I find it a little funny that TealPoint, makers of some truly awesome software for Palm's now-decrepit Operating Systems of days gone by, whipped out a launcher called TealOS that pretty much apes the WebOS that will supposedly "save" the bacon of the beleaguered handheld company. You know, Palm, the people who, after Apple dropped the ball, ran the PDA into the end zone back in the 90's?

See, if you out-innovate a company like Palm, you're going to get smacked with a cute "stop it" from someone's legal department. In this case, TealPoint has been told in no uncertain terms to stop distributing copies of TealOS (you can see it in action in the video above -- until Palm lawyers tell YouTube to pull it). Lucky for you lovers of fine software, you can get this rare vintage until Monday, March 30, 2009. My condolences to the families of the engineers who are going to burn some midnight oil "to try to get as many bug fixes and requested improvements in as we can" before Monday.

According to Engadget, a Palm rep had TealOS on a Pre at one point and seemed pretty stoked about it. Chalk that up to ignorant bliss, I suppose, as someone at Palm wasn't quite cool enough to grok how awesome this tool is -- especially if you are NOT rocking a Pre. Yeah, the Pre, the phone we don't know exactly when it will appear or what it will cost (but we do know it'll be a Sprint-tastic exclusive). Maybe this isn't funny. Maybe it is sad that Palm feels so threatened by such a tool (which only mimics the app launching portions of WebOS and doesn't provide a framework for creating applications) that they have to crush it. It's sadder still, as TealPoint's outgoing message on their tealtalk forum says "the program's success came at a badly needed time." Sound like the crashing economy and plummeting Palm marketshare has been unkind to them. Good thing they've got a friend like Palm in their corner, right? Yeah.

Google is known for its quick reactions to copyright claims, taking down videos from YouTube and Google video at the request of original copyright holders -- especially big players like TV networks. Recently, Paulo Ordoveza found one of his videos was the victim of one of these claims, and it was taken down from Google Video. The strange thing is that he had recorded his piece -- a time-lapse of some clouds -- back in 2006, way before it was used by Arianna Huffington's 23/6 Media as part of the infamous "Anonymous Message to Scientology" video.

Paulo says the video is coming back up, but this incident still raises a bigger issue about the effectiveness of Google's automated copyright enforcement scheme, which uses "a program that analyzes similarities in audio or video between user videos and a library of reference content provided to us by copyright owners. When a video matches a reference file, that video is automatically disabled." Is a system like this adequate when it comes to independent authors who want to make a video freely available for use, avoiding any kind of aggressive copyright enforcement?

For the record, Paulo never had a problem with 23/6's use of the video, and he's a fan of Anonymous. 23/6 also never asked that the original video come down. You can compare the two videos for yourself: here's the original, and here's the Anonymous Message.

CORRECTION: Paulo writes in to correct a few things here. The original Anonymous Message was not done by 23/6, who actually made a later parody of that video. Also, the correct link for the clouds from 2006 is here. Thanks, Paulo!

[via BoingBoing]