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I like his argument, but his .sig really
pisses me off. Slashdot's forum is a public
place. Anything you say here can be quoted
as if you yelled it on the streets of Miami.
That is the result of public expression.

Quoting, or more properly, citation, is covered under fair use. Look it up at Brad Templeton's site: Myth 4, third paragraph:

Fair use is almost always a short excerpt and almost always attributed. (One should not use more of the work than is necessary to make the commentary). It should not harm the commercial value of the work -- in the sense of people no longer needing to buy it (which is another reason why reproduction of the entire work is generally forbidden.)

Also, by simple act of posting my comments here on Slashdot, I obviously implicitly allow copying of my content for the purpose of conducting a discussion on Slashdot. This includes viewing, printing, quoting, and all other uses necessary to have a discussion here on this site. Copyright law explicitly protects such uses.

Use of my text outside of Slashdot, for example in a book published by Andover, or on a Best Of Slashdot CD-ROM, or in other places or for purposes other than discussion here on Slashdot requires a license. That is, I have to explicitly grant you the right to use my words.

Copyright does not cover names, trademark law does that.

Copyright does not cover ideas, patent law does that.

So if you like what I write, but I would not grant you a license to use my words, you could always phrase the ideas I convey in your own words, or express them differently (i.e. using no words at all). That should be differently enough in order not to qualify as a derived work, though.

And finally, when asked, I usually grant the license to use my words for free - completely, unaltered and with correct attribution as well as a pointer to my homepage. I do like to get 1-3 free reference exemplars of printed matter, and pointers to the sites where my words are hosted. Also, I will not grant license to use my words for free, if you sell them. If you make a living by selling my words and my works, I demand a sensible share of that money.

If you want to read my words, and my works, please go to my homepage. You find it at http://www.koehntopp.de/kris. I keep freely accessible online copies of everything I have written and deemed useful, whether sold or not. I make my contracts in such ways that I can maintain this website with my works so that you can access all my published articles and USENET posts as well as my open source projects.

Copyright law may be not an ideal solution, and may be an annoyance sometimes. But there is (or at least was at some point in time) reason behind it and used sensibly and nonoffensively, it can be actually useful to protect the interests of the public as well as the interests of the author. Just try to think, and use Google, before you flame.

© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp

This article is filled with misinformation.

It's best to go right to the sources at the Copyright Office, ASCAP, BMI, RIAA, etc. The restaurant info, the who-owns-the-copyright info, etc., are wrong in implication if not in detail.

And if the legalese is too much, then go here or (when it's back up) here.

Dennis

Friday (Nov 3), An organisation called BREIN (acronym which translates to Protection Rights Entertainment Industry Netherlands) issued a cease-and-desist to the dutch website www.napster.nl for linking to illegal music. They have 48 hours (not including the weekend) to remove all links.

The website's creator, Johan van Vliet, refuses to remove these links. He is referring to a recent deep-linking case in the Netherlands in which deep linking to newspaper articles was deemed legal.

Although newspaper articles are copyrighted material, they are published on the web freely, which seems an entirely different case to me. (On a related note, Brad Templeton has a very interesting article on linking rights.)

As far as I know, it is okay to publish copyrighted material without permission of the copyright holder if it's not-for-profit.

2) "If I don't charge for it, it's not a violation."

False. Whether you charge can affect the damages awarded in court, but that's essentially the only difference. It's still a violation if you give it away -- and there can still be heavy damages if you hurt the commercial value of the property.

Fact: All posts to Usenet are by default copyrighted material and not in the public domain unless explicitly stated. Read this for more info. The Copyright FAQ states that many believe it is implied, though, that by posting to Usenet you agree to let your material be redistributed through that medium. Copyright FAQ is here.

Fact: Most posts to Usenet are made independent of Deja, so whether or not their browsing service is free or their terms of service or whatever conditions they make up is irrelevant when determining if they have violated your intellectual property rights.

Opinion: I don't think allowing your copyrighted material to be reproduced immediately grants others a license use it to promote their commercial interests. I think this whole debate on the legality of Deja's move to use words from your post is a question of fair use.

Opinion/Analogy: Copyrighted music is played on the radio. It is free to whoever tunes in. However, it is illegal for me to record that music off of the radio and then use it in a television commercial without permission/paying royalties to the original copyright owner. I may not be altering the original content of the copyrighted work (the song). I may put a BIG ORANGE TRIANGLE on the screen with my company's logo in it, but does that make it legal? Deja made a business decision to use the content of your copyrighted work to endorse products without your permission. I don't see how this issue is much different.

Final opinion: This forum needs more lawyers and less speculation (including that of my own).

Well, my point was kind of different. Trolls are a Norwegian company and copyright issues would be resolved in Oslo City Court. European copyright laws are different from American (I don't really know how)

Well, as a matter of fact I live in Europe, not in the US. The copyright laws are not really different. All countries that have signed the Berne copyright convention have implemented the same basic rules in their national laws. I do not think that Norway is different in that respect. For more informations about copyrights, you could have a look at:

• 10 Big Myths about copyright explained
• Copyright FAQ (UK)
• EFF Intellectual Property Archive

The last page contains lots of links to useful documents, including several copyright FAQs.

[...] and Trolls do not think that the "viral clause" would be effective in Norwegian court.

Now, this is another matter. It is not related to the copyright laws, but to the interpretation of the GPL. I have seen several statements by TrollTech employees saying that, in their opinion, "neither the GPL nor the LGPL legally protect libraries." However, you have to pay attention to the wording of these statements and what exactly is meant by "protect" in that context.

The GPL does protect the libraries in that it does not allow someone to distribute a compiled version of the library itself without the sources. It also prevents the distribution of a compiled program that links with this library, unless the sources are made available.

However, the GPL does not prevent the distribution of the sources of a program (or another library) that is under a restrictive license and links with the GPL'd or LGPL'd library. For example, I could release the sources of a program under a license that forbids non-commerical use (ha!) and tell the user to compile and link with the GPL'd library. The GPL does nothing against that, because it does not restrict the usage of the GPL'd code, only its distribution or modification. It this case, it would only be possible to distribute the sources or the program (separately from the library), but not the compiled code.

Also, the GPL allows you to use the code freely for your personal use (even for commercial purposes) as long as you do not re-distribute the code (compiled or not).

In his editorial, Eirik Eng says: "If the GPL effectively protected a GPLed library from being used to develop proprietary software, we would allow relicensing Qt under the GPL." As explained above, the GPL effectively prevents the distribution of binary-only programs linked with the library, because the compiled program is considered to be a derivative work as soon as it uses some code (macros, typedefs, ...) from the header files of the library. However, it does not prevent the distribution of source-only programs, and it does not prevent the development of proprietary software using the library as long as the software is not distributed.

Contrary to the GPL, the QPL does not allow the latter, and I think that this puts an unnecessary restriction on the usage of the software. Let's suppose that I am the owner of a small shop and I want to develop my own virtual cash register on my PC using Qt. Well, according to the QPL I would have to get a commercial license if I use this little application in my shop, because that would be a "commercial use". Depending on your point of view, you can consider this as a good or a bad feature of the QPL compared to the GPL.

So they cannot release Qt with GPL as an alternative license because they are afraid that it might ruin their business model, because anyone could then use Qt Free Edition in any project, proprietary or not

Well, of course TrollTech has to earn money somehow. But I do not think that the GPL would ruin their business model. With the GPL, anybody who distributes a program built on top of the library would have to release the sources as well (under the GPL or a compatible license). If by "proprietary" you mean "without sources" or "with a restrictive license, then no, the GPL would not allow that.

for variable := start to finish do begin Statement end;
[ but nicely indented.]

And all you do is fill in the blanks. But at each blank you can get help, get a menu of what you can type and more...."

Brad has released the Source Code ready to compile on Linux. Someone please please make an RPM out of this!

for variable := start to finish do begin Statement end;
[ but nicely indented.]

And all you do is fill in the blanks. But at each blank you can get help, get a menu of what you can type and more...."

Brad has released the Source Code ready to compile on Linux. Someone please please make an RPM out of this!

If you let everybody have any TLD you will just get the same fights over www.TLD or similar.

If you make specific TLDs for specific functions, you will just get fights the same as for .com, as everybody grasps for "the one right domain" for them. And Network Solutions just rakes in the $7 registration fees. They hope that with extra .com domains, they will rake in millions on people doing a pointless landgrab or registering their domain in every single TLD they can get. The only solution is meaningless TLDs. See my domain page for details.

All I can say is ...it's True!

Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction

I myself developed a syntax directed editor in 1985 called ALICE -- see this page to download it for DOS or Linux -- which still 15 years later does more than Intellisense.

There are some MS innovations but this is also 20 year old stuff.

"If I make up my own stories, but base them on another work, my new work belongs to me." False. Copyright law is quite explicit that the making of what are called "derivative works" -- works based or derived from another copyrighted work -- is the exclusive province of the owner of the original work. This is true even though the making of these new works is a highly creative process. If you write a story using settings or characters from somebody else's work, you need that author's permission.

Yes, that means almost all "fan fiction" is a copyright violation. If you want to write a story about Jim Kirk and Mr. Spock, you need Paramount's permission, plain and simple. Now, as it turns out, many, but not all holders of popular copyrights turn a blind eye to "fan fiction" or even subtly encourage it because it helps them. Make no mistake, however, that it is entirely up to them whether to do that.

There is one major exception -- parody. The fair use provision says that if you want to make fun of something like Star Trek, you don't need their permission to include Mr. Spock. This is not a loophole; you can't just take a non-parody and claim it is one on a technicality. The way "fair use" works is you get sued for copyright infringement, and you admit you did infringe, but that your infringement was a fair use. A subjective judgment is then made.

Probably I just broke copyright law by posting that excerpt.

This comes up on Slashdot every now and then and people like you always yell loudest and don't do your homework. YOU HAVE NO CLUE SO SHUT UP AND DON'T ACT AS IF YOU DO.

I've found this article to be quite interesting. I feel comfortable providing this link since Mr. Templeton specifically wrote "Certainly you can feel free to link to these pages!".

Since we're on the topic of "the right to link", I'd like to go off on a slight tangent that has nothing to do with MP3Board. What are the opinions here on framing another site's content without permission? When does framing (or any sort of hyperlinking) represent a derivative work? To clarify, let me pose three different purposes:

1. Framing for content - One site frames the content of another, essentially co-opting the work, whether its attibutable or not. (i.e. Washington Post v. TotalNews...a case which settled without a court decision)
2. Framing for persistence - One site or service frames links to external content, but the frame retains the brand and any advertising within shared space in the browser window. Does providing a drop-frame function mitigate the practice (see Hotmail, AskJeeves, and About.Com for examples.)
3. Framing for functionality - A less common rationale, but consider a tool like a Web-based proxy service. Some fetch pages, at the behest of the user, and render them within a frameset that includes a navigation function and, perhaps, advertising. What now?

It's free. The DOS package is up and can be found via this page which points to the tutorial, manual and FTP archive.

The source code is also availble. It compiles under Linux but has a bit of bit rot. Happy to see people play with it.

Alice was, I am now proud to say, way ahead of its time. It has features that it took other IDEs a decade to introduce, and some good ones they still haven't gotten around to.

It's DOS, but that can be fine for beginners, and runs fine in a DOS box under windows. As a syntax directed editor with 700 context sensative help screens, it was designed to get a student going, and was written with all the Ontario schools as the first customer. Yeah, it should be ported to X and Windows, but I have moved on to other things.

http://www.templetons.com/brad/domain.html

-p.

The famous-on-USENET and now hard to find "annotated CD-ROM of A Fire Upon the Deep " was actually an anthology of all the 1993 Hugo nominees, put together by Brad Templeton (then of ClariNet, and now Chairman of the Board for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Since China Mountain Zhang was also a Hugo nominee that year, it was made available, in its entirety, along with a short QuickTime movie of Maureen McHugh giving pronunciation tips for those of us not fortunate enough to speak any Chinese dialect, and her reading of the beginning of the novel.

(That CD-ROM is a great toy for SF-loving geeks. No, you can't have mine, it's not for sale.)

I did a lot of research into digital cameras last year. I didn't buy one, but here's some of the info I found . . .

How good of a camera you need (and how much you end up spending on one) depends on what you plan to do with the pictures.

If all you want to do is post pix on the web, any 1-megapixel (or less) camera should do a respectable job for you, since web pix are generally low res (640 x 480 or less). At 72 ppi screen res, that's 8.9 x 6.7 inches (pretty big).

What you need the extra pixels for is printing photos onto paper. There's a big controversy over the resolution photos should be printed at, with the general consensus being in the 150 to 300 ppi range. Generally, you should avoid printing at less than 200 ppi.

At 200ppi, you'll need a 1 mp camera to print a standard 4x6 shot, 1.5 mp to do a 5x7, 3.2 mp to do an 8x10, 6.2 mp to do an 11x14.

The highest res digicams available today for under US$1,000, are ~3 mp. Best 3 mp models currently include the Canon PowerShot S20, Nikon CoolPix 990. The 2 mp models of these cameras are the S10 and Coolpix 950. They are all great cameras, and 2 mp models just dropped in price with the introduction of the 3 mp models.

For reviews, visit:

• http://photo.askey.net
  http://www.imaging-resource.com
  http://www.lonestardigital.com
  http://www.steves-digicams.com/cameras.ht ml

Note that you can get good deals buying 2nd hand cameras. A lot of users sell their 1-yr-old cameras to buy the latest models. Also, you should buy a camera that's small. If it's too big to carry around, it won't get used. (The Canons are small, sturdy, and they look cool. Kodaks generally suck in this regard.)

So why didn't I buy a digicam?

I wanted to print really big pictures, and for that you still can't beat film. Film is cheap, and you can scan onto PhotoCD whatever individual frames you like. You get a 6 mp (!) image which you can print onto 11 x 17 paper.

• http://www.templetons.com/brad/pixels.html
  http://photo.net/photo/point-and-shoot.ht ml
  http://photo.net/photo/point-and-sho ot-tips.html

BTW, for a /.-style photo site, check out:

• http://www.techphoto.org

I would suggest perusal of 10 Big Myths about copyright explained from Brad Templeton of ClariNet and EFF. I would suggest concentrating on the following items:

• "If it doesn't have a copyright notice, it's not copyrighted."
  
• "If I don't charge for it, it's not a violation." (in regard to donating the proceeds to charity)
  
• "If it's posted to Usenet it's in the public domain."
  
• "My posting was just fair use!"
  
• "If I make up my own stories, but base them on another work, my new work belongs to me." (in regard to compilation copyright)
  

Many of us would not read or post to Slashdot if we were not concerned about issues like privacy, the GPL, and IP. While nothing, in my opinion, ever justifies hate mail, nobody should at least have been surprised that many Slashdotters would be concerned about this.

Removes your links when you preview. The link from the last post was this one

What you say is true of trademarks -- which is why 3M prefers you to say "Scotch-brand tape" and not "scotch tape".

However, copyright can only expire or be given up. From 10 Big Myths about copyright:

5) "If you don't defend your copyright you lose it." -- "Somebody has that name copyrighted!" False. Copyright is effectively never lost these days, unless explicitly given away. You also can't "copyright a name" or anything short like that, such as almost all titles. You may be thinking of trade marks, which apply to names, and can be weakened or lost if not defended

Just FYI.

James

If the original poster is an American, and didn't throw a © notice on it, it's not copyrighted!

This is, by the way, the very first item in Brad Templeton's 10 Big Myths about copyright explained.

IANAL, but searching the Web has turned up what seems to be a fairly clear answer: Mindcraft did violate copyright law, but the victims don't have much recourse other than to demand that they cease and desist forthwith.

More details can be found at Terrence J. Carroll's Copyright FAQ, Part 3 and Brad Templeton's 10 Big Myths about copyright explained.
/.

Now, improvements made by others only is defined as the files where his copyright is on the top. If someone makes a (say) 2 line mod to a single file, but does not include their (c) symbol in the code as well, then they don't have a legal leg to stand on. The original (c) holder may take that code, put a different license on it and distribute it commercially/proprietry if they wish. If someone wants to enforce that you (being the original code writer) don't redistribute their changes, you need to put your little (c) mark on it as well. If you don't there's no point in crying over spilt milk.

This is incorrect. Since almost(?) the entire world has now signed the Berne Convention, you now have an implicit copyright on everything you write. You have to do something to give up this right, such as to do the work as a "work for hire", assigning it to the public domain, etc.

So, if I change two lines of code around in some file, no one else can use that patch w/o my permission. Things quickly start to get funny here. If I don't spell out what copy rights I want to reserve and what I want to give away, then it is not clear what, if any rights you have to use my work. Much of the time you can argue that the author "implicitly" gave certain rights away. Such as if I post the patch to Usenet or the Web, with a comment that says "this patch should fix the multi-user race condition, let me know if it doesn't work", then I think that most courts would conclude that I have given up much of my copy rights. Similarly, by writing this article and submitting it to /., I have given implicit permission for it to appear on /. and to be transmitted to other people. I have also implicitly said that it is OK to create "diriviative works" by quoting my article in your follow up. What isn't clear is whether I have given implicit permission for it to be copied anywhere else.

Now if my patch is applied to a GPL'ed or similar OSS license, then it can be argued, and the courts would probably agree that I implicitly licensed my patch under the same license. This means that you can't take my patch and change the license. (The BSD license, however, would allow you to take my patch and make it proprietary.)

Please note that the string "(c)" has no legal meaning. At one time, to copyright something, you have to use a c with a circle around it "©", or spell out "Copyright", but now with the Berne convention, neither of these are required. So saying "(c) Wayne Schlitt, all rights reserved" has never done anything for me.

These messy areas where you have to argue that the author gave "implicit permission" to do something causes a lot of problems in the OSS community. The Debian folks are very strict about honoring the copyrights and licenses of other people. You won't find any pirated warez on their machines. However, they frequently run into packages that have lines like this:

(c) Copyright by Foo Bar, all rights reserved. This package is in the public domain.

A good place to start for more information about copyrights is here and a related one one copyright myths here.

Finally, the rules for copyrights and for patents are very different. Patents prevent people from using an inventions, even if it was independantly discovered, copyrights apply only to the "expression of an idea." If you come up, independantly, with the same two line patch, then there is nothing that my copyright on my patch can do to prevent you from using yours.

Now, improvements made by others only is defined as the files where his copyright is on the top. If someone makes a (say) 2 line mod to a single file, but does not include their (c) symbol in the code as well, then they don't have a legal leg to stand on. The original (c) holder may take that code, put a different license on it and distribute it commercially/proprietry if they wish. If someone wants to enforce that you (being the original code writer) don't redistribute their changes, you need to put your little (c) mark on it as well. If you don't there's no point in crying over spilt milk.

This is incorrect. Since almost(?) the entire world has now signed the Berne Convention, you now have an implicit copyright on everything you write. You have to do something to give up this right, such as to do the work as a "work for hire", assigning it to the public domain, etc.

So, if I change two lines of code around in some file, no one else can use that patch w/o my permission. Things quickly start to get funny here. If I don't spell out what copy rights I want to reserve and what I want to give away, then it is not clear what, if any rights you have to use my work. Much of the time you can argue that the author "implicitly" gave certain rights away. Such as if I post the patch to Usenet or the Web, with a comment that says "this patch should fix the multi-user race condition, let me know if it doesn't work", then I think that most courts would conclude that I have given up much of my copy rights. Similarly, by writing this article and submitting it to /., I have given implicit permission for it to appear on /. and to be transmitted to other people. I have also implicitly said that it is OK to create "diriviative works" by quoting my article in your follow up. What isn't clear is whether I have given implicit permission for it to be copied anywhere else.

Now if my patch is applied to a GPL'ed or similar OSS license, then it can be argued, and the courts would probably agree that I implicitly licensed my patch under the same license. This means that you can't take my patch and change the license. (The BSD license, however, would allow you to take my patch and make it proprietary.)

Please note that the string "(c)" has no legal meaning. At one time, to copyright something, you have to use a c with a circle around it "©", or spell out "Copyright", but now with the Berne convention, neither of these are required. So saying "(c) Wayne Schlitt, all rights reserved" has never done anything for me.

These messy areas where you have to argue that the author gave "implicit permission" to do something causes a lot of problems in the OSS community. The Debian folks are very strict about honoring the copyrights and licenses of other people. You won't find any pirated warez on their machines. However, they frequently run into packages that have lines like this:

(c) Copyright by Foo Bar, all rights reserved. This package is in the public domain.

A good place to start for more information about copyrights is here and a related one one copyright myths here.

Finally, the rules for copyrights and for patents are very different. Patents prevent people from using an inventions, even if it was independantly discovered, copyrights apply only to the "expression of an idea." If you come up, independantly, with the same two line patch, then there is nothing that my copyright on my patch can do to prevent you from using yours.