LWN published that the Public Domain Enhancement Act has been reintroduced to the U.S. House of Representatives by Zoe Lofgren. This law will partially fix the problem with copyrights that currently run up to 75 years after the death of the author, a very long time. This is important since only about 2% of the works older than 55 are commercially viable so we do not have access anymore to the old works under the current copyright regime.

The idea of this law is that after 50 years the copyright author will need to file a request to keep his copyrights and pay $1. This will allow commercially nonviable works to be released to the public domain and still not annoy the copyright giants too much.

I hope that this law will pass this time, and not be buried in a subcommittee.

I tried, I really tried.

<rant>

I published on whatsup, I'm talking to anyone who'll listen. But still, most of the Hebrew related Debian issues, I hear from other sources and not from the users. I obviously don't have enough time to read all blogs and be on all boards and mailing lists, but can't people at least send me a note when there is an Hebrew bug in Debian, or a package that can be added?

The latest example is aspell-he, I've read on a blog, that there is support in aspell for Hebrew spell checking. And was never notified by anyone on this new addition. And I've already added hspell and myspell-he once I became aware of them. hspell through linux-il mailing list, and myspell-he from a user filing a wishlist bug report on hspell.

If you know of an important Hebrew related application that you want to see in Debian, please let me know. I might not be able to handle all of them, but I can delegate some of them to Lior Kaplan :-)

</rant>

There was some talk about a Planet for Free/Open-Source Software, but none was setup. So I struck one up in about 20 minutes, searching for feeds was the biggest issue. Linmagazine really need to fix their website usability wise. There are no feed links, not even in the user pages.

Anyhow, I've got some feeds now, and the Planet will update every two hours.

Here it is: Planet FOSS-IL.

Bugs:

• Bug 1: Shachar Shemesh was notified that his blog looks like gibberish through the feed. His feed is published as if it is in ISO-8859-1 encoding.
• Bug 2: The titles for Hebrew blogs are left aligned and not right aligned, will need to figure it out.