Ben Hammersley at The Guardian looks at the issue of EU software patents in an accessible piece.

On the copyright front, those aggravated by Michael Moore's latest film, Farenheit 9/11, are suggesting a distributed Net based critique of the entire film in small chunks.

"The internet is filling up with point by point exposes of Michael Moore’s deceptions. (See for instance MooreWatch, fahrenheitfact, and various reviews.) Would it be legal to compile these Fiskings into a filmic refutation of Fahrenheit 9/11, using the same video feeds that Moore uses, and some of his own footage? Would it be “fair use” to in effect take clips from Fahrenheit, replace Moore’s narration with honest narration, and run the modified clips side by side with the originals?

Perhaps the effort could be decentralized, with lots of people or little groups of people each putting together individual snippets. Surely fair use allows a person to put together one little comparison piece."

Michael Moore is on record as saying he doesn't mind people downloading his film as long as they are not making a profit out of it because he didn't like the state of intellectual property laws. I'm not sure that this was what he had in mind though.

I'm no fan of soundbite propaganda from any part of the political spectrum and that's one of the nice things about the Net - it's potential as a tool for reasoned argument and not just a point by point propaganda based dissection of an opponents' arguments. Sadly the temptation is to run with the unfair advocacy tactics rather than reasoned arguments because so many of us can be persuaded in that way. Mr Moore's film is only really likely to further convince President Bush's opponents that they still don't like him and convince Mr Bush's supporters that they don't like Mr Moore. It would be significantly more useful if either side focussed on enlightenment rather than playing to the mob.