"Microsoft can consider itself above the law no longer," says Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).

"Through tactics that successfully derailed antitrust processes in other parts of the world, including the United States, Microsoft has managed to postpone this day for almost a decade. But thanks to the perseverance and excellent work of the European Commission, these tactics have now failed in Europe," Greve continues.

In 1859 Charles Darwin published his groundbreaking work 'The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection'. The previous year he had been sent an essay by a fellow biologist working in the Indonesian rainforest, Alfred Russel Wallace, entitled, in true Victorian style 'On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type'. Darwin realised that they had both independently discovered the process of 'mutability' (now called evolution) and arranged for the simultaneous publication of both their findings by the Linnean Society.

The poet John Clare died in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum in 1864. During his lifetime he was known as 'the peasant poet', though he was not, strictly speaking, a peasant but a landless labourer, and lived in an era of social upheaval, enclosures and landless labour, when a landless labourer had even less rights than a peasant.

The 9/11 attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon shocked the Western world into a sense of insecurity not seen since the Cold War. This public nervousness provided the political leverage the British Labour government needed to bring ID cards onto the agenda. Fear of terrorism has been used by governments around the world to introduce authoritarian new measures in the name of protecting the citizenry. Here in the UK such moves coincided with the Government’s long tradition of centralising control to Whitehall.

Once upon a time a pirate was “a seafaring robber attacking other ships", a sword between his teeth and a skull and cross bones flying from the masthead, the scourge of honest travelers everywhere. Pirates are the stuff of myth, the hoarders of mysterious charts and buried treasures, Jamaica Rum, diamonds and pearls. Captains Kidd and Morgan stride across our imaginations and into our hearts, walking the deck, raising the flag and sacking ships all along the Spanish Main.

No one knows whether John Henry ever lived. People’s heroes like Robin Hood, Captain Swing or Joe Hill have a way of remaining shadowy despite the enormous amount of research focussed on them. Some, of course, definitely did live. Hill did – Joseph Hilstrom, Swedish longshoreman and Wobbly, who probably wasn’t as lily white as labour myth paints him. Others probably didn’t live at all. John Henry may have. If so he was black, born into slavery, maybe in Alabama, and he took on the new technology of his day, the steam drill.

The social critic, Ivan Illich, who died in 2002, wrote his most well-known books - 'Tools for Conviviality', 'Deschooling Society', 'Disabling Professions' and 'The Right to Useful Unemployment' - in the 1970's. If these had been written twenty years later it is difficult to imagine that he would not have seized upon the monopolisation and commodification of software and cyberspace to help illustrate his case. His ideas are more relevant today than they have ever been.

Pablo Picasso is supposed to have said that "all art is theft". The idea may or may not be controversial, but the intention is clear. The creative process, which relies on the evolution of techniques, observation and criticism, is an assimilation of all that has gone before, and all creativity, whether artistic, technological or scientific, walks a thin line between innovation and originality, plagiarism and parody.

Famous Belgians are hard to find, or so they tell you. Rene Magritte and Adolphe Saxe, the inventor of the saxophone, the painters Breughel and Van Eyck, Jacques Brel, Hercule Poirot (sic) and many others tell a different story.

The average user, politician or journalist, can be excused for not grasping the significance of the barrage of laws and other mechanisms, DMCA, EUCD, TCPA, software patents, copyright extensions, patents on anything and everything, that are being passed through the US and European legislative chambers, and are being implemented independently by the software and content industries under the guise of protecting ‘intellectual property’, but incidently serve to limit the rights of consumers, inhibit innovation and stifle competition.