.) I consider myself a moderate on these issues. I think those who download software, music, films, and other intellectual property should pay for them. At the same time, I think the industry should hurry to embrace the Internet as a distribution medium. They should find a way to work with it and stop trying to shut it down. I applaud the work of programmers, musicians, and filmmakers who have voluntarily chosen to incorporate free online distribution of their work as a way of building their careers and getting their message across. One of these experimenters will stumble across a viable replacement for today’s broken publishing model.

These ideas were put to the test the other day when I did a bit of poking around and found that my own work has been pirated in various places on the Internet.

For example, you can find an article I wrote for the October 2004 print edition of Software Development magazine at this Web site. (The article stands up pretty well, I think. Go read it if you want; I’ll wait.) Some of my SD Times blog posts have been reposted in their entirety at other sites. Heck, I’ve even found a magazine article I wrote in 1984 still live at a couple of nostalgia sites.

How does it feel to be pirated?

Well, in the first place it’s flattering. Any evidence that the stuff I write lasts longer than it takes to scan it is welcome news as far as I’m concerned. I do like the idea that these old articles of mine might continue to attract readers, and that my new work my find a wider audience.

And it’s troubling. The sites that republish my articles without permission are benefiting from my work, but I’m not. That is manifestly unfair. I was the one who stayed up late meeting my deadline, I was the one who conducted the research, I was the one who checked the facts, I was the one who paid for the college education that made the sentences work. Hitching a ride on my hard work without compensating me strikes me as deeply, viscerally wrong.

And finally, it’s irrelevant. The articles I’ve written over the years generally belong to my employers, or they were works-for-hire that I wrote on a freelance basis. In either case, I don’t own the copyrights. People who republish my work don’t need my permission, they need the permission of the magazines and Web sites that own the work. That’s who they should negotiate payment with – not me.

In an odd way, I’m a spectator when it comes to distribution and republication of my own work. I think I feel the same way musicians feel when they find out their songs have been pirated. It’s cool that the work is finding an audience, and it’s at least technically wrong, but the harm, if there is any measurable harm, affects me so indirectly it’s hard to be threatened by it.

Web recommendation: I believe the goofy charm of this woefully underdesigned page should be sufficient to get anyone to learn Python. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He has mixed feelings about country music.

I read an alarming guest editorial at the Wall Street Journal's Web site the other day. The article, “The U.N Threat to Internet Freedom,” was written by Robert M. McDowell, a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission.*

The article is quite a piece of work. McDowell believes the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union (ITU), under pressure from Russia and China, is poised to wrest control of the Internet away from existing technical advisory groups such as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and the Internet Society (ISOC). McDowell warns that the future of the Internet will no longer be in the hands of level-playing-field technologists, but under the control of national governments.

Among other things, McDowell predicts that the ITU is preparing to renegotiate a 1988 treaty and seize the power to, in his words:

• Allow foreign phone companies to charge fees for "international" Internet traffic, perhaps even on a "per-click" basis for certain Web destinations, with the goal of generating revenue for state-owned phone companies and government treasuries;

• Impose unprecedented economic regulations such as mandates for rates, terms and conditions for currently unregulated traffic-swapping agreements known as "peering";

• Establish for the first time ITU dominion over important functions of multi-stakeholder Internet governance entities such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the nonprofit entity that coordinates the .com and .org Web addresses of the world;

• Subsume under intergovernmental control many functions of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society and other multi-stakeholder groups that establish the engineering and technical standards that allow the Internet to work;

• Regulate international mobile roaming rates and practices.

It all sounds very dire. McDowell's article has sparked a ruckus at reddit, techdirt, and other technology-oriented online forums.

I agree with McDowell that a government takeover of Internet management would likely be disastrous. The Internet has grown and prospered largely because the technologists who administer it and plot its future are not beholden to national interests.

But I'm not going to ring the alarm bells just yet. As The Register points out, the ITU's publicly posted agenda doesn't include any of the issues that worry McDowell. The ITU lacks the resources to take over the Internet. An Internet takeover is contrary to the ITU's mission. And the ITU doesn't have the authority to execute the takeover McDowell fears.

Blogger Jerry Brito has additional doubts about McDowell's dire predictions:

Assuming every other country agrees to centralize control of the Internet, wouldn’t true control require the U.S. handing over the root to the UN? Why would we ever do that? And what does it mean to “Subsume under intergovernmental control many functions of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society and other multi-stakeholder groups that establish the engineering and technical standards that allow the Internet to work”? These are volunteer-run non-profits. How can they be “subsumed” by the ITU? Why would they submit?

And even if they are subsumed, all the power they now employ is merely putting out technical recommendations. It is the voluntary adhesion to these recommendations by the thousands of networks that make up the Internet which make them powerful. How would you mandate compliance with new standards from a centralized global body? Would nations have to make it illegal to belong to a rebel IETF putting out recs to compete with the ITU? I’m having a hard time envisioning how you ”repeal and replace” such a large, distributed, and successful bottom-up process.

The ITU is meeting at the World Conference on International Telecommunications in Geneva this week. If they agree to formulate an Internet regulatory plan, as McDowell fears, the plan could pass into law at the ITU's 2012 World Conference On International Telecommunications, slated for December in Dubai. The 1988 regulations governing the relationship between the UN and the Internet – the International Telecommunication Regulations – will be subject to renewal and renegotiation in Dubai.

A more comprehensive overview of what is at stake is available in The 2012 World Conference On International Telecommunications: Another Brewing Storm Over Potential UN Regulation Of The Internet, an article written by two attorneys at Washington-based law firm/lobbying enterprise Wiley Rein. I presume that the lawyers are speaking on behalf of an industry client. A history of Wiley Rein's lobbying efforts is available at OpenSecrets.org. It's not clear – to me, at least – who the firm's client might be in the current issue.

Is independent governance of the Internet really vulnerable to government takeover? I think it is. We've seen U.S. law-enforcement agencies take an increasingly aggressive stance regarding use of the Internet as a crime-detection and suspect-tracking tool (the news is full of more and more disturbing reports), and countries throughout the world are looking to censor or control the Internet for their own purposes. Governments are not doing enough to protect us from corporate interests and they are doing to much to morph the 'net into a tool for monitoring and controlling citizens.

Still, despite the real threats, I think McDowell is overreacting in this case. If other countries are (understandably) eager to reduce the U.S. government's control over the Internet, that may not be such a bad thing. The Internet is a global resource, and global participation in governance bodies is something to be desired, not feared.

Web recommendation: AT&T Bell Labs is rightly legendary in the programming world – indeed, in many technical fields. I enjoyed these observations about how and why Bell Labs was able to make such breakthroughs, an analysis by Jon Gertner of The New York Times. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He walks everywhere these days.

* The FCC is by law a five-commissioner body, but it's currently down to three members. President Obama has nominated a pair of attorneys, Jessica Rosenworcel and Ajit Pai, to fill the empty seats, but political wrangling is preventing their timely confirmation.

SOPA and PIPA are dead. This doesn't mean that pirating software, music, games, and movies online is legal, but that the ability of copyright holders and government agencies to shut down the piracy supply chain remains limited.

The whole Internet community banded together to defeat SOPA and PIPA. We all felt good about protecting free speech in the face of the proposed measures. And it appears that we have won.

So we are left with the status quo. Piracy is still illegal, but it's still common. Copyright holders will continue their search for legal tools to shut down the pipeline. Pirates will continue to use ingenious methods to get their hands on copyrighted works.

What if we are looking at this the wrong way. What if, instead of expending their time and energy stopping piracy, copyright holders accepted the pirates as an inevitable, even helpful, part of the creative ecosystem?

A number of researchers, writers, and even copyright holders are starting to come around to this point of view. In increasing numbers, people are sharing their opinion that piracy is a good thing.

How could this be?

First, there's evidence that piracy is an exploration and sampling tool for the studios' best customers. Survey after survey shows that pirates are more likely to spend a bundle on movies, software, games, and movies. It appears that pirates download content to see if it's worth having, then purchase copies of the stuff they like. Not every pirate turns into a paying customer, but the overlap between pirates and good customers is undeniable. It's not intuitive, but it seems to be true: Pirates are the industry's best customers. As one analyst puts it: “If piracy is a sampling and discovery tool for high spenders, then suppressing piracy could depress legal sales.” Another study, conducted by the Society for Consumer Research, found that users of pirate sites employed the sites as “try before you buy” services, leading pirate site users to “buy more DVDs, visit the cinema more often, and on average, spend more than their 'honest' counterparts at the box office. A 2009 report from the BI Norwegian School of Management has found that those who download music illegally are also 10 times more likely to pay for songs than those who don't.

Second, there's the argument that sales lost to piracy should be considered a marketing cost. Pirates are social, and they spread the word about worthwhile content. Studio execs are pulling their hair out trying to generate favorable mentions on social-media platforms. Pirates are effective at generating such word-of-mouth advertising. And they do it for free.

In an interview with IGN, the founders of game company Team Meat explained that they view piracy as part of their marketing program. Team Meat's Edmund McMillen explains, “The majority of e-mails that we get that revolve around piracy are people saying, 'I just want to get this off my chest. I stole your game when it came out because I wasn't sure about it and I really, really, really love it and so I bought it because I feel real guilty.' This is a common e-mail.”

In his blog at Futurebook.net, publishing pro Timo Boezeman writes about the opportunities available to publishers who embrace piracy as a new avenue for reaching customers instead of a threat: “Think about why people pirate your books. Why would they do that? Think negative and you might say: they don’t want to pay for it. Could be. But the main reason is: they want your book! And that is a good thing, right? So if you want to use that in your own advantage, you could see piracy as sampling. Hey, an opportunity! Take over control and spread the work for free yourself. Not just the complete work with no further actions attached. But for instance a management summary of your (non-fiction) work. Or a version with ads (additional income!). Or a version with social media buttons included to let the readers spread the word (so they become ambassadors of your work, free marketing!). Of course with links included that can help people to buy the original work if they like it (and I know from experience that people do this) in a format they choose (e-book, hardcover, etc.). If you take this even one step further, you can also see that this could help the author spread his name (and expertise), which could lead to extra lectures, workshops or seminars. And if you offer the author a complete package (including arranging his presentations), this could become an alternative source of income for you as a publisher.”

The producers of a a small, independent movie called “Man from Earth” tell a common story: Their movie languished unwatched until it became popular on pirate download sites. Then sales took off, and revenues too. The whole story is here: Internet Piracy is Good for Films.

A similar dynamic helped the sales of the humorous parenting book Go the **** to Sleep. The book grabbed the #1 spot on Amazon's bestseller list—a month before its release. It seems that a pirated copy in PDF form became popular on download sites before the release date. Instead of depressing sales, the pirated version generated interest and demand, and led to higher sales.

You can listen to similar experiences from bestselling author Neil Gaiman in this video. Gaiman used to be against piracy, but his view changed when he noticed that his sales went up in countries where his books were being pirated. As an experiment, he put his novel American Gods on his Web site for free downloading. Sales went up by 300 percent – not just for American Gods, but for all of his books.

Author Paulo Coelho agrees. Coelho not only approves of piracy, but he has actually posted “pirated” versions of his own books at torrent sites like Pirate Bay. Coelho relates the publication history of one of his novels in Russia. The first year, it sold 3,000 copies. The next year a pirated copy was released, and he sold 10,000 copies. The next year saw 100,000 sales, and sales grew to more than a million the next year. Coelho says people bought the printed books after sampling the pirated versions.

Also rethinking piracy is Mikael Hed, CEO of Rovio, the company behind Angry Birds and other games. “Piracy may not be a bad thing,” he said at this week's Midem music conference in Cannes, France. “It can get us more business at the end of the day.”

The studios' claims of revenue lost to piracy are grotesquely inflated, but they surely are losing some sales to illegal downloads. It's just possible, however, that they are getting more than sufficient value in return.

Web recommendation: Here is the page in which Google details some of its charitable giving in 2011. The company says it donated more than $100 million to charity over the course of the year. That sounds like a lot...until you realize that it amounts to about one-fourth of one percent of the company's $37.9 billion in revenues. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He wonders if any of his old friends from the dial-up Bulletin Board of the Absurd (7 cps speed limit enforced 24 hours per day) ever read these posts.

I am writing on January 18, 2012 – SOPA Internet Blackout Day. Today, thousands of Web-site operators have temporarily deleted their pages to protest the SOPA and PIPA legislation that is currently under consideration by Congress.

The protest seems to be superfluous. Over the past seven days President Obama has expressed opposition to the proposed bills, the bills' sponsors have removed the DNS-blocking provision that sparked the most concern, and a few former supporters in Congress have responded to Silicon Valley pressure by deleting their names from the list of sponsors.

SOPA and PIPA have been gutted. My prediction is that the bills will not pass. Even if they do, they will be rendered mostly harmless. It's Internet 1, Hollywood 0. Right?

Right...I guess. Sort of.

I've been as vocal a critic of the SOPA bills as anyone. I've warned of the bills' excesses here and here and here. My voice was part of an Internet-wide chorus seeking the legislation's defeat. I have had legitimate concerns about the power the bills would have placed in the hands of copyright holders and government, power to shut down or hamper the operations of Web sites without the burden of due process. I'm a libertarian at heart. I didn't have to think long or hard about my position.

Now that it appears we have won, I'm having second thoughts. If the bills are voted down (or, more likely, die without being put to a vote), the Internet will continue operating as it did before this brouhaha began. YouTube won't have to fear being shut down because a single person posted a video that included snatches of a copyrighted song being played in another room (to cite a persistent straw man from the anti-SOPA handbook). Everything will be hunky-dory.

And...piracy of copyrighted material will continue. It will no doubt continue to become more prevalent. Pirates will continue to become rich by offering access to stolen material. Google, DoubleClick, Clicksor, Pubmatic, AdBrite, Image Space Media, PayPal and other middlemen will get their share of the action. Content creators will continue to get nothing from illegal streaming and download of their work. They will continue to incur the expenses, do the work, create the content, and get nothing.

It isn't right to congratulate ourselves on killing SOPA and going on as if the world is as it should be. We own the Internet, and it is our job to make sure it is a force for good. We have a responsibility to correct inequities. To stop theft.

The Obama administration explained its opposition to SOPA and PIPA in a post at the White House blog. The post's authors wrote this: “[R]ather than just look at how legislation can be stopped, ask yourself: Where do we go from here? Don’t limit your opinion to what’s the wrong thing to do, ask yourself what’s right.”

So. What's right?

Web recommendation: Speaking of piracy, here's some food for thought. Click on the embedded video. Yes, it's a bit overlong...but it's a powerful, provocative message. It may just change your mind. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He is currently reading Markus Zusak's The Book Thief.

I have written several times about proposed legislation that would give copyright holders and law-enforcement agents unprecedented powers to censor the Internet. Although both the House and Senate versions of the legislation continue to grind their way through the adoption process, they have encountered setbacks that seem to ensure that the final versions, if approved, will no longer incorporate their most damaging provisions.

Most news reports, including mine, have referred to the legislation as SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. In fact, the House and Senate versions of the bill have different names. SOPA is the name of the House's version, authored by Lamar Smith of Texas. The Senate version is called the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act – the PROTECT IP Act-- or PIPA for short.

Both bills are essentially the same. It is common for proposed legislation to make its way through the House and Senate separately. Once both houses of Congress have passed the legislation, it goes to a committee that sands and polishes the language until it has created a single bill that reflects the wishes of both chambers. That bill then gets a final vote, as a formality, in the House and Senate. It's a complicated process.

In the past few days, both the House and Senate versions of the bill have experienced setbacks.

The Senate version of the bill – PIPA – was written by Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont. In response to public outcry and expert testimony before the Senate, Leahy now says the DNS-blocking provision of the bill requires “further study” and should not be implemented when and if the bill is passed. Leahy posted a statement on his Web site.

In the House, SOPA author Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has taken a further step. He has rewritten the bill to strike the DNS-blocking provision entirely. Like Leahy, he posted a statement on his official Web site.

Both versions of the bill retain other controversial provisions. For example, search engines will be instructed to block links to sites accused of direct and indirect copyright infringement – including, it appears, links to copyrighted material hosted on other sites. Suspected infringers will also lose access to payment services such as PayPal. U.S. companies will be prohibited from advertising on sites suspected of infringement.

Note that in all cases I said “suspected” of infringement. The penalties go into effect without the benefit of due process. First the site is booted off the Internet. Then, perhaps, if the site operator has sufficient cash to protest the move, a trial begins.

A further blow to the proposed legislation has come in the form of a statement from the Obama administration. In response to a petition at the recently created We the People Web site, the President's technical advisors have composed a statement against the current versions of SOPA and PIPA. “Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small,” the statement says.

Despite these developments, a January 18 protest will apparently go ahead as planned. On that day, a large number of Web sites will “go dark,” pulling themselves off the Internet temporarily to dramatize what they see as the legislation's censorship of the Internet. Reddit, Wikipedia, the Cheezburger Network, Destructoid, Red 5 Studios, Major League Gaming, Mozilla, Tucows, the Free Software Foundation, and many other sites are participating in the blackout.

The tide appears to have turned against this poorly conceived legislation, but even with the DNS-blocking language removed, the bills go too far. Here's hoping the legislators' waffling on the legislation's most onerous provisions proves too little, too late, and the blackout puts a stake through SOPA's heart.

Web recommendation: The hacker collective Anonymous is agitating against SOPA too – no surprise there. Have you ever watched one of their videos? I just did today, on YouTube. It's here. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He spends far too long reading blogs and news on the Web every day.

I love late December. Temperatures plummet. The streets fill with Christmas shoppers. Snow falls. The blogosphere fills with year's-best lists and forecasts for next year. Year in, year out, some things never change.

In keeping with this longstanding tradition, and in conformance with the largely unwritten rules of blogging, I herewith offer my own instantiation of a longstanding year-end tradition. Yes, I'm going to recommend a New Year's resolution.

I won't advise you to lose weight, though statistically speaking, if you're American, you could probably stand to drop a few pounds. I won't suggest learning a new programming language or contributing to an open source project. Both of these will enhance your employability in these days of outsourcing and offshoring, but if you haven't started yet, my advice isn't likely to get you moving. I won't even recommend becoming more Agile, mostly because I still haven't figured out what the hell that means (and I don't entirely trust anyone who says he has).

No, my resolution – and it's one I suggest that you emulate – is much simpler. It's this: Learn something.

Higher learning is what separates human beings from the rest of the animal world. It's what transforms us from simple organisms that eat, respire, and reproduce, and into human beings capable of appreciating and creating things of lasting value. Learning is what allows us to participate in human culture, and the more we learn, the more deeply we can participate.

My New Year's resolution is to devote deliberate time to learning in 2012. You should do the same.

The time you spending keeping up-do-date on software development doesn't count. Learning a language or a framework or a new platform is all very well, but it's part of your career, not something you pursue to spend your life. I'm talking about nontechnical learning: world history, or learning to play an instrument, or auditing a literature course.

You can even do it for free, online. Here is a list of resources. It's amazing what you can find online. MIT, for example, makes materials from 2,000 of its courses available online, free, via its OpenCourseWare intitiative. The university is launching an e-learning framework and online certification program in the next few months. My alma mater, Columbia University, has more than 700 lectures available on YouTube, and Harvard has uploaded more than 500. It's easy to find educational material online, for free. And if you're willing to pay a bit, you can get certification. You can even earn a degree online if you're willing to invest some time.

So invest in your own humanity this year. Stretch yourself. Grow a little. And have a great year.

Web recommendation: I am sure you are already well-informed about the flaws in SOPA, the draconian anti-piracy bill that Hollywood is pushing through Congress. Big companies in music and motion pictures argue that the bill is necessary to prevent pirates from bankrupting them (despite the record profits they continue to bring in, year after year). In an ironic twist, the folks at YouHaveDownloaded.com are making available the results of their tracking of torrent downloads, and the results include downloads of copyrighted material from within Sony Pictures, Universal, Fox, the RIAA, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. YouHaveDownloaded even reports which movies and TV series were downloaded within those organizations. Embarrassing, no? J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. His favorite flavor of ice cream is vanilla, but he insists that this doesn't conclusively establish that he lacks information. He just likes vanilla, OK?

Intellectual property law was created to protect the rights of creators over products of the mind. Speaking loosely: Patents protect inventions. Trademark protection covers names, images, and designs used in commerce. Copyright covers literary and artistic works, including both tangible artifacts and intangibles such as performances. Trade-secret protection is for information that owners keep secret to maintain competitive advantage.

The intersection of intellectual property law and software development is a fascinating and potentially lucrative field. The application of traditional intellectual property law to software is not always straightforward. It is generally acknowledged, for instance, that computer source code is subject to copyright protection – it is, after all, a written work, same as a novel or screenplay. (Well, sort of the same.) Of course, the same source-code file might be protected by patent law or trade-secret protection. You are surely aware that software patents have become very big business in recent years. If your job is in jeopardy of being outsourced or offshored, consider leveraging your technical expertise into a new career as a patent agent. You don't even have to go to law school – just pass the patent bar exam (you can find review materials and courses online) and you're in business. According to one site, patent agents earn about 25 percent more than software engineers.

But I digress.

The relationship between software and patent law is straightforward compared to the intersection of software and copyright protection. Specifically, it is unclear whether or not computer programming languages should be eligible for copyright protection. Uncertainties and apprehensions have attended this question for a long time.

A couple decades ago, Borland International – a publisher of C and Pascal compilers, spreadsheets, and database systems – was at the center of the copyrighting-a-language controversy. On the one hand, Borland was sued by Lotus, which claimed that because Borland's Quattro Pro duplicated a portion of Lotus 1-2-3's “command structure” – the keystrokes controlling operation of the spreadsheet – Borland was guilty of violating Lotus's copyrighted language. (Borland prevailed in court, setting a precedent against the copyrightability of programming languages.) At about the same time, Borland acquired dBase publisher Ashton-Tate, which was at the time litigating against Fox Software, whose database system implemented the dBase programming language. In this case, Borland's interests were on the opposite side of the copyrighting-a-language issue. No one knows how the judges might have ruled: Borland agreed to drop the case, and all future cases based on infringement of the dBase programming language, in return for regulatory approval of its acquisition of Ashton-Tate. It is important to note, however, that the U.S. Justice Department's Antitrust Division did not reject the copyrightability of the dBase language in its 1991 Competitive Impact Statement. It merely enjoined Borland from pursuing infringement lawsuits. (Read more here.)

Fast-forward to August 2010, when Oracle sued Google for alleged intellectual-property violations in the Android operating system. Alongside 50 alleged patent violations was this claim: “Oracle America owns copyrights in the code, documentation, specifications, libraries, and other materials that comprise the Java platform.” In particular, Oracle alleges that Google violated its copyright by implementing copyrighted Java APIs and copying a dozen small library source files. The source-file issue isn't interesting – source-code files are obviously copyrightable. But if you can copyright a language's APIs, are you copyrighting the language? It's hard to say. We'll have to wait for the judge's ruling – this case is still pending. (Read more here.)

Outside the U.S., the applicability of copyright law to programming languages is being tested in the United Kingdom, where SAS Institute, a publisher of statistical-analysis software, has brought suit against competitor World Programming Ltd., alleging that World has duplicated the SAS programming language in its software. Again, we are waiting for a judge's ruling (the case is being adjudicated by the UK High Court). There is an interesting twist, however. In July 2010, the British court asked for guidance from the Court of Justice of the European Union. Specifically, the court asked the CJEU if programming languages could be copyrighted. The court has not ruled on the issue, but it has released a statement from the office of Advocate General Yves Bot, whose advisory statements are almost always followed by the court. Bot dismissed the idea the languages could be copyrighted: “The functionalities of a computer program and the programming language cannot be protected by copyright.” Should the court adopt this position, the matter would essential be closed throughout the European Union. (Read more here.)

Should languages be subject to copyright? I keep scratching my head. I can definitely see both sides of this fascinating issue.

Web recommendation: I read an interesting report on language choice and software quality today. The report was produced by an international consulting firm called CAST, which says it has analyzed 365 million lines of code in 745 IT applications. A language-by-language comparison shows the highest density of bad code in Java EE applications, while COBOL applications show the fewest problems. CAST, which advocates metrics in software development and management, makes a summary of the report available on its Web site for free, though you must fill out a registration form to get at the data. I'm not wholly convinced, but the report is food for thought. You can read it here. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He plays a mean game of gin rummy.

Here are updates on some of the issues I've been following for the past few weeks.

Infrastructure attack a false alarm – for now. In a series of posts, I have made clear my concern about the ongoing effort to computerize utilities and municipal-infrastructure control systems. While intelligent systems can help us conserve resources and use energy more efficiently, computerization also leaves critical systems vulnerable to hack attacks. A data-point supporting my argument was November 8's widely reported cyber attack against an Illinois water utility's SCADA system. The Illinois Statewide Terrorism and Intelligence Center reported that a hacker with a Russian IP address had caused a pump to burn out. The cyber war had begun! Or maybe not. It turns out the SCADA system was accessed by a utility contractor, Jim Mimlitz, who was on vacation in Russia. While everyone is breathing a little easier, the fact remains that these systems are still vulnerable. It's only a matter of time until they are really hit.

Microsoft bullish on Kinect 2: Microsoft has realized that its Kinect game controller for the Xbox platform is potentially a good solution for a huge range of problems. Beta 2 of the Kinect SDK is available now, and Microsoft promises that a commercialized SDK will be available in early 2012. In the meantime, the Kinect hacker community is running full-tilt at every offbeat and potentially useful application it can imagine. Meanwhile, the Kinect 2 will reported greatly extend the Kinect's abilities. The new device may be able to read lips and even to detect users' emotional states with its facial-recognition algorithms. (If hackers were to install a back door into Kinect-enabled systems, they would essentially have around-the-clock video access to user sites, and the Kinect's voice-recognition routines could monitor speech for key words. What if the government were to install such software?) Check out Kinect Hacks. And if you haven't seen it yet, you might as well look at Microsoft's Kinect Effect video.

Software detects lies with voice analysis. Researchers are using a variety of methods to analyze speech and detect whether speakers are telling the truth. The New York Times has an informative article here: Software that listens for lies. It must be a lot of fun working on applications like these.

Pentagon sponsors hacking contest. A determined team of programmers has won $50,000 in a contest sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. The eight-member team successfully retrieved the contents of seven pages of documents that had been shredded into more than 10,000 fragments. The Pentagon is quite open about its motivation for the contest: “The goal was to identify and assess potential capabilities that could be used by our warfighters operating in war zones, but might also create vulnerabilities to sensitive information that is protected through our own shredding practices throughout the U.S. national security community.” We already knew the government could intercept anything on the Internet. Now it turns out that they're looking to read our shredded documents. Congratulations, in any case, to the winners.

Web recommendation: Perhaps you have noticed that many programmers are also serious about cooking. You may be a good cook yourself, in which case you have no doubt already discovered the new Developer Cookbook section of sdtimes.com. Those recipes look good, but they're positively primitive compared to the cooking-as-rocket-science entries in Modernist Cuisine, a six-volume encyclopedia of cooking ingredients, methods, and technologies dreamed up by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. This lavishly illustrated tome has 2,438 pages and weighs more than 50 pounds. Your status as an amateur cook may not justify the book's $625 purchase price, but you should at least take a look via the authors' beautiful Web site. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He likes raisins and walnuts in his oatmeal cookies.

As I have written elsewhere, Congress is debating the merits of controversial legislation intended to protect the movie and music industries from piracy of their copyrighted content. The legislation has had different names at different stages in the adoption process – E-PARASITE, SIPA, and currently the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. You can read the full text of the bill here. An analysis by the Center for Democracy & Technology is here.

The proposed legislation has attracted a lot of attention in recent days. Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt used the words “draconian” and “censorship” to describe the bill in a recent speech at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Google has joined AOL, eBay, Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo in sending a letter of opposition to the bill to Congress. Mozilla is rallying users to oppose the legislation. The Brookings Institution says the bill creates more problems than it solves. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's summary of industry opposition to the legislation is here.

Supporters of the bill include the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, Pfizer, the AFL-CIO, MasterCard, and the American Apparel & Footwear Association. Maria Pallante, director of the U.S. Copyright Office, says the act is “essential” to halting online piracy.

At the center of the controversy is a disagreement over how much damage online piracy does to content creators and owners. A recent study – detailed here – suggests that although piracy of music and movies is widespread, it does not do as much harm to the entertainment industry as Hollywood believes. Hollywood, for its part, sticks to its position that every illicit download is a lost sale.

There are three main problems with SOPA as it is currently conceived. First, the act allows the government to eliminate access to suspected copyright-infringing Web sites before the sites' guilt has been established. Second, the bill significantly weakens the “safe harbor” provisions of existing piracy legislation, the DMCA. The safe harbor provision gives site operators the benefit of the doubt, for example, when users upload copyrighted material. It is the safe harbor provision that allows YouTube to stay in business by making good-faith efforts to delete copyrighted content uploaded by users. Finally, SOPA allows the government to create a list of sites that are off-limits. American companies can't do business with those sites – for example, they can't place advertising on them. This provision puts the government in the position of deciding which sites are acceptable fare for Americans. The potential for censorship is obvious.

SendWrite.com is making it easy to write your Congressional delegation to urge opposition to the bill. Just click here.

Web recommendation: Sign-on bonuses are no novelty in Silicon Valley startups. And it is common for hiring companies to pay a bonus to those who perform matchmaker services and refer new hires to them. But the folks at Scopely.com have taken these bonuses to an absurd new level. If Scopely hires you or the person you refer, you will receive a year’s supply of Dos Equis beer, a portrait of yourself painted in oils, a tuxedo, Cuban cigars, beard grooming oil, a cologne called “Sex Panther,” and $11,000 wrapped in bacon. See for yourself by clicking here. J.D. say check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He likes gin rummy.

Digital rights management, or DRM, is a catch-all term that refers to license agreements and technologies intended to protect the rights of content providers from would-be pirates. It is DRM technology that Apple uses, for example, to prevent unlimited duplication of songs from its iTunes store.

I've been looking at tablet computers, including the Amazon Kindle and B&N's recently updated Nook. English-language books are hard to come by here in Serbia, and they're expensive when you find them. So I've been thinking that I should feed my addiction to literature with an e-reader of some kind.

The problem with most e-books is that they suffer from draconian DRM restrictions. Most user licenses cover only a single hardware device, so if you want to use the tablet one day and the laptop another, you need to buy a second copy of the book. Some e-book publishers tie their offerings (officially if not practically) to their own software. Copying, printing, sharing, and reselling are typically not allowed. It's complicated – the relevant restrictions on a particular book may come from the publisher, the distributor, or the e-reader's platform vendor. Individual titles from the same publisher or vendor may have different restrictions.

Amazon made headlines recently when it opened the Kindle Owners' Lending Library for e-books. Reality doesn't live up to the headlines, however. First, the service is available to Kindle users only. Second, it is available only to members of Amazon's $79/year Amazon Prime program. Third, the service is limited to one book per month, one book at a time. Finally, the service is currently limited to about 5,000 titles, a list that consists largely of public-domain and self-help books.

You're better off going to your local public library. Seriously. Public libraries across North America are now making e-books available for check-out, often at no charge. (You can access libraries' offerings with a free e-reader app called OverDrive if you've a mind to. The company's Web site even helps you locate nearby libraries to lend you books.)

The complicated e-books ecosphere is just the latest example of the fractious world of digital rights management. Vendors are lending toward a streaming model, in which they retain all ownership of digital content, offering users only a limited one-time right to view it. Users, understandably, would prefer to store content on their devices or in the cloud, and access it multiple times on an unlimited number of arbitrary devices. The marketplace is a mixed-up mess of compromises between these two poles.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation offers a thoughtful checklist of issues to consider in the e-books world at this page: Digital Books and Your Rights: A Checklist for Readers. It's well worth reading.

Web recommendation: Call me a cockeyed optimist – I have a good feeling about Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). The latest version of Google's operating system for mobile devices is a major release that's intended to power both smartphones and tablets. Google has promised to release the source code to developers so they can fine-tune their offerings. Why develop for Ice Cream Sandwich? ZDNet blogger Ed Burnette has combed through the ICS SDK and emerged with a handful of compelling reasons: Top 10 Features in Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). J.D. say check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He enjoys the occasional game of cribbage.