Europe's Highest Court Says DRM Circumvention May Be Lawful In Certain Circumstances

One of the many problems with DRM is its blanket nature. As well as locking down the work in question, it often causes all kinds of other, perfectly legal activities to be blocked as well -- something that the copyright industry seems quite untroubled by. Here's an example from Europe involving Nintendo (pdf): 

On Techdirt.

Wii Opens Up a Bit, We All Gain

Game consoles are notorious for being tightly-controlled, closed platforms. So this news, delivered en passant, is a rather significant vote for openness:

On Wednesday morning, Nintendo will officially announce to the general public its plans for WiiWare, downloadable games for the wildly popular Wii videogame console.

...

while Nintendo, as the retailer, would itself determine the appropriate pricing for each game on a per-title bases, the games themselves would not be vetted by Nintendo. Instead, Nintendo would only check the games for bugs and compatibility

Clearly, the company has recognised that the loss of control is more than outweighed by the benefit of establishing a flourishing ecosystem around the Wii.

Avatar Liberation Movement

Interesting:

"Mii" avatars for the Wii console have been given a license to travel, thanks to a "How To" article published by LiquidIce's Nintendo Wii Hacks. Using the built-in Bluetooth capabilities of the Wiimote control device, a Bluetooth-capable PC, and a program called MiiTransfer, Mii avatar data can be scraped from the Wiimote to the PC, then shared through web sites such as the Mii Transfer Station (see the article for details).

I don't know if this is the first such case of avatar liberation, but it certainly won't be the last.