An anonymous reader writes “A campaign started by HelloFax, Google, Expensify, and others has challenged businesses to get rid of physical paper from their office environment in 2013. According to the EPA, the average office worker uses about 10,000 sheets of paper each year, and the Paperless 2013 project wants to move all of those documents online. HelloFax CEO Joseph Walla said, ‘The digital tools that are available today blow what we had even five years ago out of the water. For the first time, it’s easy to sign, fax, and store documents without ever printing a piece of paper. It’s finally fast and simple to complete paperwork and expense reports, to manage accounting, pay bills and invoice others. The paperless office is here – we just need to use it.’ The companies involved all have a pretty obvious dog in this fight, but I can’t say I’d mind getting rid of the stacks of paper HR sends me.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read More:
Campaign To Remove Paper From Offices
An anonymous reader writes with an article from Duke Law on what would have entered the public domain today were it not for the copyright extensions enacted in 1978. From the article: “What could have been entering the public domain in the US on January 1, 2013? Under the law that existed until 1978, works from 1956. The films Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, The Best Things in Life Are Free, Forbidden Planet, The Ten Commandments, and Around the World in 80 Days; the stories 101 Dalmations and Phillip K. Dick’s The Minority Report; the songs ‘Que Sera, Sera’ and ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, and more. What is entering the public domain this year? Nothing.” And Rick Falkvinge shares his predictions for what the copyright monopoly will try this year. As a bit of a music fan, excessive copyright hits home often: the entire discographies of many artists I like have been out of print for at least a decade. Should copyright even be as long as in the pre-1978 law? Is the Berne Convention obsolete and in need of breaking to actually preserve cultural history? Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
ezabi writes “After announcing a 43 Million USD license agreement with Microsoft, the Egyptian government was faced with a protest from FOSS enthusiasts staging a stand before the cabinet http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/activists-protest-microsoft-deal Later, representatives from the community had a meeting with the minister of communications and information technology, such a meeting led to the ministry issuing a press release (in Arabic) stating its commitment to gradually move to open source (Google Translate to English) as a strategic option for future projects. It’s worth mentioning that all governmental websites used in the elections and constitution referendum were all based on open source solutions.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
