A Connecticut judge has upped the damages in Bristol Technology’s suit against Microsoft from the $1 awarded by the jury to 1 million dollars (in punitive damages). Still a drop in the bucket to Microsoft, unfortunately. The only reason I even care about the case is that it’s a great example of how Microsoft stomps on its “partners” whenever it ceases to find them useful.

LinuxPlanet has a screen shot of Nautilus (the forthcoming file manager from Eazel). It looks like a file manager — not very impressive, really. The fact that Nautilus is currently eliciting such excitement in the Linux community is a good indicator of how far Linux on the desktop has to go to even achieve parity with Windows or the Mac OS.

Salon has a great article about Patrick Ball, a database programmer who uses data mining to catalog human rights violations so that the information can be used to hold the appropriate parties accountable. It sounds like incredibly fascinating and worthy work, and it’s cool that a technology that’s normally used to send us better targetted junk mail can also be used to make the world a better place. He’s written a book about his work called Making the Case that looks like a fascinating read.

The Motley Fool has a column on how the MPAA and RIAA are manipulating the legal system to thwart capitalism. When I stop and think about the degree to which corporations and other monied interests control the legislative agenda in this country, I can’t help but shudder. Of course, things aren’t any better in other countries, either.

Amazon is catching a lot of flack for charging different amounts for the same product. This is standard operating procedure in the world of business, but on the Internet things are a bit different. Most people don’t know or care whether people in Seattle pay more for lawnmowers than people in Atlanta, but on the Internet, comparing notes on things like this is trivial. Between their patent abuse, increasingly user-unfriendly privacy policy, and consumer-agitating pricing strategy, Amazon.com has really been striking out lately.

The O’Reilly Network has a convenient list of controversial patents that relate to the Web. Most of them are serious howlers.

Meaningless piece of trivia I discovered today: when you save a page from the Web as HTML using Internet Explorer, it completely rewrites all of the HTML tags in the document in its own format. The document looks the same, but the actual tags and formatting are different. For what it’s worth, Netscape saves the document as it’s sent by the Web server.

The TV show Big Brother is being sued by the guy who owns the movie and television rights to the George Orwell book of the same name. I have no idea what to say about this, but I thought you’d like to know.

RSA has generously released the patent for their encryption algorithm into the public domain (it expires in two weeks). I guess this is the intellectual property equivalent of saying, “You can’t fire me, I quit!”

A group of hardcore Mac users are planning on protesting during Steve Jobs’ keynote at the upcoming Mac Expo in Paris by standing and interrupting his speech. Isn’t it easier to just not buy Apple’s products?