While many people are familiar with copyright issues concerning things like music, movies and software online, there's another community that also has been quite active: the knitting community. For a few years now there's been an ongoing battle between hobbyist knitters who have uploaded patterns that others feel are infringing on their copyrights. Now it appears that issue is touching on the tech/sci-fi community as well.

While it looks like the attempt to get Rick Frenkel, better known as the "Patent Troll Tracker" into court on a separate patent-related dispute has gone nowhere, there's an interesting side dispute as part of this that touches on the age-old debate concerning the border of blogging and journalism.

Copyright and patent law is supposed to act as incentives for the creation of new content or inventions. Yet, as we've pointed out recently, there's little economic evidence that it does so. Instead, the evidence suggests that stronger intellectual property laws seem to come after the fact. In other words, when there is little IP protection, there is often quite a bit of creation and invention -- and then those that did that creation and invention decide that they want to protect it retrospectively.

Correction 6:18 p.m. PT: I misinterpreted the announcement; Inquisitor founder David Watanabe isn't joining Yahoo.

Inquisitor augments Safari by autocompleting search queries and showing results.

(Credit: Yahoo)

While it is a bit troubling that the Department of Homeland Security has had some computer security problems recently, it's difficult to see exactly how that's solved by legislation. But, of course, to politicians with a legislative hammer, every little problem looks like a nail. Thus, we've got politicians proposing cybersecurity legislation that would require Homeland Security to decrease the number of successful cybersecurity attacks against its network.

Cold calls from telemarketers and other companies that ignore the do-not-call list are one of the banes of modern day civilization.

A simple Google search for a mystery number you've received usually lets you know who's on the other end before you have to pick it up.