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In an opinion which, if affirmed by judges, would have dramatic impact on the definition of software and standards - at least in Europe if not eventually worldwide - the Advocate General in a European Court of Justice case involving U.S.-based business analytics firm SAS, has argued that the language in which computer programs are written may be exempt from copyright.

At issue: If you make a programming language that works like an existing one, have you violated copyright if you use a copyrighted manual as your guide? Have you violated copyright if you produce a manual that explains your language using terms that are similar to those in the manual you used as your guide? And finally, the big one: Is a work-alike programming language a violation of copyright in and of itself? You can just imagine the Oracle executives listening intently in the gallery.

The second round of talks between chief executives from Google and Oracle commences today, with the possibility of a settlement between the two over Google's use of Java in Android, as Bloomberg reports this morning. This just days after the latest rebuke of Google by Judge William Alsup, who last Thursday granted only a small part of Google's motion to throw out aspects of Oracle's copyright infringement claims.

Oracle claims, among other things, that when Google copied the precise order and phraseology of Java methods in developing its Dalvik virtual machine for Android, it violated copyright. The judge disagreed. Google claims that such order is necessary in order to educate developers on how APIs work, and since an API is an implementation of software that the Supreme Court ruled falls outside the boundaries of intellectual property, that the API specifications also fall outside those boundaries. The judge disagreed with that too.

It will amount to being publicly shamed, and although Oracle gave SAP an escape hatch, it purposely made that hatch too small to crawl though. In a deal announced yesterday, SAP is likely to plead guilty on behalf of its former customer support unit, TomorrowNow (TN), on charges that it stole Oracle's intellectual property in an effort to support Oracle customers who were also TN clients.

The fresh set of charges was, according to multiple press sources, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco yesterday. (A copy of the filing was not yet available at press time.) The sole defendant in this new set of charges is TomorrowNow, shifting the shame over to the SAP subsidiary, although it will still be SAP that is liable for damages.

The changes in U.S. copyright law over the past three years affect the way damages are assessed. When a party is found guilty of infringement of copyright (which runs deeper than mere violation), the test now is the extent to which the infringed party is less able to license its intellectual property than it had planned back before it was infringed.

In other words, if you weren't going to sell something in the first place, you can't claim lost sales. That's what SAP argued after a jury awarded Oracle a record $1.3 billion, after finding SAP guilty of copyright infringement for tapping into Oracle's servers for product support data. Today, a federal court judge struck down that verdict, stating it didn't match the circumstances.

Schools have been illegally showing videos in schools for educational purposes forever. But now universities are taking advantage of Netflix rentals and streaming video to supplement their media collections.

The practice recently gained attention after some first person accounts of the cost-saving wonders of Netflix showed up in a library trade publication and on a blog.

When 20-year-old college student Firas Alkhateeb posted a picture of President Obama decked out in Joker facepaint to photo-sharing website Flickr, little did he know that he was going to be the catalyst for a major policy change in how the Yahoo-owned company will handle copyright infringement claims. However, that's exactly what happened. Thanks to massive outcry from the online community, Yahoo's legal team allowed Flickr to put the photo's web page back up. Not the image itself, mind you, but the photo's page...along with all its accompanying metadata like date posted, tags, and most importantly, user comments.

The story surrounding the infamous Obama Joker picture and how Yahoo's Flickr photo sharing service deleted it after it received a DMCA take-down notice is getting stranger by the day. According to photo blogger Thomas Hawk, who actually saw the name on the take-down notice that Flickr shared with the original poster, the name is likely "totally bogus." This is quite a disturbing development, especially because it has now become clear that Flickr does not verify the authenticity of the DMCA take-down notices it receives.

Los Angeles residents recently began seeing a new sort of Obama poster plastered across their city. Instead of promoting "hope," these posters feature U.S. President Barack Obama wearing the Joker's clown makeup from the Batman movie "The Dark Knight." Even those outside of L.A. have likely seen this image somewhere as it soon took on a viral nature, appearing both online and in other cities across the country. The politically charged (and rather disturbing) photo serves as a counterpoint to the prolific and iconic "hope" posters that became popular during Obama's campaign. Regardless of which side you favor, one thing can be said about this photo: it definitely grabs your attention.

According to a new study (PDF) by economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee (Harvard) and Koleman Strumpf (University of Kansas), file sharing and weaker copyright protections generally benefit societies more than they hurt them. Among other things, Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf argue that file sharing has done nothing to deter the production of books, music, and films. The two economists argue that weaker copyright is desirable, as long as it doesn't "lessen the incentives of artists and entertainment companies to produce new works."

Our good friends over at TechDirt discovered an interesting anomaly and enormous security hole in BayTSP's website today.

BayTSP, a Los Gatos, CA-based company, is best known for putting the cease-and-desist smackdown on peer-to-peer copyright violators. The site serves infringement information forms to offending parties on behalf of the copyright holders. Think of them as the online debt collectors of the BitTorrent universe, with all the information security risk that implies.