To steal a theme from the X-Files … when it comes to Web patents, the prior art is out there.

From the way Tim O’Reilly tells it, MP3.com is a really cool place to work.

The legend of BSD, by Annalee Newitz.

Mike Godwin has an extensive article on the Digital Millenium Copyright Act in the National Law Journal. The DMCA is an evil law that punishes people for circumventing copy protection even if they own the protected work itself. It’s the club being used to bludgeon the people who wrote DeCSS.

Developers are skeptical about Microsoft’s proposed concessions in the antitrust case.

More evidence that IBM really gets it: at least some people there see Linux as a top to bottom answer to all their operating system needs. They’re running Beowulf on massive clusters of Intel-based servers, and they’re also running thousands of copies of Linux concurrently on a single mainframe. Cool stuff.

We have a date: the beta of Netscape 6 will debut on April 5. I’ll probably stick with the bare Mozilla release and not use the Netscape-branded beta, but if it’s really good, who knows?

The patent office is trying to clean up its act when it comes to business model patents, thank goodness. We’ll see if their review process makes any difference at all. Like all good government functionaries, the commisioner of the office says that there was never anything wrong with the process in the first place.

It seems like at least one person really gets it when it comes to open standards. (I actually think that quite a few people at IBM get it. For a company that seemed totally out of touch in the eighties and early nineties, IBM is really on the cutting edge these days.)

Over at XML.com, Simon St. Laurent reviews the XML support in Mozilla.