Senator Rick Santorum introduced the National Weather Services Duties Act of 2005 earlier this year. The bill would have several troubling effects. These impacts may mark the first time the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association have had occasion to be allied on an issue.

The bill, which Santourm says was crafted with the "jobs of Pennsylvanians in mind," would limit the National Weather Service's ability to provide information to the public. Instead the agency would use its tax-payer funding to create "a set of data portals designed for volume access by commercial providers of products or services." These services, such as Santorum campaign donor AccuWeather, would then provided to consumers through commercial services.

Limiting access to commercial providers would eliminate the provision of data for so much of rural America. Everybody from search and rescue teams to farmers and small town fire-fighters would be at the mercy of these commercial providers for critical, sometimes life-or-death, situations. With the recent fires in Southern Nevada for example, the large weather services didn't have information available. Residents of the farms and rural residences would have had no information to make decisions. In truth we need more information not less.

Cnet has an article about the publisher of Perfect 10 suing Amazon over its A9 search engine.

The suit and another against Google by the publisher claims the operators of these search engines are infringing on Perfect 10's copyright by including images in their search results. To my non-legally educated mind, the suits don't seem to be such a huge deal. There are plenty of opportunities for Perfect 10 to protect their copyright. If as the article implies the suit has to do with Google indexing other sites that are hosting the infringing images then separate action against those sites will solve two problems at once. It seems from this seat on the sideline like a company looking for a way to squeeze money from the search engines that are making money.

The article notes in the last paragraph "The situation is more dire after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this week that companies can be held legally liable for copyright piracy that takes place on their online networks." Which leads me to say um, not really. Cnet needs to get their facts straight here. The Supreme Court ruled that there was enough evidence that the cases against Grokster and Streamcast should not have been granted summary judgement. They went on to describe a lot of actions that look like the companies were inducing users to violate copyrights of third parties. However, they also by way of example, suggested filters might be one way a company could help to show they are not liable for inducing infringement. It so happens that robots.txt is just one such filtering mechanism that Google, A9 and others support.