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Money found to pay expert witnesses
THE FREE Software Foundation said it has started a fighting fund to provide expert witnesses to fight off the music industry in P2P cases.
For a while now, the RIAA has had its own expert witnesses show up in court and apparently baffle the bewigged ones and the largely unbewigged juries with their ideas.
Now the Free Software Foundation has announced that it has established an " Expert Witness Defense (sic) Fund" to assist defendants in RIAA cases.
The Foundation is raising money to help provide computer expert witnesses to combat RIAA's ongoing lawsuits, and to "defend against the RIAA's attempt to redefine copyright law".
The cash will be used to pay fees and/or expenses of technical expert witnesses, forensic examiners, and other technical consultants assisting individuals named as defendants in non-commercial, peer-to-peer file sharing cases.
Not every case will get cash. It has to be the sort of case which is important to resolve "critical legal issues".
Even then the defendant and a lawyer has to be prepared to fight the case to the bitter end and be putting in money themselves.
The link for donations to the fund is here while there is more here .µ
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'Defense' is the standard American spelling, just so you know.
In any case, these lawsuits are going to soon disappear as people catch on to private, encrypted file-sharing solutions such as GigaTribe: http://www.gigatribe.com
'Sic' is used to denote a word that may [i]appear[/i] incorrect, not just when a word [i]is[/i] incorrect, just so you know. :P
Just because someone in the US misspelled the word defence years ago and somehow got it into US English dictionaries that way, doesn't automatically make it right.

-Peter from Canada... where it's 'defence' and 'colour'... and where a 'cheque' is something you give someone and 'check' is something you do.
Defence would imply im taking down fencing.
That's what happens when you rebel against the empire. You can no longer learn proper spelling.
Actually, the OED lists the earliest known use of 'defense' as 1303, with the earilest use of 'defence' as 1377.

In other words, both are correct no matter which country you're in.

Nothing's worse than uneducated pedants.
American English is far more logical than English English. As a Scot, I ought to know. The best English in the UK is spoken in Aberdeen, where I emanated from. Ed.
Just because someone in the UK thinks that words ending in the letter "a" should really have an "r" added to them doesn't make it a good idear (sic).