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Open Source and Legal Protection
"I'm in the middle of taking a current bastion of big science and making it open-sourced. I'm not going to say exactly what I'm working on right now but I'm alas confident that shortly after this codebase is released, I will be the target of numerous lawsuits by holders of patents and software patents. Although I am reverse-engineering everything from published work, it has been made clear to me that most of the implementation of the work is considered proprietary and the rest is considered trade secrets.
The field from which this work is drawn is currently in the hands of a minority of individuals, some of whom are scrambling to create startups based on their work. I have real ethical problems with their ongoing hoarding of valuable data and algorithms developed with public and defense money hence I am attempting to get their capabilities into the hands of any interested individual. Not everyone in the field acts this way, but enough do to make it a real issue with me and others.
So, my question is how do I cover my butt? After the DeCSS affair, I want to be ready for the attack lawyers before they come. Who knows, maybe they won't, but I've never gotten very far on optimism."
moderators, do your job
Finally, a worthy troll. Congratulations.
it is crucial to check for patents before releasing something that is considered to be a trade secret.
Oh shit! I can imagine programmers at their prime in the teenage years and in college going out and doing full patent searches themselves for every project they do. Never mind that the programming is mostly common sense to a standard problem. $10,000 for a simple search, no problem!
The problem is that software patents are causing lots of needless grief.
document everythingOr, you can be anonymous.
Are you a woman?
This comment is overrated, and contains extemely bad advice. You are explaining how to release some hacked and illegal stuff on the Internet, hoping that it will be impossible for the cops to catch you. The guy asking the question wants to release something legally to the community (meaning: allowing others to use it without being prosecuted because they use some dirty stuff that some 31337 d00dz have spread all over the net). He is worried about being safe himself and staying on the legal side, not about how to steal some secret stuff and distributing it all over the world.
hey go to a public computer system... and then massively send out the information how will they catch you? DeCSS third partner
"Although I am reverse-engineering everything from published work, it has been made clear to me that most of the implementation of the work is considered proprietary and the rest is considered trade secrets."
The key point here is published work. Do you mean "published in the open scientific literature", or do you mean "published in govt/internal reports"?
If the former that is a very different situation to DeCSS. If the latter you are on your own.
This is just a guess, but I bet this guy is working on hyperbolic trees. The guys at inxight (Xeros spinoff) have "patented" the use of hyper- bolic trees in software, even though the algorithm for drawing them would be fairly trivial for someone in the field of math software. Hyperbolic trees are useful for mapping internet sites.
Are you an asshole?
(Say, DVD CCA lawyers: the idea that DeCSS could be used to produce an unencrypted DVD on consumer DVD-recordable media is not new. This possibility will be acknowledged in all sorts of places. The consequences of this fact will be argued about in court. But, if you do care to quote this message in a declaration, please refrain from eliding "Though it has not been demonstrated"; I read all your court filings and will point out the omission to defense lawyers if you quote selectively. Thanks.)
Guess what?
The "caps lock" key was invented.
Use it.
Dork.
Yeah, and use the proposed trade rules on shrinkwrapped licenses to back you up. Put a license notice on the page, that visitors agree to just by loading the page. Then make a simple HTML form that has a text box, and call it an application. Then demand $200 for its use.
Most programmers cringe at documentation, what makes you think they will be happy at the thought of going out and searching patents? Its not bloodly likely.
HEH
You're so funny! I can't stop laughing! This is too much, how can anyone be so hilarious. So stupendously exhilarant person must be a born comedian!
Sarcasm aside, that dude is a fucking dork.
> What's the difference between stealing intellectual property from a person who is under > NDA and by reverse engineer a certain product? There is a big difference. An NDA is a contract, and we all agree that you shouldn't break contracts. Reverse engineering is just a matter of taking apart something that you own. It is immoral for the government to say what I can and cannot do with my own property, in my own house. MOREOVER, if people want to keep their secrets, they should not sell them to people embedded in their products. It's just common sense.
SORRY
YOU DIDN'T REALLY GET FIRST POST. IT'S JUST IN YOUR MIND, MY FRIEND
BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME
> What's the difference between stealing intellectual property from a person who is under
> NDA and by reverse engineer a certain product?
There is a big difference. An NDA is a contract, and we all agree that you shouldn't break contracts.
Reverse engineering is just a matter of taking apart something that you own. It is immoral for the government to say what I can and cannot do with my own property, in my own house.
MOREOVER, if people want to keep their secrets, they should not sell them to people embedded in their products. It's just common sense.
[ Damn HTML posting defaults ]
You are explaining how to release some hacked and illegal stuff on the Internet, hoping that it will be impossible for the cops to catch you
Oh, he hasn't even started to describe the ways one can be anonymous. What he stated was basic common sense, not advanced strategic methods involving basic technology and networking.
The problem we have is a war of capitalists trying to map property rights over the entire software terrain. The game is to brand a profit method to the intangible so it can be viable and traded on the market. Its how capitalism thrives. Be ready for an information takeover of the internet! The concept of information rights are being lobbied for intensly now. This is our freedom we are talking about.
i basically agree with what you're saying, but there's a problem: what happens when he gets himself and account or two, or three and starts spamming with those... giving him a default posting score of 1. then everyone has to set their threshold to 2 to avoid it and legitimate ACs get ignored. at that point, the moderators still end up wasting points to moderate up legit ACs to a level of 2 just to get read.
YOU SUCK AT SPELLING AND YOUR POST SUCKS TOO
I'M SORRY BUT I'M GOING TO HAVE TO CASTRATE YOU
MR.T IS GONNA KICK YOUR ASS AFTER THAT!
It's only organized because you're an ignorant goit.
Some of us speak the Queen's English, know how to count without counting 10 twice, and know how to turn off caps lock.
3
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KEEP WASTING THEM POINTS
5
KEEP WASTING THEM POINTS
SIX
KEEP WASTING THEM POINTS
7
KEEP WASTING THEM POINTS
8
KEEP WASTING THEM POINTS
9
AWWW YEAH. MODERATE THIS DOWN BITCH. YOU'RE LOSING POINTS BY THE FUCKING POST
10
AWWW YEAH. MODERATE THIS DOWN BITCH. YOU'RE LOSING POINTS BY THE FUCKING POST
10
THIS TAKES ME A FEW MINUTES TO DO, AND YET YOU'RE WASTING POINTS ON IT. HA HA HA HA HA
WHOOPS. I HAD TWO TENS.
11
Right, and what do you think was the entire purpose of inventing Viagra? So they could say that "Oooh look, we cured impotence, now everyone will know our name and we'll be famous?" No, unfortunately not....millions of dollars of research went into a product with the sole purpose of making money, lots of money, lots and lots of money. If you take away the ability for companies to make money from their inventions, people lose the incentive to innovate, to invent, to take risks and chances.
For everyone project that succeeds, there are hundreds more that fail. This is why there are a lack of projects in the Open Source world that do actually innovate...They take a relatively safe product, say a window manager, or a browser, and 'improve' it's functionality, whether that be stability, usability, or otherwise...a major project, one that requires time, money, and lots of effort, and is not absolutely 100% guaranteed to be successful will be scorned by any Open Source programmers as a likely waste of time.
Granted OS has definite advantages over some proprietory systems: improved stability, bug-stomping, advanced-UI design, but it is still lacking in the acknowledgement risks that come hand in hand with innovation.
If you feel like talking more about this, I'll be glad to hear your side of things. I didn't feel like logging in so...
Email me at god@(nospamdamnit)wkpowerlink.comSo? You still need expensive mastering equipment to create the final product. It's that same equipment that allows commercial pirates to do their business with or without DeCSS. This would merely allow you to pirate from the pirates.
Even then, you would still need the aforementioned expensive mastering equipment to make a real DVD.
i require protection for my open source pants. they are open to the pouring of hot bowls of grits down them. thank you.
I've been told that bash (bourne again shell) was also developed using this method. It seems a clever way to do things in my opinion.
Neat! I guess this means that if it was a GPL'd work, that the GPL doesn't apply, as a copyright can't be issued to and defended by "anonymous user x."
On the other hand, the "portal" that provides the anonymnity could be held responsible.
Are they of the college culture, real computer programmers who enjoy communication,
I will translate that, for our viewers out in the real world. What the previous writer meant by "college culture" was people on the staff at Universities, who should be teaching, tutoring students, or engaged in formal research or administrative tasks.
Someone whose wages we all pay.
Someone who sits around diddling with "Open Source
projects instead, sad to say.
(abolish Tenure)
> such is the nature of living in a non-free society (and
> I won't dignify anyone who says we do with a reply
I'll accept that we don't live in a free society. However, given that as a premise, one must conclude that no one ever has and no one ever will.
BTW, the gov. CAN own copyrights, but only by way of transfer, not creation.
Besides, taking it up the ass doesn't make you gay. Especially if you are a woman. Grow up.
But the problem is, if I want to read the good comments at -1, like the natalie portman ones, I also have to put up with stupid people like you.
We need a finer grained moderation here so that the funny trolls can be weeded out from the stupid trolls (you) and those from the banal idiocy of the people who repeat the same phrase a hundred times in a commment.
Only by doing this can we be sure to make slashdot all things to all people. (except of course for tight-assed pricks who don't like the thought of humour occuring here.)
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Black box approach. Is that like when you take a lock and probe it with little "picks" until you determine how it responds to various shapes of keys? I was black-box testing over at my neighbor's the other day and discovered that it is indeed illegal. And I didn't even steal anything.
Something that wasn't mentioned in "Cringeley's" (not his real name) special was that the ASM source code for the IBM PC ROM-BIOS is fully disclosed. If you look in the Technical Reference Manual (available to anybody who pays for it) it's all there commented, with meaningful labels, etc.
Anybody who read that section of the Tech Ref. Manual was in effect prohibited from being part of the team coding the new version. The task of the other team was to read through the code and write a "neutral" document describing the function calls, etc., in a general form for reimplementation.
If you're interested in x86 Assembly, by all means get the IBM source listings. I have seen similar listings for other BIOS versions, i.e. it's in the Programmers Ref. Manual for the AT&T 6300 as well.
The BIOS-clone project was not a case of black-box reverse engineering, because the source was out there and publicly available (and copyrighted by IBM, of course.)
Take anything that 'Cringeley' has to say with a grain of salt, as he's primarily a self-promoter trying to elbow his way into "personal computing history" with his anecdotes.
hgahgahlaghaghaghalag
Economics is morality, and morality is economics.
Whoops! Looks like you just flunked out of a half dozen undergraduate philosophy courses.
Ethics for one.
Logic for another.
But I'm sure you never took those courses.
Your "moral relativism" is repulsive to behold. What a shame that whoemever you got your education failed so badly.
Economics is morality, and morality is economics.
Whoops! Looks like you just flunked out of a half dozen undergraduate philosophy courses.
Ethics for one.
Logic for another.
But I'm sure you never took those courses.
Your "moral relativism" is repulsive to behold. What a shame that whoemever you got your education from failed so badly.
I guess that makes you queer. You probably are considering you call everyone else one. Come out of the closet and stop raping the dog.
Read the fine print dude. All CD's and DVD's are copyrighted. This means you can only do what the owners WANT you to do. This means no copying, no broadcasting, and yes, even no playing. Copyright law makes no distinction between copying to make a duplicate or copying into a temporary storage medium (ie. RAM) for playback. It's just that companies aren't THAT stupid.
Your analogy regarding Coca Cola is _exactly_ what I have been thinking with regard to the DeCSS case. It seems to me that what the DeCSS author has done is akin to taking a bottle of Coke into the chemistry lab and analyzing it. The MPAA seems to think it was like the author broke into the main safe at Coke headquarters and stole the formula, or maybe brainwashed or threatened the CEO (or chief chemist or whatever) until he squealed. Unfortunately, it seems that the judge is taking the theft point of view. IANAL, but from what I learned in high school about the advantage of a trade secret over a patent is that the patent comes to and end, but the trade secret could, theoretically, live forever. The downside of the trade secret is that if the secret is somehow disclosed, you have NO protection. I'm sure a lot of laws have been written since I was in high school, but at the time it didn't seem to matter how the secret was disclosed. Even if the secret holder did a poor job of protecting the secret.
SIWIWAL (Sometimes I Wish I Was A Lawyer) (No, I take that back!) I would like to know for certain, however, whether I was taught wrong in high school, or whether the MPAA's money, lobbying power, and characterization of the DeCSS author as a hacker and pirate is influencing the judges thinking.
Cool, the ultimate warez network. :-))
;-)
Really, how do they plan to keep warez off this? Or maybe they aren't.
Don't get sued in the first place. Right or wrong, the lawsuit will ruin your day. Assuming there is nothing criminal involved (like violation of a NDA), and this really is just genuine reverse engineering, without patent infringement, I would find an anonymous way of posting it (like from the computers in a public library, if youdon't have to post 3500 lines of source). That way nobody's logs will give you away to the hounds from hell in pinstripe suits. (I _am_ a lawyer.) Encourage mirrors. The first few sites to post your stuff might expect visits, but presumably are sophisticated enough to cover their asses, or are overseas and beyond the reach of US jurisdiction (but recall the DeCSS fiasco). My point is that you don't want to be come a small target for the big guns, and you can only do this by being anonymous. There is no other safe way if you expect a spasm of retribution from the people whose plans you are frustrating.
Mr. T ca kick my ass I he feels like it, but some how you don't strike quite that much fear i my heart. >:)%
FUCK OFF AND LEARN TO TYPE, FAG
BY THE WAY YOUR FACE IS QUEERISH
I see nothing wrong with releasing the works anonymously. There are many creative ways to do this, but the greatest joy might be publicizing this great gem that surfaced. You can let others know that you are greatly interested in its function, set up web pages, irc groups about it, and provide support while the "author" is "annonymous." You would be the greatest wiz kid that came along to help nurture the best minds that gravitate to it.
Don't get attacked. Be anonymous, except for your enthusiasm and support. I doubt you would be hassled for supporting a great project that surfaces out of the ground like a buried treasure.
NO ONE CARES ABOUT OTHER COUNTRIES. US > *
into cowards ? Why is it that the posters dare not give up their names, much less their ./ nicks ? It seems like we are losing the battle, and it's because we are playing their game. It's become a game of chess, where you always need to watch your next move, just like they do. We need to take the power back! Seriously! logins...who needs em ;p
USING BOLD EVERY OTHER WORD MAKES YOU A QUEER
Of course it's true.
If you haven't 'earned' a 24-hour IP ban from your trolling, you can't really call yourself a full Slashdot troll.
I got my IP ban for a First Post that mentioned "Richard Stallman, in Lime Green pantyhose."
Sadly, I cannot reveal who I am.
It might depend on how close you are to this project, and how identifiable you might be, but if you decide not to put your name on the work, can they legally go after you (i.e. they won't know who to go after)? Of course, if anyone wants to incoperate it into their project, it brings a whole new issue with tons of software being written by nameless people. Perhaps an even better idea is to write under a pseudonym. Back to the good ol' days of handles, and such.
Your first bullet-point is not quite right. When you work as employee or contractor, the law considers your employer to be the "author" of the work, even if you did the thinking and typing. And that's even without a contract. No transfer of copyright neccessary. A contract just makes it explicit to reduce the amount of litigation. Or a contract can trasfter the copyright from the employer to employee, of course.
I often see on /. that people think that because they wrote it, they own the copyright. It ain't necessarily so. The copyright code isn't hard to find and it is remarkably readable.
And when you modify some code and add your copyright claim to another's, you both share copyright to that code and licensing becomes a unclear issue. Most people think that authors of derivatives can add restrictions, but not remove any. It is complicated by whether the derivative is a collective work, a joint work, or a compilation and whether financial gain is involved. All of these terms are defined in the US Code. The latter term is interesting: "The term ''financial gain'' includes receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value, including the receipt of other copyrighted works." It gives a whole new meaning to "free, as in beer" if I'm expecting you to return your modifications, like with the SCSL or maybe even the GPL.
Jon Katz will punish you for trolling!!!!!11
Yeah, just ask 2600.com about what it is like to express great enthusiasm for something facing legal scrutiny :). My thought is that if you feel your ethics necessitate your releasing this information to the public, then I would do so through as anonymous a mechanism as you can find. Usenet comes to mind.
If you post it anonymously, then the legal fallout will mostly hit those who make use of the information you released if it indeed violates some patents, etc. I say give them the chance to make that decision, but you might want to tag a few disclaimers on things so they know what they are getting into (just as a courtesy). As long as it is nearly impossible to trace back to you, then your butt should be covered.
I would suggest finding some sort of publicly accessible terminal. Public libraries seem like a good possibility. I've also seen kiosks in a few places (the oasis rest stops over chicagoland expressways for example). All you do is pump in some cash (as yet still untraceable), and your out on-line and anonymous. Go get a bogus account at deja news and a few free web sites, then post it all over the place.
Whatever you do, do not do anything from your own computer over any connection that can be traced to you. As soon as you do go public, wipe all records that you ever knew about this stuff (unless because of your position that would seem suspicious).
Is this true?
YOU DON'T
IF YOU WEREN'T SUCH A RETARD YOU'D KNOW WHAT A THRESHOLD IS
FUCK OFF
YOUR LONG, LAME POST WILL MOST LIKELY GO UNREAD BY MOST PEOPLE
BECAUSE IT BLOWS
this, to me....is simply wrong. you are basically taking the research of others...their discoveries, hard work, and insights... and stealing them. you aren't simply 'fighting' some software behemoth like microsoft to ensure that the major programs people run aren't inherently buggy and crash prone... you're taking the painstaking work of others, in a relatively new and unestablished field, stealing them, and screwing the new startups over. it hasn't been established that these new companies won't benefit us, the consumer. they've done nothing monopolistic, they've yet to display any sign of evil... what happened to free enterprise? open source is not the epitome of human economic development...it's merely another way of doing things, which has proven in numerous cases to be very beneficial. but that doesn't mean that we should blindly strive to open source *everything*. you should not be reverse engineering the works of others in order to wrest control of their ingenius solutions for the sole purpose of open sourcing something. take decss for example. at its core, the media companies are trying to fight illegal ... thefts/pirating/copying/whateverpoliticallycorrect termyouwanttouse. this is not about companies restricting the rights of individuals to understand/learn an algorithm. i'm convinced that the true intent of decss was to facilitate pirating. it makes no difference if you think that dvds are overpriced...that's the way the system works. you don't like it, make your own movies and sell for cheap. same goes with intellectual property...the problem is that people see patents granted on business processes to fools such as jay walker and his priceline...patents that are obvious and should never have been granted. but i believe that the fault lies with the patent office. they're the ones that allow such nonsense to go on. defensive patents are concievable. likewise...to attempt to open source anything for the sole purpose of open sourcing everything is a blind and empty act. ...or not... i had a point to make..but i think i kinda rambled and lost it halfway thru oh well i just think this is wrong...and im' sure there are those who will agree
How about spending your own money towards research and development instead of just copying the ideas from someone who has worked for it. Otherwise I'm sure that company has deeper pockets than you and can afford many high priced lawyers. Prepare to lose in court.
SORRY FRIEND
LOOK FOR WAREXZ ELSEWHERE
LIKE #BEARCAVE ON EFNET
THAT'S A COOL CHANNEL
I'M A HAIRYBEAR
Some clueless fuckwit moderated grumpy_geek's post as Offtopic? Why?
Aside from the usual problems with this idea, remember when we had an actual lawyer on Slashdot who had an article about patents? One of the points he made was that if you've seen the patent but your work is later found to violate the patent, that's considered willful infringement and means extra penalties for you. You can't say "it wasn't willful, because I honestly believed I wasn't violating the patent"--the law only consideres attorneys competent to make such a decision and if you look at the patent yourself, it's *automatically* willful.
Which means that you're better off *not* looking at the patent. The law is rarely simple.
Fact 1: There are numerous ways to copy DVD information to other formats that does not require the use of DeCSS.
Fact 2: The commercially available blank media for DVD does not permit burning of the encryption keys to the media thus making a copy of an original DVD totally useless
Fact 3: Even if Fact 2 was not true, the DVD players are expecting the media to be encrypted, so it would be a waste of time to decrypt it.
Why shouldn't it be legal for me to make copies of my movies? Why shouldn't it be legal for me to rip it and put it in other formats. Sure, I can see why it would be naughty of me to then take those copies and give it away or sell it, but the ability to commit a criminal act with a technology does not warrant the prohibition of the technology. If that were true, everything from guns to pocket knives would have been illegal long ago.
There are real pirates out there who are making illegal copies, and if the MPAA wants to go after them, fine! But that is not what they are doing! They aren't taking on pirates, they are taking on programmers and web site hosters who want to play DVD's on a Linux! Don't listen to the MPAA spin doctors, look at the facts at opendvd.org.
YOU'RE EVEN MORE OF A QUEER THAN WAS ORIGINALLY THOUGHT
TO REPLY TO A TROLL IS TO FEED A TROLL
SEE ALSO: A WASTE OF TIME
BY THE WAY, DID I MENTION YOU'RE A QUEER?
IANAL?
HAHA THAT MEANS YOU TAKE IT IN THE ASS!!
You need to take out a loan and buy some imagination.
No, No, not "Shutt he", it should be "shut the".
Learn to spell before trolling in future.
This only applies to the USA. In the rest of the world patents protect a "techological advance". (I.e. not algorithms or buisness ideas)
This seems like an easy way to take over the market for them. The world will go with an MS linux distribution well before any other... They could tie it in well with other flairs of their OS and easily take back market share...
If you just want to post it annonymously, both the community college and the university that I have attended have labs without video survelliance and with guest accounts.
As others have pointed out, this probably wouldn't help others in legal use or futher re-engineering.
If it were me, I would document everything and get a good copyright lawyer before releasing anything. I would also read as much as I could about copyright law, patent law, intellectual property law, and case law regarding IP, patents, and copyrights. I would probably also contact EFF and FSF for assistance/advice too.
99% of such problems are related to the weird US law. Get your project located somewhere else, say in a ru cz or pl domain. Don't try Germany ( or Norway ;) ). We have such weird laws too.
Has there ever been a service that facillitates true anonymous publishing of digital works?
/var/log/secure? Do you know how to check these logs? Are they of the college culture, real computer programmers who enjoy communication, or are they pushbutton administrators of a major online provider that will squeeze troublemakers like a cockroach under their shoe if one single person complains?
Know your ISP. How often do the logs rotate for ftp, http, and usenet? Do you know how to check these? Do they print logins and entries in
Log in from a dynamic IP and post from usenet from the ISP's shell. Does your newsreader or the server attatch your ID? How long is your dialup ID stored in the dialup database? You can ask your ISP if you are unsure. Let them know you value privacy. If they don't respect that, get another ISP and yes, I would be interested if they do not respect privacy too.
You can log in from a friend's house. I'd imagine the flames will be high if the FBI knocks on his door and they have to search all his friend's houses and take everyone's computer. hehehe...
If its something you beleive in, go for it. Get creative. You know damn well, the capitalists use every avenue for maximizing profits and minimizing liabilities. You can too. Its all about money. Who wants to play the game is who will determine where the resources will flow. If you wish the general public to benefit, rather than your pockets, anonymous is a good way to go if you don't want to battle the elite capitalist club.
Alas, I wished it were so. NASA and most universities have large patent offices and are quite serious about profitting from their patents.
The CusSEEME video conferecing s/w was developed by Carnegie Mellon with Government money too! However, they won't release the source code to it: only if you join their consortium and pay fees. And even if you join the consortium, you can't release the source. A while back Carnegie Mellon sold the s/w or licensed it to White Pine Software which made the colorized version of it.
Thus not all publicly funded or government/Darpa funded stuff is in the public domain. I wished it were though since I'd like to get a copy of this source.
E-mail the source to a foreign colleague in a country without software patent law, and have him take official "credit" for any patent-infringing work. This has worked before.
SO WHAT IF HE IS? YOU GOT A PROBLEM WITH THAT? HOMOPHOBE!
All of this is, of course, IMNSHO. Cheers, Elmo
What happened to this article? For some reason, the colors are all in gray, and the word wrap is turned off. Each paragraph scrolls all the way across the screen, instead of having all line feeds.
It's not my settings, because all other articles are appearing normally.
Here's the problem: the project implements what many have made clear to be proprietary information and trade secrets.
Okay, I'm not a lawyer, but it is my understanding that trade secret protection applies to secrets that were stolen from a company that kept them secret. The standard for violation of trade secret protection is that the secrets must have been protected from the competition and the general public, and the people who acquired them must have made an effort to breech that secrecy. Determining how a product works by black box testing wouldn't qualify as a violation of trade secrets. Stealing confidential documents or getting one of their engineers drunk and recording the conversation would.
This codebase has been written based on published specs?
IANAL (of course), but I was under the impression that building software projects based on published specs isn't reverse engineering. Remember that Cringly PBS special? Didn't compaq build their original PC clone by having one engineer reverse engineer the PC BIOS, write out extensive specs, and have another engineer (w/ no knowledge of the work) build the new BIOS based on those specs?
Note how comprehensively this story has been trolled. Some people with vested interests are obviously trying to drown out the reasoned discussion necessary to establish organised resistance to the idiots in charge.
I think trolling is becoming more coordinated.
Wow -- so much for trade secrets -- this describes the algorithm for descrambling data on DVDs I wonder if it might make some impact in the california case.(it doesn't appear to cover authentication/key tables etc)
Publish it anonymously through the cypherpunks remailers and/or "www.freedom.net".
If the programmer is that concerned about it, then don't tell anyone who he is. Just release the code. There are plenty of places to upload the code to make it available to the public without having to stamp your name all over it.
As we all see with this DeCCS deal, once its out there, there's no stopping it.
Sign up for a $GENERIC_FREE_HOMEPAGE account using a fake name. Afraid they might log your IP? Do it from a net cafe or something. Post anonymously to slashdot. Watch mirrors pop up around the world.
%japh = (
'name' => 'Niklas Nordebo', 'mail' => 'niklas@' . 'nordebo.com',
'work' => 'www.sonox.com', 'phone' => '+46-708-405095'
Not to be a party-pooper, I've participated in discussions like this before after all, but the correct answer to the question, and the only one that should be offered, is GO SEEK THE ADVICE OF A LAWYER.
There are lots of people out there that are educated or semi-educated in the ways of the law, but you shouldn't really take the word of lay people on something like this, which could potentially land you in a lot of heat.
Hell, there are trained professionals out there who can't get it right, so why would anyone want to risk listening to this bunch. So go talk to someone who is a paid professional, and hope they know what they're doing.
As a side note, I find it troubling when people say 'this is a legal issue, only talk to lawyers about it.' The law is complicated, but information and thoughts regarding it should not be restricted to just 'the Sacred Priesthood.'
That's very well put. However, in some parts, if you are not a lawyer and your are caught giving what would be considered legal advice, you can get in serious trouble. You certainly open yourself up for a law suit if you tell someone something is legal and it turns out that it isn't.
I don't like all the questions of "can I do this or can I do that" that pop up on here from time to time. These folks should really be speaking to a lawyer because laws vary from region to region. Slashdot may be a good place to get help and advice on technical issues, but the law is not one of them.
As far as restricting what gets posted on Slashdot, the Slashdot crew makes editorial choices about which submissions to post out of the hundreds that they receive in a day, so in essence the content is already restricted. I guess if they could add a filter (like the one for Jon Katz) to block me from viewing these articles, then that might be better.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
As a Brit, I ask you...
how can you patent for x=1 to x=20, y=x^2 (yep, as far as I can see that's an algorithm).
How?! (see, question and exclamation, must be confused...)
--Remove SPAM from my address to mail me
1. It would still be illegal for anyone else to release/share copies of the software, if it violated patents.
2. What is open source if you can't distribute it openly?
Don't do anything you think might get you in trouble until you've consulted a lawyer. When you do, remember that the lawyer will look for ways for you to accomplish what you want, but in the end the lawyer may turn out to be wrong. There is an element of risk here.
The EFF may be able to point you in the direction of people who can help, or even provide a bit of help. But you should not, in any case, rely on what you have heard here. There are quite a few smart people posting here, but you should not rely on any lay advice. Even if some of them are attorneys, you are not in an attorney-client relationship with them, and should not rely on their advice.
Even a preliminary consultation in this case might cost a few hundred dollars. That'll be a lot cheaper than tens of thousands, though.
-TH
Student, University of Minnesota Law School
As ESR noted in Magic Cauldron, software is inherently a service, not a manufactured product. I would note that the power to create, also carriers with it the power to destroy. As a sovereign individual, one theoretically has the right to dispose of the fruits of one's labor any way you desire, even to the point of giving it away. It may not make economic sense but then nobody said that people are completely rational.
... (OK bully) ... other countries, you can guess the outcome.
Given that the federal government has the guidelines that all tax-payer funded activities should be released to the public (a trade-off between economic security of the researchers in return for wide-spread public dissemination), it does raise some rather interesting questions about privatising the gains (through patents, etc) and publicising the risks (failures, prototypes, etc) with some claims that the cost of tertiary education is disproportunate to the value due to the inefficient commercialisation apparatus. However, public institutions do provide a valuable social role in fostering income mobility and providing career opportunities to the disadvantaged. In particular they can curb the role of excessive rent-seeking and monopolistic profits. For example, by releasing an open reference design or protocol, common standards can be established with companies motivated to sell additional value to demonstrate clear advantages (either direct, through support, ir indirect through warentees) over the the public version. In an economic sense, this is analogous to the Mum&Pop shop putting limits on the megastore as they can't afford to charge a big price differential while people have alternatives. Of course, if through anti-competitive measures they drive the Mum&Pop out of business, they can then go down the route of the corporate town (aka company store). In a similar way, public individual research & development (effectively what OpenSource is) can (given enough time and resources) replicate any private research (unless they're using some alien technology!).
As to the legality of it, it comes down to a combination of juristictions which is ultimately a codification of individual and social beliefs. The US has a comparative advantage in high tech which means the goverance structure prefers to enact laws (especially property rights) that preserve and protects these advantages. From other countries' perspectives it leads to "unfair" situations such as AIDS drugs being unaffordable to people in Africa due to the drug companies wishing to preserve their market in the US. Given that the US has the military and financial clout to convince
What can one do? Depends on your belief system, if you want to go the Larry Wall approach and diffuse Perl, you can gain fame. If you want to go the Bill Gates approach you can have a chance of becoming rich (but also a good chance of being crushed by competitors, mauled by venture capitalists, and screwed by Wall Street). You cannot say that Perl and Windows can't coexist, they serve different needs. If you wish, you can establish a server in some countries which permits reverse-engineering for compatibility reasons (I believe Australia is one example) and then publicise it and let the world decide. You can publish it as a CD with source code under whatever copyright you wish. You can even forget about it and join the startup and try and make a living. Ultimately the choices one makes in life are individual and you can only act in concordance with your beliefs and values.
If other people believe otherwise, then that is only a concern if they attempt to impose their values on you. Now whether the patent system and the associated heavy-handed branding and trademark protection is worth believing in as a system to promote innovation and invention is a different question. All I can say is that with umpteen legal variations and juristictions around the world, there is no reason to shift your work to another location where it can be protected under different laws. Some countries (e.g. Taiwan I believe) even refuse to accept certain interpretations of IP laws. Note that IANAL and there would be serious complications on the interactions of various laws (e.g. the US insists on taxing citizens on world-wide income). Perhaps one day somebody would create a special juristiction to accomplish your desires (OpenNation?) but until then, if you believe strongly enough in the sharing of ideas (as compared with products or provision of related services), you can blaze your own path much as Linus did.
LL
Why not just release it anonymously, according to your question you are doing this since you feel it is wrong for a few individuals/companies to hold onto something this important and the general fact that software patients are bogus.
If that is really the case just release it and take no credit for it. No one to sue, if it just shows up on a bunch of ftp servers around the world.
Technically you can do them yourself. You'll find most relevent stuff easily. There are many libraries that are used as depositories.
(see http://www.uspto.gov/web/of fices/ac/ido/ptdl/ptdlib.htm) Chances are there's one nearby. Its actually rather interesting to sift through it all. Most of these libraries also have some kind of search engines too. Or if you want to do it from home look at http://www.patents.ibm.com/. If its a decent library they'll probably even have someone who can help you figure out how to do a search. Its not eaxactly easy, but nor is it rocket science. If you make a reasonable effort you'll probably find all of the relavent patents quickly. The $10,000 is for a professional lawyer or librarian or both to search thouroughly the entire patent database. You can probably restrict yourself to just the software stuff.
-cpd
That wasn't the argument. The argument was on cost. I'll agree that programmers generally hate doing documentation, but this is more along the lines of reading the manual. Or searching the internet to see if anyone has done it before. Why would you reinvent the wheel? Its already done. Besides, go look at patents that were submitted 17 years ago (I think). These will be coming off patent protection, use those ideas, and implement free forms of that. Legal, easy, and probably useful.
-cpd
We're not talking about "forcing" anyone to open-source their products... We're talking about reverse-engineering those products, and creating our OWN open-source clones... The whole damned computer industry is founded on this very basic ability/right; imagine where we'd be if no one were legally able to reverse-engineer IBM's PC BIOS, and create their own clones... Just because you create a product does NOT give you sole rights to all other products that behave like it, as well... No one is taking away anyone's freedom, as you claim, by reverse-engineering their products... There's absolutely nothing wrong (either legally, or morally/ethically, IMNSHO) with such reverse-engineering efforts... Without them, many useful products (eg: WINE, Samba, etc.) just wouldn't exist at all; in fact, the entire computer industry as we know it today wouldn't exist at all...
This seems like a very difficult proposition in our networked world. Has there ever been a service that facillitates true anonymous publishing of digital works?
Idea: A PO box that accepts magnetic media and duplicates it to a network of automatic, unstructured, and uncontrolled mirrored web servers. The disk can get posted and then the mailer and media will be destroyed.
As DeCSS has shown us, just creating it is not enough. I agree with you that it is sometimes neccessary to be anonymous to speek freely, but something like this isn't exactly speech. The value of what this person is creating can only be realized if it is actually used, and as we've seen with the DeCSS case, the lawyers will go after everyone who uses the work, not just the creator. In a pure speech case (like the guy who posted Scientology's "secret" information) just getting the info out there is enough, because just knowing the info is what the whole case is about.
But in these cases we need to make it legal somehow, because the scientists who use this work are presumably not in a position to do so anonymously (after all, they must publish their results).
Hopefully your option B wouldn't actually require martyrdom, merely lots of community support (both financial and otherwise).
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
Has there ever been a service that facillitates true anonymous publishing of digital works?
www.freedom.net or
www.zeroknowledge.com
They claim complete anonymity, and their credentials look good.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Get a good business lawyer. Maybe try contacting the EFF or Software in the Public Interest(?) to locate a lawyer who would be willing to help cheap.
You can get some legal protection by incorporating (like apache did). Unfortunately this takes some amount of money.
As others said, Document document document. Keep an engineers notebook (stiched bining, numbered pages). These have a higher evidence value than a text file log because they make alteration difficult. One DOD project that I was involved with used these notebooks, not because the DOD wanted them. The lawyers for the company required them.
Legal precedents are wonderful things, but the new problem we are facing (or should I say -you- are: I live in Canada) is that much of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act is drafted -specifically- to overrule the common law in this area. As the DVD MPAA case shows quite clearly in my reading, the DMCA prohibits activities that were permitted by courts under the traditional copyright regime. This is why I'm pessimistic, at least about that specific case.
Just one thing wrong with your little plan. I'm not giving you my invention. You need me to make your scheme work, and I'm not cooperating.
Good day.
"To excuse such an atrocity by blaming U.S. government policies is to deny the basic idea of all morality: that individu
In which parts of the world are the patents active? Remember the RSA patent - covered the US but not Europe. If the patents are US only, consider getting Europeans to do the OSS work. If I recall correctly, you can't patent algorithms in the EU.
It does seem to me that you're setting yourself up for much legal hassle. In the US, as I understand it (IANAL), patent disputes are heard before juries, making them a pain to fight and even more of a pain to win. The situation is different in the EU.
ben_ the technologist and platform agnostic
That would essentially mean to give up level 0 to the trollers and flamers. Actually, that's what happening. Have you noticed the immense increase in spamming /. gets nowadays? I used to browse at 0, but have since moved to 1, at the cost of missing some good ACs (hopefully moderators rate them up).
/. for the first time...
I pity the newbies visiting
Something should be done about it. Ideas anyone?
BTW: When I get moderator points, I try to exclusively moderate good posts up.
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
A copyright can be owned anonymously or pseudonymously; USC Title 17, Chapter 3, Section 302 discusses the copyright duration for anonymous works, for example
Haven't people ever thought to work within the system... (use your most whiny voice)
I have reverse-engineered a few systems, and in every case, it was a measure of last resort, when working within the system didn't help. Reverse-engineering is a lot of work, and getting a working solution is usually cheaper.
But if the vendor just tells you, that you are out of luck then it's time to get out the debuggers, the logic anaylizers and teh hex dumpers. The same happens if you need to import legacy data into the new system and the vendor provides no support.
When buying a system, I expect the vendor to provide the minimum means to do with it what I need (or like). This usually means at least access to the documentation of all file formats and transmission protocols. If he doesn't, he witholds from his customers part of what they paid for:
The possibility to get the maximum use out of the product.
First you will need to clarify what it is that you have reverse engineered. You mention both patents and trade secrets.
If patents are involved you will have little or no protection, regardless of what you do. With a patent it doesn't matter how you 'discover' the technique or process. Whoever has the patent 'owns' the idea under US law. Unless you are willing to take them to court over it and can prove prior art, etc.
If only trade secrets are invovled you are in much better shape. Assuming of course that you haven't broken any NDA you may have agreed to. If you were able to figure out a trade secret via publicly available information, and you can show this is the case, you will probably win out in the long run. You may well have a few years of court battles on your hands however.
As for general protection make sure you have copies of ALL of you work and work related items, i.e. source code, notes, correspondance, etc.
Also talk to a real lawyer. It is all fine and good to get comments here, but only a lawyer will be able to help you with all the details.
I'm at work, so in a real sense I'm not wasting my time. I'm getting paid about $20/hr to respond to some prepubescent, bunghole licking, needle dick moron. On the other hand, when I start my business next month I won't be at liberty to expend this sort of effort.
BTW, ever read Freud?
I remember before the big security crackdown on government websites how easily accessable research information was. I used to have a link to a government storehouse for sourcecode and programs. About the same time that the government ordered the different agencies to increase security most of the source code was removed from goverment websites and much of it offerd on a pay to use basis. A lot of my tax money goes into funding reasearch in pubic learning institutions, yet the results of the reasearch is more often closed to the public and sold to the highest bidder (often big business). We, as the supporters of public institutions, deserve equal access to the fruits of our investment. Selling off the patents and copyrights only serves to benefit a few, while keeping it open would be a boon to all. Adding to the waste is the real possibility that selling intellectual rights to a corporation with limited resources and narrow-sighted goals actually hinders future developments by closing off pathways for other researchers and private entrepreneurs. I'd change the system if I could but unfortunately I can't afford to pay for big money, bribing, lobbyists to get my voice heard.
By the way, when you post on Slashdot it trapps tour IP, which is then cross-referenced to your domain.
I remember before the big secirity crackdown on government websites how easily accessalbe research information was. I used to have a link to a government storehouse for sourcecode and programs. About the same time that the government ordered the different agencies to increase security most of the source code was removed from goverment websites. A lot of my tax money goes into funding reasearch in pubic learning institutions, yet the results of the reasearch is more often closed to the public and sold to the highest bidder (often big business). We, as the supporters of public institutions, deserve equal access to the fruits of our investment. Selling off the patents and copyrights only serves to benefit a few, while keeping it open would be a boon to all. Adding to the waste is the real possibility that selling intellectual rights to a corporation with limited resources and narrow-sighted goals actually hinders future developments by closing off pathways for other researchers. I'd change the system if I could but unfortunately I can't afford to pay for big money, bribing, lobbyists to get my voice heard.
Congratulations, you have just discovered obscurity.
Search for Mixmaster on google to learn about security, generally considered a lot smarter.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
> you are basically taking the research of others.. How do you think science works?? People BUILD UP from other people's problems and solutions. >.their discoveries, hard work, and insights... and stealing them. HOW do you steal an IDEA? The orginal person STILL has it ! I think you meant COPYING an idea. Patents protection the IMPLEMENTATION of an idea, not the idea itself. Proof: The law allows one to "clean room" reverse engineer. Cheers
Your only hope is to disguise your identity. Post your code through anonymous sources, remove all traces of your name for the system, etc. They can't sue you if they can't find you.
Too bad, we could have put them out of business at the government's expense...
penguinicide... when jumping out a window just won't do.
I was wondering about this one. Large corporations sue with the expectation that the individual will run out of money. What would happen if they had to sue a hundred (or a thousand)different people, each putting up a small defense. (admittedly this would take alot of potential martyrs, but Gahndi succeded in the end, didn't he?) How long could they last? Are public defenders available for such cases?
penguinicide... when jumping out a window just won't do.
ObDisclaimer: IANAL
Have you considered consulting with the Free Software Foundation about the issues you're dealing with? At the very least they'll be able to point you in the correct direction as to how to approach this or recommend a good attorney. Also, if you're a university student, you *MIGHT* be able to get some advice from your university's student legal department which provides such services for free (well, at least mine did).
If you do consult with an attorney, it's best to follow what other people have been recommending and document the heck out of everything.
Good Luck!
why do people believe they have the right to decompile and start distributing someone else's hard work?
Who said anything about decompiling and distributing someone else's work? There's more than one type of reverse engineering, and probably the most common is the black box approach. This is when you look at how something works (ie. the input and output) and try to duplicate it in your own code. There's no theft involved, just puzzle solving. What's wrong and/or illegal about that?
Addlepated - punk & metal
Idea: A PO box that accepts magnetic media and duplicates it to a network of automatic, unstructured, and uncontrolled mirrored web servers. The disk can get posted and then the mailer and media will be destroyed.
After the effort of getting a PO Box with a fake ID, they can still easily stake the box out and arrest the owner when he gets his mail.
There's a list of anonymous remailers that I hope is still good. It explains how to pgp the message multiple times and chain it through multiple remailers, so you don't have to trust any single remailer. You can make the ultimate destination a mailing list or a mail to news gateway.
Public terminals in universities, cyber cafes, or libraries make anonymous net access very easy. Don't feel like doing whatever you want to do in public? Just install some kind of proxy on the machine - a simple port forwarder if you know where you want to connect to. After you're done, kill the process and delete the binary, on the off chance that someone there is competent enough to track down what happened.
Get a shell account on a heavily used system that does not run identd. Barring any funny tricks (e.g. the netcom*.netcom.com machines have a modified /usr/bin/telnet that logs username/source/destination to syslog), it will be difficult to differentiate you from the rest of the traffic. Just the same, get the account under a fake name, pay with a money order, and telnet to it from somewhere at least slightly safe. If you want to be a little bit more careful, leave some sort of proxy running on the machine and do whatever you want to do while you're not even logged in.
When you buy a DVD, CD, whatever, you are purchasing a license to play it at home, with restrictions. You don't own the content, you own the media. The intellectual property owner owns the content and can impose any restrictions they like. If you don't like it tough, don't buy it.
stty erase ^H
you are basically taking the research of others...their discoveries, hard work, and insights... and stealing them
And who paid for that research and hard work? US taxpayers, that's who. Now in my book, if I paid for it, I own it (or at least I ought to have fair use of it.) Did you miss that point in the initial story? This isn't guys in a garage dreaming up something cool and borrowing money from friends and family to create a company around it. They're using public funds to create knowledge which they are sequestering for private gain.
it hasn't been established that these new companies won't benefit us, the consumer
It hasn't been established that they will either. They certainly won't benefit anyone as much as the folks with stock options in the startups, but those startups will be built on research paid for by the public. If I wanted to contribute my dollars to someone else's enrichment I would do it directly. I do not appreciate my government making that choice for me. And you are out of line to suggest that anyone but the public has an inherent right to benefit from publicly funded research.
Jenny, former coworker of federal scientists
Ummm.....
This is a new topic you might want to get on the train away from DeCSS and onto this one. You want to talk about the MPAA go talk about it where it actually is the topic.
Ahh, so we finally found a use for MS proxy.... ;)
Seriously now, if you don't know where it is, how are you going to retrieve it?
If you send a broadcast across freenet for this file, the responding server would be the one with the files. Thus, giving away the location of the file.
Can you explain?
There: Something at a specific location.
Their: Owned by someone.
Please make sure your english compiles.
I think saying things like "I didn't get what I paid for" doesn't tell enough about the problem, since everyone can release whatever they want. Maybe you just got the version that didn't include the specs? It's your own fault for buying and using a product not supported enough from said company. What's disturbing is too often you can't get the formats and specs _anywhere_.
This limits our freedom, and halts all development as everyone in the industry is forced to wait for one company. The guy who complained about whiners and slashdot snotts just don't get it. If you want to work with proprietary solutions you must reverse-engineer sometimes. Because you don't get any help from the companies, and even reverse-engineering is a painfully hard and slow process.
As long as customers are ignorant of the practices in this industry, it'll just continue. But as more and more get aware of the problem, they will make more informed decisions and not buy from companies who want to stagnate all development. Just to earn more money for their invested research.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Documenting everything is the only way to protect yourself. You can (apparently, although IANAL) defend yourself, even against a patent, if you can reliably show that you got there first. Basically, if you can document that in 1999 you did X, even if you did not file a patent, then you can defend against the patent application filed in 2000.
Oh, and make good backups, especially since there is the possibility of seizure as a legal recourse (although much later).
Did you take the cheap offer?
Bizar technology?
By the way, using documentation... is that rev. eng.? Don't they assume no-one to be bothered to rev. eng.?
What are the copyright rules for the documentation, doesn't this give any clue?
Bizar technology?
You shouldn't be asking these questions here or in any other public forum. I, for one, will not answer these questions. It is asking for trouble to answer legal questions in places such as this.
Only for people living in jurisdictions where that is outlawed. For everyone else, it's fine. And, yes, the "safe" answer is to ask a lawyer - but many people, thinking together, can come up with solutions that any one single expert might miss. Even a lawyer.
In terms of time, certainly not. Time may not be money, but most people seem to value it regardless of whether they're doing something they enjoy or not.
"I personally like Co-Source's funding model. I think that method gets at your objection that open-source has limited output in many areas. Developers there are asked to develop solutions, and are paid for the work they do, not for the output. ie, the output is forever free, there is simply a one-time charge for the work to produce it."
I think ESR has harped a lot about this, but it suffers from the same kind of limitations as funding your open source project via service/support. This requires a large entity with a lot of money to hire people to produce something. The problem -- there are many, many types of software that have no real use in buisness, or only very marginal application. Not only that, but when one buisness pours X dollars into that CRM program to streamline themselves, it doesn't seem to be a wild stretch to me that many are hesitant toward the idea of giving it away to their direct competitors.
"You also point out that currently we are doing pretty good having both open and closed source. That's great, I agree".
Perhaps that's the real answer unless something radical happens.
While I do believe the current system is flawed, I don't believe that "property == physical"/"can copy == not property" quite fits the bill. I do not believe this is because I'm a puppet of the man unable to join the enlightened.
"There are many good ones, but I think my solution is relatively simple and effective"
Perhaps the general idea is simple, but the implementation is quite a nightmare. It's much like saying "Well, we'll just set up a government that passes laws and distributes money in a way we'll all find acceptible".
"Now, the incentive to innovate is created by a public body that is independant of the government, perhaps even with its own democratically elected committee. Its role is to reward those who create useful innovations with hard cash awards."
Consider what this would entail, particularly if we're talking on the scope you seem to be. Lets just consider software development - who decides who gets what out of the myraid of potential developers? I could go on for awhile here, but I'll limit this post to direct responses.
"Awards are only given if an innovation is a proven success, i.e. people take it up and use it effectively in the market"
How do you define success? "Effectiveness"? What is "the market"? The buisness world? Perhaps everyone in the universe may be using a small not-so-complex piece of code/software, but how are you going to measure that against an enormous code monstrosity that works beatifully but has very specialized use?
"Note that the product could be produced by anyone, not necessarily the inventor, which is a good thing because the market will now be competitive, driving economic growth and further innovation."
Disregarding further problems of favortism this could lead to, I have an problem with someone inventing something only to be washed aside after giving it all away. Competition can be a good motivator. Unrestricted competition (Hello MS) can be an extremely limiting force in a variety of ways.
"Funding for the awards will come out of general taxation. This is the fairest solution, since innovations now benefit society and the economy as a whole. I would estimate that this would be a fairly small addition to the tax burden, which would be more than compensated by greater economic progress."
I'm not sure I'm understanding you correctly, as it seems this would require an ENORMOUS increase in taxation to take what is now funded by "buisness" and begin funding ala the NSF. Now, this might mean you're paying tax and very little for a product instead of little tax and a lot for a product, but this still requires people to pay for developing things they may not want/care about/use. This can be a problem, even when you're talking about something you may consider universal (Welcome to the healthcare debate).
Anyway in general you sound like you're essentially talking about a "software tax", which I'd already mentioned.
-- That's not MY brain on drugs
All laws are artificial constructs, including personal "physical" property. "Quite easy. New products get registered and published. Anyone is free to take them up, package them and sell them. Over the next yaer or two, surveys are done on the uptake of different types of products. Awards are given to creators based on how well used the products are, with a modifiying factor for the type and complexity of software." Your are grossly oversimplifying your idea. Unless your product warrants some sort of serivce you might sell, how are you going to make any money off packaging something? Considering we remove all IP laws, I can simply copy your product verbatim and sell it for a bare-minimum cost. The undercutting would be quite enormous, with the only potential hope being that you, somehow, are chosen for an award based on "user surverys" 1-2 years down the road? How are you going to track who "created" what, when there could be endless claims as to what software was derived from what, and who should get the real credit. Anyway this has been an interesting discussion, but as I said before you are basically repeating the idea of a software tax, which I had already mentioned. Regards -- Shiner Missionary
I'm glad you mentioned this as I grow weary of hearing that the SATISFACTION of coding open source in the evening and weekends is all that's needed.
The only idea I've heard beyond the service/support/merchandising route (IE - Redhat, a model which will not work for a huge category of software that does not have the complexity that an OS does) is the FSF's "software tax" idea. I haven't read about it in quite awhile, but I have a strong feeling levying a tax on hardware or whatever in order to support software creation ala science/NSF (which you seem to allude to)is not going to happen.
So what's your idea for a new funding model?
Would scientists continue working for less money? Probably. Would less people go through 9+ years of school to get a PhD and make $40k/year? Probably. Will people write Free Software regardless of economics? Would more people write free software (rather than closed source) if there were more ways to make a living at it?
I don't believe patents are really doing much to affect open/source free software development. The cases where they come up are rare. They may cause traffic to slow down when theres a wreck, but in the vast majority of cases the highway is clear. Charities/Non-profits for scientific causes (or free software - IE FSF) already exist en mass, and they are not the solution. There is a huge list of successful/popular closed source software which has no free software competition of any merit despite plenty of demand and interest. Obviously (to me) the "joy of coding it and the strength of numbers" gives rise to limited output in many areas.
The software tax idea may have merit despite the enormous can of worms administering it would seem to cause, but I'd be interested in more realistic proposals. ESR has also had some things to say about this, but his buisness models for using open source software are awfully limited in the scope of software/buisnesses that could apply them.
In case you are wondering, it is routine for professors of Computer Science to sketch to students enough information about an algorithm so that they can write it up as code.
That is called getting an education! I know of no better way to learn algorithms, coding, Comp Sci, logic and discrete maths other than by _reverse engineering_ all the algorithms of old. I fondly remember my Prof giving me the task of implementing FFT, by pointing out the appropriate recurrence relation. And I worked the rest out myself.
There is no better sense of satisfaction than that. It's even better than sex!
well.. i have a feeling no one will see this, as it is a (relatively) old story... but here goes anyways
How about instead of giving moderators a certain amount of points to do as they please with, they give them a certain amount to moderate UP with, and a certain amount to moderate DOWN with. This would ensure that the trolls get put in their place, and also the the good posts get put in theirs.
-- Dr. E --
Post the file on USENET from a terminal in an internet cafe. Wear a plastic bag over you head while you're there, and have you car parked a few squares away from the cafe.
The lawyers can't attack what they can't find. Once the source is out in the open, everyone will know what it is.
If you only want to open this topic to the community, stay hidden.
If you want fame and glory, well then it is up to you.
You can send me (and a few hundred others) the source so we can publish it. like the DeCSS source.
(which I have now published, from the public record)
good luck
-- Andy
* "Uncle this droid is malfunctioning" -- Luke Skywalker
Hi, sorry, but Federal law allows Universities and other federally funded non-profits (and I think even for-profits) to keep the intellectual property (patents, copyrights, etc) developed with these funds. All the government asks for is a license back at some nominal fee. In fact, the goverment encourages patent filings and other "evidence" of new technology and ideas from federally funded research. As long as no patents have been filed, or the patents that have been filed can be broken by prior art, or you have NOT signed an NDA so the other side can claim you released their trade secrets, then you are safe. The hard part is even if none of these three things are true, the other side may sue you anyway. Open source needs a Legal Defense Fund of some kind to protect individual hackers from bully-boy companies and individuals who use the courts to protect their bogus patents and trade secrets. Matt O'Keefe The GFS Group
A new proposed law for the US (you know the one), proposes to make transactions of this sort a matter of licencing and not of purchase. As far as I've understood, you will in that case you get a strictly personal licence with no right to pass it on. So it's probably not at that point quite yet, but it's still scary.
-- Eythain
Well, you can always represent yourself, can't you? Plead that the corporation is trying to scare you into submission with the prospect of a costly trial.
Besides, those run in and out of the witness stand asking questions and answering them are always a hoot(*) smile.
-- Eythain
*) I wonder how that would work in RL? Are there precedences?
Sorry, let me get this right. The license to play at home requires you to use the player they tell you to use? I can't even write my OWN player? Isn't this a restriction of my liberty? I buy the license to PLAY the disk, NOT to dictate HOW I should play the disk. c0rarc
The reasoning behind this is simple. If the MPAA feel the necessity to provide software that will only run on certain OS's or players, don't you think that this comes under using a monopolistic position to push other software (e.g. Microsoft Windows, Philips, Sony etc.) into the forefront as a monopolistic company? If this was the case then I think you'll find the result would be that there would be one company (or a selected few) which would control everything (a la communism). Is this what you would prefer. Don't get me wrong, communism is not (as in Marxist communism) a bad idea in a lot of areas, but it does have some serious problems.
Additionally, again, when you buy media it gives you a licence to run the software, not to enforce what you can run it on. If the major suppliers of software don't feel as though the development of software for a minority system is profitable enough, your stuffed. This is large conglomerates forceing people into a channel without any choice. Where is your sense of consumerism?
Unlike the large corporations we are not forcing them to opensource everything. If they decide to opensource then so be it, we do not demand it, all we ask is that the ability to allow the lesser people a chance to use a product which, in essence, you have paid your dues.
Besides which, if you look at copyright law for software (and patents for that matter), you cannot copyright mathematical equations and functions, only ideas and concepts. This means that DeCSS in itself is copyright (except the mathematical section of the decryption) to whomever has written it and as such is quite capable of countersuing for damages. It was wrong to bring this case up in the first place and hence wrong to have taken (i think stolen is a better word) Jon Johansens machine. Apparently he didn't even write it! c0rarc
I am not an attorney. This is not intended to constitute legal advice. This passage provides food for thought, though: Digital Millenium Copyright Act Section 1201 5F (f) REVERSE ENGINEERING.--(1) Notwithstanding the provi-sions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a techno-logical measure that effectively controls access to a particular por-tion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyz-ing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.
In cases like this, where the person asking the question is probably an academic who has to spend money very carefully, simply going to an expensive expert can't be the first option. The other two options may be to either do nothing, (not cool) or shop around a little to see if an obvious answer exists somewhere.
My position is mostly that if an article or even just the comments replying to it might help someone in some way, then it was ok to post it. I don't like all the articles, but maybe someone else found it interesting, and that's ok.
You're certainly right about the dangers of giving legal advice under some systems. I find this truth of current society to be rather troubling, though...
With respect, I believe that restricting what can be posted by Slashdot is not a good idea. Whatever view you might have of an idea, discussion of it does no harm. If it isn't good, this will become evident, and the case against it will gain strength. If it is good, then that is an idea that should be supported favorably.
As a side note, I find it troubling when people say 'this is a legal issue, only talk to lawyers about it.' The law is complicated, but information and thoughts regarding it should not be restricted to just 'the Sacred Priesthood.'
LINUX BIGOT ALERT! Do get legal advice in your country of origin and hope that it will cover your ass a little in the big wide world. If you have used patented algorithms etc then you have got to pay the owners (it sucks but it's the law) wait for the outcome of current trials before releasing because the laws may change (but I doubt it) If you have discovered new ways of doing things it should be easily proved with your code/docs. Good Luck (but don't rush into anything without qualified advice) Sparkes
*** www.linuxuk.co.uk relaunches 1 Mar 2000 ***
blog and junk
If it was developed in the US, the fact that the original project was developed with government money is in your favor. Projects that were developed with government help, are automatically placed in the public domain. The reasoning is that since the government is funding the development, the results belongs to all of the citizens.
You might be familier with another government funded research project that spun off Illustra (now an Informix project), Ingres (CA product), and the Postgres family of open source databases.
Whatever country your from, you need to get someone who understands patent laws and obviously the laws you're subject to. Of course, you'd have to show that person what you have done and give him alot of information if you want him to help.
/before/ you do anything. Better safe than sorry =)
Some countries outlaw reverse engineering, some have specific provisions for it. Depending on where you are, the issues at hand will change alot.
Best advice I think is to not rush anything. Get advice from a lawyer
"I remember Y1K, every abacus had to get another bead"
At the risk of stating the obvious... I think this financial burden should be taken on by some of the companies that are making money on open source. Not only would this be great PR for them, it seems like the right thing to do.
So it's pretty simple to determine if you broke any laws or if you are going to break any laws. By reverse-enginering a piece of software you probably broke the law already, so your case is weak. Get a good copyright laywer to check if you broke any laws and if you're going to by publishing perhaps patented and protected intellectual property.
Note to the whiners about if this is right or wrong: there ARE people on this earth making money by writing software, hell I think a LOT of the
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Strictly speaking, you can't patent software in the UK. In practice, it just takes clever wording. Essentially the patent is for a machine that could consist of a computer with an appropriate program to perform a task.
This does however protect from some of the more trivial patents, so the above advice does still apply.
Perhaps the moderators should be encouraged to moderate UP every AC with anything remotely interesting to say instead of moderating down this one troll with LOTS of unintersting things to say.
Does what this troll is doing count as a hack. It is using human failings to circumvent a protection measure in Slashdot.
You know, in a way, you're correct. I don't think I've ever come out well against one, seeing as IANAL either. But really, lets leave the worlds oldest profession (the real one) out of it, and just let the disclaimer stand, whaddya say? ;)
If, on the other hand, you are making a simpler way to shop online (i.e. one click shopping). Assuming that Amazon's patent would hold in court, you can't recreate it in any way unless you can show that what you have done is really different to what is patented.
Zero-click shopping! (Patent Pending) I charge you just for visiting my website! With that huge doubleclick.net address and credit card database, I've not no problem finding out where to send the merchandise and which credit card to bill!
Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
Unfortunatly, no. The right to an attourney only applies to criminal court.
I wonder if some brave/foolish soul could do a sort of non-defense/civil disobedience defense until the thing rises to the level of having a public defender (or a well-funded supporter)
Such tactics (if developed and elaborated) could be useful.
Is I couldn't afford a lawyer to contest my restarining order. a valid defense? At least you'd have a court-appointed attourney at that point.
With this, the developent timeline will be well-documented, and, should the author decide to out themself, they can. (If you're really lucky, you can run the whole thing through the courts as hypotheticals before the author would have to consider surfacing.)
The copying isn't the illegal part. It's the distribution of copies that is illegal. I can copy a CD or DVD perfectly legally. If I then give that copy to someone else who hasn't paid for the right to own a copy of that work, I've broken the law.
This means you can only do what the owners WANT you to do. This means no copying, no broadcasting, and yes, even no playing.
Can you cite an instance where a license of this sort has been upheld in court as taking precedent over an individual's right to fair use? I've not heard of one, and until I do, I won't consider such licenses to be legal or enforceable.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
It's much more legal if you do that with a lock that you own.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
The guy asking the question wants to release something legally to the community (meaning: allowing others to use it without being prosecuted because they use some dirty stuff that some 31337 d00dz have spread all over the net).
The problem is, the way the courts allow themselves to be abused these days, even if you do something that is legal, moral, and ethical, if it is inconvieniant to people and corperations with plenty of money, you can still be dragged through legal mud for years and face ruinous legal bills. It is entirely possable to have the court find in your favor every single time (initial case, appeals, additional and closely related suits etc) and end up loosing more money than it would have cost to settle in the first place. Eventually, you might well face one more suit and have no resources left to fight a summary judgement. For all practical purposes, a civil court decision can be bought. In such a case, it may be best to be anonymous and avoid all of that.
That is a perfect example of something that is legally acceptable even though it is ethically and morally reprehensable.
How long could they last? Are public defenders available for such cases?
Unfortunatly, no. The right to an attourney only applies to criminal court.
"I don't really care if it's legal or not in their home country, I think it's morally wrong to force our opensource ideals onto companies by tactics slashdot would raise holy hell about if the rolls were reversed."
Your opinion has been registered. Fortunately, there are alternative concepts of "morality" and "ethics" that are out there today. The standard set of morals that would lead you to believe that what the person asking the question in this article was doing is wrong is not the root of the way that everybody thinks about things.
Economics is morality, and morality is economics. They're essentially indistinguishable, and this is one of those examples where it's a bit more evident than in other places.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
The freenet team (check it out at SourceForge is working on such a solution, you post stuff totally anonymously, and once injected in the network, nobody is able to remove it, it's cached all over the place, but nobody knows exactly where...
at least that's the case with CDs. I don't see any reason why DVDs would be any different.
What are the published works you are 'reverse engineering' from? If they are patents, then you are probably in trouble. If they are journal articles, then I don't think you'll have any trouble. They could be prior art to disqualify the patents.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
I know it ain't this way anymore, but once upon a very long time ago, it used to be law that the results of research paid for with taxpayer dollars were public domain; unpatentable and uncopyrightable. Anybody who wanted to make a buck off the technology was free to create an added-value package using it (e.g., MatLab). The demolition of this policy, allowing university and corporate researchers to take proprietary ownership of technology developed with OUR TAX DOLLARS (e.g., RSA) is one of the biggest betrayals of the public trust by the U.S. government in recent times.
Most people around here do not believe they have that right. Implementations should be protected, and only pirates would argue against that. But there is apparently still some debate about whether or not the ideas and mathematics -- upon which implementations are based -- should be protected. When certain parties try to use "idea protection" (like software patents and the DMCA) to inhibit competing implementations and interoperability, then we have a problem.
I agree. But that's not what this is about. For example, nobody really wants to "force" Microsoft to release their media player's source code, or to force Xing to release their DVD player's source code. We just want the specs for the media formats that these programs play. And that is the right that we demand: the specs for data formats and protocols. If you're going to send or sell me files, then they simply must be in an understandable format. Since the specs are unavailable, disassembling and reverse-engineering an existing implementations is what we have to resort to, so that we can infer the specs and start to make independant implementations. It's not pretty, but sometimes it's the only way. Congress understood the importance of that right, which is why even the highly-restrictive DMCA protects the right of reverse engineering. Unfortuantely, they didn't understand open source so now the right of distributing the knowledge gained by reverse engineering is now in danger.
That right is important to freedom, and you're going to hear a lot of screaming around here whenever it is endangered..
You are implying that there's a double-standard here. But there isn't. If someone were to copy GPL'ed code into a closed-source implementation, that would be a copyright violation and you can bet your ass that there would be an uproar. But if someone were to study that code to understand how it works, or to understand the format of the data that it manipulates, and then they were to write their own closed source implentation that is based upon that knowledge, there would be no "moral outrage" at all. Yeah, I bet a few people might question the business sense of whoever does this (i.e. trying to sell a product that competes with an already existing open source product) but that's another issue.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
That could be a good idea, indeed. However, the most important advice (document everything) will then become very tricky. The ghost author will have to explain how he has acquired the information, written the code, and so on. The ghost author will also need one or several friends who can testify that he has found all this by himself.
Nevertheless, finding a friendly party in a country that allows reverse-engineering might be a good solution for people living in the USA or in other countries that have stupid restrictions on reverse-engineering. Alas, even European countries are now modifying their laws to prohibit reverse-engineering because of the pressure from several big companies.
-Raphaël
*IANAL*
Put simply, your best chance here is probably to have had a previous case on a similar subject decided in your favor. If the companies see that they can crush open-source projects like DeCSS they'll get bolder and do it as a standard business practice.
If however, DeCSS beats the DVDCCA and MPAA, most specifically if they beat them in a very public and somewhat humiliating manner, you may well see the companies thinking about who they sue before they sue.
Even better, if the Judge's ruling in one of these cases were to actually address the issue of reverse engineering and either implicity or explicity allow it you stand in very good shape.
So you stand to lose a lot with the DeCSS case, keep this in mind. Write editors of newspapers asking them to give fair and balanced coverage, organize a protest where it will get noticed by the media, and above all, BE POLITE! Don't do anything that would make everyone think we're a bunch of law-breaking freaks who deserve to what we get. This battle will be fought much more in the court of public opinion than any particular jurisdiction.
I'm not judging you in any way, but something seems very clear to me.
If what you are doing is illegal, why should you be able to simply use 'open source' as a shield?
Why? Code is code, period.
All software should be free.
Who cares if it's in binary.. it's *STILL* instructions that are understood by a computer, and I have every moral right in the world to read those instructions and translate them into whatever language I want.
If I was getting paranoid, I know what I'd do. Put on a cap and dark glasses then head off on foot at a busy time of day. Make sure I'm wearing very anonymous clothing and not carrying anything. That way, I'm harder to track by CCTV.
Next, go to a net cafe, paying with cash. Open a webmail account with fake details - not exactly tricky - and use that to submit it to as many different servers as I could think of. But don't do anything else or it's easier for someone to establish a usage pattern and identify you. DEFINITELY don't log in to any other services...
Finally, go. Flush the cache on your machine manually, take all media with you and go. But go via a park (or somewhere else secluded with plenty of cover) and remove a top layer of clothing - say, cap, glasses and jacket. Dump these in bushes or wherever and go home.
Would that be secure enough for most people?
Greg
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Although this is not what you want to hear, there really is only one meaningful answer to this question. Get ready!
In other words, talk to a full-blooded lawyer about the question before you release. Have materials and papers ready, being ready to ambush the ambushers with motions and declarations before the ex parte and rush TRO hearings. Have all your ducks in a row, to the extent you do have a legal defense, and make certain that you don't overstep or lose on a technical glitch.
The only way to do this right is to have a lawyer, whom you have retained for your particular problems. If money is an issue, you may have to find someone willing to do it pro bono, which may be possible if the cause is worthy. This may require some shopping, and I'd be pleased to help guide you to finding such a person working in your jurisdiction.
But do this ALL UP FRONT, with a clear sense of what you are doing and why you are doing it. In a recent thread, slashdotters lambasted the legal system for moving too quickly. Count on it to move quickly, too quickly, once you release. In the meanwhile -- YOU CONTROL -- when that happens. So be ready for the deluge, before it descends upon you.
Although its not what you want to hear, the only way to be ready, legally speaking, is to be ready, legally speaking.
One thing I always prefer, is diversity, for exactly the objections you have. It seems you don't really object to any of these methods except to say none of them do the total job. I will always argue that multiple funding methods are needed - that's usually the best way to deal with a broad problem space.
But, like I said before, the patent system discourages alternate funding systems, so I would like to see it go.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
...what would happen? Well, firstly, everyone could start selling all the still-protected drugs really cheaply, since virtually all the costs come from research and clinical trial costs. So, you could buy a box of Viagra for $5, or whatever. I just wanted to point that out first.
Second, all the bio-tech start-ups and research departments shut right down. No company on earth could afford to spend that kind of money unless a government supported monopoly was the reward.
Third, there will be a lot of scientists out of work who would very much like to still be working.
Those scientists still want to do research for reasonable salaries (say $60-200k). Some would do it for less, of course, but I doubt many would reject these salaries (cause i don't believe there are many scientists out there doing it for the stock options and the getting rich part).
So, what those scientists need, is spending money. A software tax is an interesting idea. The basic plan is fund it with public money. This would be fine. I personally wouldn't like delegating the choice of what which research projects to fund, but this would be an improvement over the current patent system.
The typical argument against public (tax) funding is that it's inefficient and will cost a lot. Here's where I bring up point 1: do you have any idea how much we'll save in health costs? I don't, but I bet it's a handsome amount. Health insurance costs would come down, significantly. Medicare and Medicaid would cost less to administer. In the public funding system, our money would go directly to research, bypassing patent and court costs. Strikes me as more efficient. And, all scientific findings would be public domain (even those no one would have wanted to patent before). Another bonus.
There are other ways to fund as well. Charities get money - scientific foundations could be formed which receive donations. That way, people could choose which projects they fund. Probably not enough people are educated enough to go straight to this, but some sort of hybrid could probably be worked out. ie, whatever you donated to a foundation could be subtracted from your research tax.
Socialist, you say? Maybe so. Do you think there's no place for socialistic concepts? The biggest argument against socialism is that the government can never allocate resources as efficiently as the market. I happen to agree very strongly with this argument, so I would prefer a more chaotic system than having our legislators "legislate" where the funding goes. I would prefer that each individual gets to "vote" for their favorite research foundation. That way, the allocation of research funding could change very quickly to meet the demands of the people. Currently, Michael J. Fox has to go before congress to try and work out increases for Parkinson research. With my way, he could go directly to the people and it would happen immediately, according to the people's desires.
But, I don't think any other funding model could work or be put into place so long as Patents are around. Patents make any other source of funding something only a fool would choose to do since you'll be paying for those government supported monopolies either way. Get rid of patents, then we'll be open to other possibilities.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
I just wanted to pick on one little bit of your post (which otherwise was quite good :-)
If we did not have laws protecting IP then there would be no incentive to create works and/or new products.
This is simply untrue. There are usually at least two motivations to invent something - one is economic, and the other is the joy/satisfaction of doing the thing itself. Thousands of open-source coders should have clue'd us in to that by now. For scientific research, this is even more true. The problem is, how do we fund research, not how can we profit from it. Given money, there will be more than enough people who will do research regardless of whether they can sell a product as a result. Patent law is unnecessary - what's necessary is a new funding model.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
I agree with most of your post - particularly where you talk about the economic benefits of an open knowledge system versus the patent system. If you examine all the economic costs involved, I think it becomes clear that patents are not efficient. Problem is, many of the patent costs are hidden, whereas we're talking about making those costs very apparent. I think that's a good thing to, but it means it's harder to sell it to people.
I do disagree with one point, however - that of your "award" system. I don't like award systems. They inherently favor small, cheap solutions to problems, whether or not that's the best way. Who would undertake to build a brand new operating system based on an award system? Who would risk drug development based on the possibility of getting an award, but having to foot the bill in the meantime?
I think the reason you chose an award system, and this public body, are to create a valid way of determining who is deserving of funding. But, as I said in another post, I prefer a more dynamic way of determining who gets funded. Let the people decide individually. You can still have a public body that generates a list of valid projects if you like, to protect against fraud. But, the point is, projects get funded up front, and money is free to switch projects when people choose to do so.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
About the shrink wrap license -- do they attempt to get around the "I bought it second-hand at a garage sale" defense ? I.E., does the license deny you the right to re-sell the DVD player or mandate that you keep the license intact when you transfer it ?
Not that I think that these shrink-wrap licenses are ever going to stand up in a higher court. But they do give the big money a tool to harass people with until they can afford to appeal up to an educated judge.
Could one of the people who actually bought one of these devices post the text of the claimed license ?
Sounds like a prime target for corruption.
Sure, it's complex. But I don't see that it's any more arbitrary than "Lets make some random laws and rely on people to sue each other all the time and hope that everything just works out".
It's an ambitious enterprise certainly. But it's worth the effort because the potential rewards are enormous.
Don't forget that patents and intellectual property are articficial constructs. They were created at a time when information was scarce and economic progress was paramount.
Now, technology has brought us to a state where information could be made free and the sum of human knowledge could be harnessed for everbody's mutual advantage. How sad then that antiquated laws remain, stifling the economy and providing little more than a way for businesses to stab each other in the back and extort monopoly power.
Quite easy. New products get registered and published. Anyone is free to take them up, package them and sell them. Over the next yaer or two, surveys are done on the uptake of different types of products. Awards are given to creators based on how well used the products are, with a modifiying factor for the type and complexity of software.
I don't think that is particularly hard to administer. With reasonable data gathering a fairly small team of people could distribute awards to a whole industry. If people get missed out, you can always give them an award later when the true potential of their idea/product is realised. A democratically elected steering committee can stamp out abuses, but I think these would be relatively few since the process would be open to public scrutiny.
Since I graduated in economics, the issue of incentives to innovate has always been a fascinating subject to me. I have never been happy with the concept of "ownership" of an idea, but as a practical person I see the need to guarantee that the important innovations actually occur. Some people seem to think that patents are in some way neccessary to create innovation. This is demonstrably untrue. People have been programmed to regard ideas as property, but this is a lie perpetuated by a combination of inertia and vested interests. If you look at the issue with an open mind, you can see that there is in fact no need for intellectual property at all. So what is the solution? There are many good ones, but I think my solution is relatively simple and effective. All ideas / algorithms / techniques are to beconsidered public knowledge. This has big economic benefits, since it ensures competitive markets and guarantees that the benefits of science will be utilised to the maximum extent, which is *not* the case when you are restricted by patents. Now, the incentive to innovate is created by a public body that is independant of the government, perhaps even with its own democratically elected committee. Its role is to reward those who create useful innovations with hard cash awards. Awards are only given if an innovation is a proven success, i.e. people take it up and use it effectively in the market. In a way, the award is meant to reflect what the inventor would have been able to earn under a patent system. Note that the product could be produced by anyone, not necessarily the inventor, which is a good thing because the market will now be competitive, driving economic growth and further innovation. Funding for the awards will come out of general taxation. This is the fairest solution, since innovations now benefit society and the economy as a whole. I would estimate that this would be a fairly small addition to the tax burden, which would be more than compensated by greater economic progress. The award system will undoubtably cost money to set up and run effectively, but will probably still be cheaper than the current patent system, if you include all the legal expenses paid by firms. Biggest bonus of all is that since all ideas are now free, innovation and research can occur much faster without being encumbered by other people's patents, the need to patent your own ideas or any of the frightful legal wrangling that currently occurs. Of course, there are a lot more complicated economic arguments behind all this. But I'm pretty convinced any country that adopted this model would surge ahead of the rest of the world in technological and economic development. Not only does it have practical economic advantages, I think it is also philosophically more elegant and more morally justifiable in terms of freedom.
Since I graduated in economics, the issue of incentives to innovate has always been a fascinating subject to me. I have never been happy with the concept of "ownership" of an idea, but as a practical person I see the need to guarantee that the important innovations actually occur.
Some people seem to think that patents are in some way neccessary to create innovation. This is demonstrably untrue. People have been programmed to regard ideas as property, but this is a lie perpetuated by a combination of inertia and vested interests. If you look at the issue with an open mind, you can see that there is in fact no need for intellectual property at all.
So what is the solution? There are many good ones, but I think my solution is relatively simple and effective.
All ideas / algorithms / techniques are to beconsidered public knowledge. This has big economic benefits, since it ensures competitive markets and guarantees that the benefits of science will be utilised to the maximum extent, which is *not* the case when you are restricted by patents.
Now, the incentive to innovate is created by a public body that is independant of the government, perhaps even with its own democratically elected committee. Its role is to reward those who create useful innovations with hard cash awards.
Awards are only given if an innovation is a proven success, i.e. people take it up and use it effectively in the market. In a way, the award is meant to reflect what the inventor would have been able to earn under a patent system. Note that the product could be produced by anyone, not necessarily the inventor, which is a good thing because the market will now be competitive, driving economic growth and further innovation.
Funding for the awards will come out of general taxation. This is the fairest solution, since innovations now benefit society and the economy as a whole. I would estimate that this would be a fairly small addition to the tax burden, which would be more than compensated by greater economic progress.
The award system will undoubtably cost money to set up and run effectively, but will probably still be cheaper than the current patent system, if you include all the legal expenses paid by firms.
Biggest bonus of all is that since all ideas are now free, innovation and research can occur much faster without being encumbered by other people's patents, the need to patent your own ideas or any of the frightful legal wrangling that currently occurs.
Of course, there are a lot more complicated economic arguments behind all this. But I'm pretty convinced any country that adopted this model would surge ahead of the rest of the world in technological and economic development. Not only does it have practical economic advantages, I think it is also philosophically more elegant and more morally justifiable in terms of freedom.
Yeah, the award system is more geared towards tangible things like patents, innovations and copyrighted works. It's a big thank-you from society for those who make the world a better place.
For things like ongoing drug research, it might be better to focus on funding practical scientific research through universities and suchlike. Getting research grants beforehand is certainly much less risky for innovators.
Still, I think the main beauty of the award system is that it virtually eliminates potential corruption and uncertainty about the value of a project. Awards are only given for things which are a proven success, at which point the innovator has certainly shown themselves to be deserving.
Ultimately, I guess that the exact nature of funding would be somewhat dependant on the nature of the field being researched. You'd also need a transitional period as these new systems are introduced, although I think this could be managed quite easily provided the long term objectives are always bourne in mind.
In either case, what you'll need to worry about is what restrictions were put on the material you used. The problem with the DVD issue is that they use a shrink wrapped licence stating that you can't reverse engineer it, but as long as nothing like that applies (in which case you'd have to fight that what you're doing is covered by laws making it legal), what you need to worry about are the usual trouble spots in reimplemantation. Is it clean? Can you document that you at no time used unlawfully attained information? Did you have access to any information for which you're bound to NDAs? Etc.
The biggest problem, probably, is that the companies could sue you whether or not they thought they could win, to frighten you into submission. Assuming you live in the US of A where everyone has the God given right to sue anyone else, there is nothing you can do to prevent this, only fight and win.
-- Eythain
This individual is working from the idea that someone else came up with, just like millions of others have before him. Making the claim that he's 'stealing' anything without the evidence of wrongdoing seems to be a hallmark of the (in)justice system of the U.S. where guilty until proven innocent seems to hold sway..
If this individual is gleaning information from articles and trade papers he's not stealing; he's availing himself of freely available information to take an idea, whether patented or a 'trade secret' (oxymoron if I ever heard one), to a further level, or along a different path to reach the same result. Much akin to building a homemade skateboard; you know someone patented the idea, but are you really going to hurt their business by 'rolling your own'? If you try to sell the resulting product is one thing, but creating something for yourself, IMHO, cannot be a crime.
I for one am glad that there are individuals like this in society who are willing to step up and make ideas happen, even in the face of the extremely juvenile patent law system of the U.S.; juvenile in the sense that it is not sufficent to deal with the current state of intellectual property, and has no provisions to give a clear cut reach to law regarding trade secrets.
Third, release it anonymously.
That people have to release useful, open codes anonymously in order to avoid terrible corporate punishment is a very sad thought.
I should hope that I would have more sense, but I would be very tempted to release such codes with my name on them. To me, the support of the hacker community is worth the price of corporate crackdown. Then there's that whole ego thing a la esr.
Anonymous internet access? May I recommend wireless lan with the usual 2.4GHz IEEE 802.11, signal unencrypted, and default settings. I leave it as such and anyone in my town can park their car in the neighborhood with their laptop and use it (ssh is your friend.) Someday it will be abused and I'll have to lock it, but its there and I'm sure many other people have their links in the open too.
US Law gives us that right.
The law differentiates certain protections. Copyright protects an expression of an idea. But the ideas in a work are unprotected, and reverse engineering is allowed as a way to retrieve those unprotected ideas, so long as you don't infringe on their copyright by copying the expression.
This isn't a new concept. Society doesn't recognize a permanent right of creators to keep their ideas secret. You have a right to try to keep it secret (trade secret, aka don't tell anyone without contracts), or you can release it fully in exchange for temporary protection (patents).
First, release it from a country where the patents and trademarks do not apply. You might have to do some digging to figure that out. At the very least, that confuses the jurisdictional issues. Second, release it to the public domain. Third, release it anonymously. If you don't have the resources to fight the legal battles (and it sounds like you don't; and it also sounds like you might lose them) then the best thing you can do is simply make it available to those who might have the resources, or who might be in a better position to win the battles. For example, it might turn out that European users will be able to make use of your software, whereas U.S. users may not. Obviously since you haven't said what you are doing, I don't know :-)
Bad advice. If the intent of the author is to release something to the community, then he probably wants to be sure that it would be possible for others to use his work. Releasing the code or documentation anonymously would not help anyone, because they would have to prove that the original information was obtained legally, which would be impossible if it comes from an anonymous source.
If the author is in a country where reverse engineering has been made illegal (probably at the behest of Software and Media Mogules such as Microsoft, the RIAA, MPAA, and DVD Forum), then he or she is probably not in a position to take on the overfunded lawyers of these organizations (or other, similar entities), much less have a snowball's chance in hell of winning. However, you are correct, anonymous release of trade secrets doesn't do anyone any good, because we can't show it was obtained legally and therefor can't use it safely.
But, the author could find a friendly party in a safe country and have them take credit for the release. In this way, the author gets the protection of anonymouty (especially if he or she uses an anonymous (e.g. cypherpunk) mail forwarding service to maintain true anonymouty throughout (which I would recommend in case the "friendly party" turns out to be a malicious plant). At the same time, the community gets the benefit of a product which has been legally reverse engineered and made available.
This doesn't guaruntee the community complete safety. After all, the CSS algorithm was legally reverse engineered abroad and that hasn't appeared to slow down the MPAA and DVD Forum from sending the secret police in to drag children from their farms, or go after every Tom, Dick, and Harry for having a link on their web page which might, somewhere, lead to the offending (though perfectly legal) code. Alas, there is no complete safety when taking on powerful, established entities with a monopoly or (in the DVD case) quasi-legal trust to protect.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Here is a good place to do a little research:
i ng_links.shtml
http://www.softpanorama.org/SE/reverse_engineer
But even the most rigorous dosumentation won't protect yo from litigation. What you need is a "big daddy", someone to front you on any legal expenses. Talk to the Free Software Foundation. I know that is you assign rights to the FSF under specifically and release it under the GPL they have lawyers to help protect your copyrights. Talk to them, if you think the software you have developed is that important they are lieky to listen and maybe even help.
Please send inquiries about GNU and the FSF to
Free Software Foundation
59 Temple Place - Suite 330
Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA
Voice: +1-617-542-5942
Fax: +1-617-542-2652
gnu@gnu.org
or WWW.FSF.org
People seem to be confusing the protection that patents offer with the protections offered by copyright or trade secrets.
Patents protect a process or an idea. In order to have patent protection the subject of the patent must be fully documented and publicly available at the patent office. This means that reverse engineering should not be necessary for any product which is covered by patents, because all of the inner workings must be documented.
Trade secret, as we all know from the DeCSS debacle, keeps the "how" out of public knowledge, but (theoretically) once the cat is out of the bag, and someone comes across the secret (by proper means) the trade secret protection is lost. Here is the area where people are trying to use trade secret law, combined with contract provisions against reverse engineering to maintain an unprecedented amount of control over intellectual property.
Copyright, the third traditional form of IP protects a method of epression. But copyright does not protect the idea behind the expression, only the precise expression that was used.
You really need to see an IP lawyer to have him/her identify which forms of protection are currently being asserted over the IP you are working from. Then you can figure out how to complete your project while minimizing the legal consequences.
Dane Torbenson
Easier said than done... However, this brings an important point: it is crucial to check for patents before releasing something that is considered to be a trade secret. If something is proprietary but not patented, then it is perfectly legal to re-implement it (as long as you use a "clean room" process and you do not copy anything directly from the current solution). But if anything is patented, then it is not possible to release this to the community.
Why? If he has spent a significant amount of time studying the problem and the existing solutions, I doubt that he would be happy to see some companies taking his solution and making a proprietary product out of it.
Bad advice. If the intent of the author is to release something to the community, then he probably wants to be sure that it would be possible for others to use his work. Releasing the code or documentation anonymously would not help anyone, because they would have to prove that the original information was obtained legally, which would be impossible if it comes from an anonymous source.
I think that the only good advice is: document everything. If you want to release something (possibly controversial) to the community, then the only way to make sure that others can really benefit from what you have done is to be accountable for it. You have to be able to prove that all the information was obtained legally, and that it does not come from any confidential documents. If every source of information is legal, then the community can benefit legally from your work (and you will be able to cover your back because you can prove how you obtained the information).
-Raphaël
Of course, IANAL, and there is much more to lawsuits than mere law (as we all know).
Now I don't know what field you are in, but lets say you are reinventing coca cola.
You may analyze a bottle (Reverse engineer) or use open sources (what is printed on the bottle i.e water, sugar, artificial flavoring). If you never seen the real recipy (trade secret) you are in the clear as long as you dont try to call your product "Coca cola" or something too similar.
If, on the other hand, you are making a simpler way to shop online (i.e. one click shopping). Assuming that Amazon's patent would hold in court, you can't recreate it in any way unless you can show that what you have done is really different to what is patented.
In short: Against patents you are screwed if their lawyers find you. Against trade secrets *they* are screwed as soon as you can show that you did the same independently.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
First off the issue at hand is NOT about stealing anyone else's code. It is about implementing some algorithm in code. This algorithm has (presumably) either been published in major journals or enough information is availible in the field to figure this algorithm out WITHOUT stealing anyone else's code.
Certainly from a moral standpoint (and a legal standpoint involving copyright but not patent) their is no theft occuring if I figure out hos someone else did something independently and implement this algorithm myself. (In some sense this is what DeCSS is about. Someone figured out the algorithm mapping encrypted to decrypeted files. This algorithm, being unpatented, should be perfectly within our rights to use as we see fit. No one copied their code and is distributing it.).
From a moral issue there is no reason whatsoever to assume that using someone else's idea is wrong or incorrect. They do not lose anything when you use their idea (to say they lose the rights to it is fallacious as it assumes that they have said rights in the first place) like they do when you take physical property from them. The arguments for Intellectual prooperty are ENTIERLY economic. If we did not have laws protecting IP then there would be no incentive to create works and/or new products. It is interesting to note that these laws were all originally choosen to have reasonably limited durations but that lobbying from various companies has pushed up the copyright time to a ridiculous level.
For a while after the revolution the United States had no copyright law to speak of. Of course during this period we produced little literature and became a 'pirate country' reprinting books from other countries beyond their law.
Marriage is the "pseudo-ethics" that cloaks the messy truth of sexuality in the raiment of propriety -- it's "Don't Ask,
You shouldn't be asking these questions here or in any other public forum. I, for one, will not answer these questions. It is asking for trouble to answer legal questions in places such as this.
My advice to you is hire a lawyer, or don't release your work. You'd better know the legal implications of what you're doing before you do it, and the description of what you're tyring to do is too vague for anyone, even a lawyer, to give you any kind of decent answer.
BTW, YOU WILL end up in court if someone has made it clear to you that what you are reverse engineering is considered a trade secret. If you've had any kind of access to that trade secret, and you knew it was a trade secret, you'll probably get sued, and you'll probably deserve it.
Now, we just have to get the Slashdot crew to stop posting these things.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
As much as I admire and enjoy slashdot, it is about the last place I would seek legal advice (which is what this is.) A perfect illustration of why is that your initial post, and the replies that have followed, have failed to distinguish between patents, trade secrets, copyrights, etc.
You mention that the work you are attempting to re-implemenent is the subject of "proprietary" protection and "trade secrets", but then you claim that you will be the subject of patent litigation. I'm sorry - what are you referring to? If they have patents on the technology, then what are the patent #'s? Further, if they have patents, then their technology is NOT a trade secret - patents are published.
You mention that "most of the work is considered proprietary, the rest is considered trade secrets" this doesn't make much sense. First point - "proprietary" is NOT a subset of intellectual property. IF a technology IS the subject of either patent, copyright or trade secret protection, only then can they consider it proprietary.
So again - if there is no patent, there is no patent protection. If the technology is contained in published works, then there is no trade secret protection (unless what you are referring to is object code software that has been released to the public - you are not clear on this point). (If however, you gained knowledge of the technologies you are trying to re-implement under an implicit or explicit agreement of secrecy, then you may be in hot water.) If you are not copying source code verbatim, then you are NOT violating copyright by re-implementing the algorithm.
Further than that, you simply haven't provided enough information to help you in any meaningful way.
I recall watching Cringeley's first special on computers a few years ago. In order to claim that the reverse engineering was clean, there were two sets of engineers. The first set of engineers had access to the device being reversed (IBMs PC BIOS) and compiled a set of rules. The second set of engineers worked _only_ from the rules obtained by the first set and supposedly never came into contact with the device being reversed.
I get the impression from your posting that there really isn't even a product available yet to be reversed, but that there is enough information to design a parallel process. Whether or not this can stand as 'clean room' reversing would depend on how the data you obtained was presented.
I agree with one of the prior posters; If it was obtained from patent documents, you might have some problems.
I am curious whether or not, if the data was obtained from published commercial/scientific documents, copyrights might also be claimed?
In the immortal words of Socrates, who said; 'I drank what?'
IANAL, but this seems more or less clear:
a) Stay down. Barring your own vanity, releasing something anonymously on the Internet is not that difficult. Put everything together nicely, and then send it to a mailing list or newsgroup on the subject through a Mixmaster or Cypherpunk mailing list. Leave spreading it to the power of the masses and of the Internet, by just creating it you have done enough.
This means major paranoia though, possibly you are not careful enough even when submitting this Slashdot. How sure are you that Rob and Andover are _really_ wiping the logs?
Yes, it sucks to have to be anonymous to speak freely, but such is the nature of living in a non-free society (and I won't even dignify anyone who says we do with a reply). Possibly you could sign the message with a public key, so that when (if) freedom comes you can take credit for your work. Consider that possesion of the private key would be very incriminating however.
b) Make a matyr of yourself. Contact a lawyer, and maybe a charity that is ready to help you first. Then just go out and tell the truth, ready to be the case that gets taken to the supreme court. It's a risky strategy, but it is a lot more glamorous then the first, so some people may still prefer it (being a pompous asshole myself, I think I might). And at least in this case you have a better chance of the data actually becoming legal, so that using it is not thoughtcrime...
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
One thing I've been trying to wrap my head around lately is, why do people believe they have the right to decompile and start distributing someone else's hard work? It seems to me that the mantra of the opensource movement is free as in freedom not free as in beer; and what these people are doing is reversing that and making it "free as in beer". Haven't people ever thought to work within One thing I've been trying to wrap my head around lately is, why do people believe they have the right to decompile and start distributing someone else's hard work? It seems to me that the mantra of the opensource movement is free as in freedom not free as in beer; and what these people are doing is reversing that and making it "free as in beer". Haven't people ever thought to work within the system... (use your most whiny voice) "oh, but it takes to long", "oh, they didn't want to the first time, so I'm going to make them", "we didn't have it for X platform and I want it now!", "oh, I'm spoiled little brat who can't wait for something".
Forcing a company to release source code really isn't freedom, it sure seems me like strong-arm mafia tactics by snotty brats. Slashdot sure brings itself into a huge fit when a mention of the GPL being violated, now where is our moral outrage that someone is wanting advice on a premeditated violation of someone else's license.
I don't really care if it's legal or not in their home country, I think it's morally wrong to force our opensource ideals onto companies by tactics slashdot would raise holy hell about if the rolls were reversed. If a company doesn't want to release something opensource what right to we have to TAKE AWAY THEIR FREEDOM? I love opensource, I am a firm believer in giving back to the community; but this premeditated stealing of someone else's code I can't agree with.
- Lab books should be properly bound and have sequential page numbers
- Each page should be dated and signed by the researcher and a witness/supervisor
- Blank spaces should be crossed through and initialed/signed
- Computer printouts should be glued in, not just kept on disk
- Any crossings-out/deletions should leave the original text readable. No tippex/whiteout
- Abbreviations should be kept to a minimum and explained where unclear
That's probably not an exhaustive list, and the poster of the article may know this already. Hopefully it will be useful to somebody.Document, Document, Document. The key to a good defense is to be able to prove HOW you did something. Keep a daily diary with the steps you've taken and plan to take. Document all results, and all versions of the code you are using. If you can prove that this was reverse engineered 'cleanly', then your legal problems will be much less than they would be. I'd also hire a good lawyer NOW. And not one that handles wills and property transactions. I mean one that understands copyright law. Good luck to you.