the legend of St. Columba, patron saint of copyright infringers : ‘At this point IPKat team member Jeremy dons his old academic hat and excitedly draws attention to some research he did on the St Columba case. The goodly saint was given access to a psalter that was in the possession of Abbot Finian in around the year 560. A psalter is a book of psalms — definitely public domain stuff, having been compiled during the reign of King David, who is generally reckoned to have died around 970 years before the common era. Even on a life + 70 year basis, copyright would have expired around getting on for 1,500 years before Columba came on to the scene. Having illicitly copied the psalter he refused to deliver it up to King Dermot of Tara, who famously said “to every cow its calf, to every book its copy” — not “to every cow its calf, to every author his work”. Anyway, to cut a long story short, Columba refused to hand it over, fled the country for the safety of England (like the founder of Wikileaks), converted the Picts to Christianity, settled in Iona and became a saint. You can read this all in “St Columba the Copyright Infringer” [1985] 12 European Intellectual Property Review 350-353.’ (via Eoin O’Dell). Someone fill in the misquoting High Court judges….
(tags: st-columba books via:cearta ireland law history filesharing copyright)eclim (eclipse + vim) : ‘Eclim is less of an application and more of an integration of two great projects. The first, Vim, is arguably one of the best text editors in existence. The second, Eclipse, provides many great tools for development in various languages. Each provides many features that can increase developer productivity, but both still leave something to be desired. Vim lacks native Java support and many of the advanced features available in Eclipse. Eclipse, on the other hand, still requires the use of the mouse for many things, and when compared to Vim, provides a less than ideal interface for editing text. That is where eclim comes into play. Instead of trying to write an IDE in Vim or a Vim editor in Eclipse, eclim provides an Eclipse plug-in that exposes Eclipse features through a server interface, and a set of Vim plug-ins that communicate with Eclipse over that interface. This functionality can be leveraged in three primary ways, as illustrated below.’
(tags: eclipse java programming software vim editors refactoring)