With all of the sturmundrang out there about Micrsoft's tentative foray into the world of open source licensing, it seems people may be missing another aspect of the discussion.

""In a decision centering around the violation of the Artistic License, a San Francisco court has denied an injunction against Matthew Katzer in the favor of Roberr Jacobsen of the JMRI project. Importantly, the decision makes the point that the Artistic License is a contract, an interpretation which the Free Software Foundation has been keen to avoid as a legal stance."

A GNU/Linux user was jailed for uploading a film onto a peer-to-peer service. Now he's being told he will have to switch to Windows if he wants to use a computer again.

In a reversal, the American representative to the ISO standards body is now tentatively supporting the approval of Microsoft's Office Open XML document format as an open standard this year.

A Microsoft document format that may be adopted as an international standard this weekend is a ploy to lock in customers, who could lose control over their own data in a worst-case scenario, critics say.

Earlier this month, the Computer & Communications Industry Association filed a complaint with the FTC alleging that professional sports leagues, Hollywood studios, and book publishers were all using copyright notices that misrepresented the law. Now, the group has launched a web site called Defend Fair Use that shows they are serious about making the complaint stick.

As one of his clients told us, "Mark Radcliffe is the law when it comes to open source software."

CSI wishes to clarify that at no point has CSI supported the proposed standard in its present form. (A statement from the Computer Society of India)