Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

Having previously discussed the verdict in the case brought against The Pirate Bay, perhaps I should not get distracted by other similar court cases, as this blog is not a running commentary on file sharing news. However, there is an important issue which I mentioned last time about where the courts will draw the line between Google and The Pirate Bay, and whether that line can stop a significant amount of copyright infringement without stopping a significant amount of legal online activity. The BREIN vs. Mininova case provides another interesting data point, testing the legal waters (despite the case being heard in a slightly different jurisdiction) which might inform other websites how they should operate to remain legal. I actually think that although the cases, and their verdicts, were similar, the Mininova case involved fewer dubious legal steps from the judge, but perhaps that’s because I have only read a Google translation of the verdict. In any case, I detail below my understanding of the trial and its consequences for operators of websites.

I do a lot of programming, and I like writing one-liners to help me with things, so it’s perhaps not surprising that I’ve ended up writing a one-liner to help me with my programming. I should point out that the initial motivation to write this one-liner was not that I made any mistakes in the code I wrote, rather it was someone else’s code I was looking at which needed correction, but it would be hubris to assume I’m never going to make any mistakes myself, so I’m sure this script will be useful for my own code. Of course, nowadays editors will at least spell check the comments in your code for you, but it is also good to make sure your variable names don’t contain misspelled words, as that makes it harder for people (who know the correct spelling) to collaborate with you. This one-liner is rather crude and does produce a lot of noise in the output, but it is also interesting from a technical point of view, so I will discuss below how I came up with it and how it works.