Re: FAT patents. Do we need to revive non-US?
> Also, bear in mind that at one point, panama was our territory, but I'm
> not sure if Noriega actually did some of his drug related stuff while
> it was still our territory.
No. Panama has been an independent nation since it seceded from Colombia
in 1903. Perhaps you're referring to the Canal Zone, an area embedded
inside Panama which extended five miles to each side of the Panama Canal.
That was indeed U.S. territory until the end of the 70s, when it was
under joint U.S.-Panamanian control until the end of the 90s. U.S.
control of the Canal Zone, however, has nothing to do with jurisdiction
over any drug trafficking-related activities of Manuel Noriega inside
the completely separate nation of Panama.
A perhaps more relevant (to the FAT distribution issue) example of the
U.S. applying intellectual property laws to actors and actions outside
the U.S. which were legal in that location would be the case of Dmitri
Skylarov, which I'm sure Free Software advocates here have not forgotten.
-c
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