For the first time today...

...since I started doing this little hobby, I woke up and thought to myself, "What on earth am I going to blog about today?"...

(can "blog" be a verb? Ah, Answers.com says yes...thank you...)

*Ahem*, anyway..."What on earth am I going to blog about today?"...

There were a multitude of things in my head that I could talk about, for example - Flyingpops and I have been getting out on the bikes a lot lately (found some *awesome* downhill routes along the Surrey Cycleway btw.), my foot still ain't quite right, we have large flowering courgettes on the courgette plant (okay, where else would they be? Shame I don't really like courgettes, but I know someone who will wolf them down ;)...Squiz came and stayed the night on Saturday (we BBQ'd *again*, no bad thing though in my opinion ;) ...etc., etc., etc. (or as the Victorians would have it "&tc." which I think I prefer actually)...

Unfortunately, something else came to light while grazing my feeds (ooo, I like that! Wonder if anyone else has thought of that way of describing the activity - update - just checked Google, nope, I'm the first!) this morning more worthy of comment...
The BBC is reporting that in the United States of America, the Supreme Court has ruled that (and I quote) "(We) hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright ... is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties."...

This has broad implications...not least - every company or person that makes any code that can be used to swap copyrighted material can now be sued by the injured parties. Taking this at it's least extreme - Grokster, Morpheus, Streamcast et al, are now going to be sued to death (that's it). It's most extreme? You *can* use Google to search for illegal material quite easily, and I pity the guy that wrote Bittorrent...everyone is going to have to be very careful about what they say, and carefully check what they *have* said in public in the past...

Imagine if this had happened with the video recorder...how quickly would they have stopped making them? Would they have been so widely adopted? "Hey, you can record movies off TV!" from the mouth of the wrong company exec would have been enough for a barrage of law suits...I think the VCD player would have been the product of choice for many electronics firms from there on in...(and the winner? The Yakuza/Mafia/, who would have employed armies more hawkers and VCD pressing plants to flood the world with pirate copies)...the current trend of "boot sale" buying would have started ten years earlier...

One thing is for sure though, for the short term, this ruling is going to do is make a lot of lawyers a lot of money and push the scene further underground...