Wendy Seltzer Interviewed

mpawlo writes "Wendy Seltzer was recently appointed staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Seltzer is also a fellow with the Berkman Center. Greplaw has picked Seltzer's brain on her new position with the EFF, Chilling Effects and the greatest opera tunes."

Good choice

[Empiric]

A lawyer with coding experience. Very nice selection for the EFF. She certainly seems to a very good perspective, based on the interview.

I would think her background would give her a decided advantage in court against opposition such as SCO's legal team. Non-technical lawyers I'd expect would be rather limited in their ability to see the proverbial trees as well as the forest, leading to egregious, easily-destroyable assertions such as SCO's claim that, in effect, "Linux" is one particular whole, when a moment's consideration from one with a technical background would suggest it's actually a very dynamic, variable thing, and that to claim all Linux deployments violate a given set of supposed "infringments" is rather absurd.

I'd expect Ms. Seltzer will be able to bring good arguments to the table on this and many other Open Source challenges. Kudos to the EFF's fine choice.

Plagiarism

[Safety Cap]

As it happens too often here, the editor allowed through a story that is plagiarized. The submitted text was cribbed verbatim from the site (the gratuitous addition of links do not excuse the crime), which fit the definition of plagiarism [unimelb.edu.au] to a tee.

If one cannot bother to paraphrase [reference.com], then perhaps one might consider deferring one's submission, as a courtesy to the original author. After all, some folks work hard to craft the words that we enjoy reading. Why not provide them the common courtesy of respecting their hard work?

Cheers.