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The big battles are now about software patents, not copyright, and particularly take place in connection with mobile devices: http://www.scribd.com/my_document_collections/2770688

I never intended for my FOSS Patents blog to be a discussion community like Groklaw, but I do cover those issues and try to help a broader audience understand the strategic battlelines, such as with the visualizations available in the above folder.

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Is the Sony mess not important? It's all about copyrights and license agreements, and it seems like it could have major repercussions for the right to run the software of your choosing on hardware that you own. (Not to mention the horrible privacy precedents Sony is trying to set with their subpoenas.)

I'm not saying that the software patent issues aren't big, but they're battles between corporate giants, and will have limited effect on developers until most of them are settled. The Sony cases, on the other hand, could mean that you would need the manufacturer's permission before putting free software on the hardware they sold you. Most companies selling hardware would love for that to be the case, but it would make it nearly impossible for open-source communities to form around consumer hardware.

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