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Linus Corrects Darl on Copyright Law
cybermancer writes "ITWorld.com has a rebuttal by Linus Torvalds to Darl McBride's latest FUD on copyrights and Open Source. In a nutshell Darl states "SCO asserts that the GPL, under which Linux is distributed, violates the United States Constitution and the U.S. copyright and patent laws" and Linus points out that "the notion that the GPL has, of "exchange of receipt of copyrighted works," is actually explicitly encoded in U.S. copyright law". With Linus of course providing a link allowing the reader to see the law for themselves."
"They are smoking crack."
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
Acronyms, Acronyms, Acronyms.... What do they all mean??????????????
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
Darl said in his letter that this was only the first of many letters... Is Darl going to try and rebutt Linus' statement in the next letter, or is he going to go spread more FUD?
It's not just a crazy idea that some lefty Commie hippie dreamed up in a drug-induced stupor.
So if Darl calls that notion unconstitutional, he is actually attacking the U.S. code as it stands today.
Clear. Concise. Accurate. Funny. That's why people trust and love Linus Torvalds. He is the uber-geek that so many of us aspire to be like.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
Talking in reference of GPL.
"It's not just a crazy idea that some lefty Commie hippie dreamed up in a drug-induced stupor."
I just love how Linus say what is on his mind.
Get Movie Posters
It doesn't sound like the judges are at all swayed by SCO's legal antics, and that's only been regarding SCO showing proof of violated code. I think they'll be dead in the water before they even get to the GPL bit.
Maybe someone can explain to Darl that the GPL is designed so that people receive the value of other peoples copyrighted works in return for having made their own contributions. That is the fundamental idea of the whole license -- everything else is just legal fluff.
Said it better than anyone on /. has :)
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Linus is correct about copyright law, but he's got to watch getting too involved in a back-and-forth with SCO. Imagine Linus on the witness stand in a year and a half (if it ever gets to that) being asked if he said that everything else in the GPL besides the expectation of some form of return is "legal fluff."
I'm not looking at my Murphy's Law poster right now, but isn't there a saying like 'never argue with an idiot, people might not know the difference'? And, the more serious side is the possible legal significance of any statement. SCO is all but finished, but nevertheless, they should probably be allowed to continue shooting off their collective mouth and digging their hole deeper, while everyone else just sits back and waits. Sure, some of the statements are so silly, stupid, or outrageous that they just beg to be countered, but...
Uhhhh... *points behind Linus* What the hell's that!
*While Linus is distracted, Darl jumps into a giant Bob's Big Boy statue, launches himself into orbit and freezes himself for 30 years*
Technoli
Everyone blasted Darl last week for his challenging use of the english language.
To be fair, I must say that Linus's piece is not very cogent, either. At the end of it, I'm left wondering what he's really trying to say. Is he saying that Darl is right (in a sense), that copyright does require profit motive, but the GPL has it because people are exchanging copyrights? On one level, that seems to agree with Darl, doesn't it?
I'm confused. I think Linus should leave this one to all those EFF lawyers.
... here
is it just me, or do i recently see heaps of old stuff appearing on the front page?
Buy all your crazy japanese videogames from
Ugh, I'm sorry, but regardless of it being inline with the views of 90% of those who are reading, I find the word "corrects" in the subject line of this story to be more biased than should be occuring on a site where people often rip others for their biases.
does anyone else think these sco guys are just releasing all these inflamatory statements just to bait the leaders of the oss movement. playing on their passions to force them to make comments that will eventually be used against them in court?
So what else is new? Linus has showned that the framers of the US copyright law were unusually far sighted people, who saw that money was but one of the mediums of profit. Darl however in interpreting profit in monetary terms only, is wrong. He knows this of course, and is merely trying to confuse other people.
It undoes much of the damage caused by copyrights, which might have been bearable 25 years ago when the biggest issues were cassete tapes and xerox machines, but in the information age will just not work.
Then what do you propose? I want something to protect my work, and allow me to profit from it whether that be financial gain, street cred' from my peers, or any other profit motive.
Any ideas?
Ruby on Rails Screencast
The Free Software movement had the right ideas, but lacked a working model for community development. OSS offered a new way to develop software; make every user that wants to take place in development do so freely.
I don't think "intellectual property" is such a bad thing, but I think OSS/FSF has offered a better solution that sits atop "capitalism" quite nicely. The pragmatist in me loves corporations; the idealist in me loves free software.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
...left-wing commie hippie. There is nothing wrong with copyrights. We have problems with forcing others to enforce them by questionalble means. We have problems with expanding them indefinitely and stretching definitions beyond reason. We have problems with assuming that those with tools capable of bootlegging could not be doing anything else... etc. But the principle of copyright is sound, usefull to society, and the basis of the GPL!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficinetly advanced.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
Last week, we were arguing about how believing that everything is profit-oriented, including the Constitution is just cheap and bad. Infact, Linus starts off by hinting at something like that - since it would hinder scientific progress (universities/etc).
And he ends up with a quote/explanation, which backs up the fact that the Constitution does include wording to ensure financial gain (does it really?)...albeit in the form of copyrighted work.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
While some of his responses are rather terse to Mr. McBride, Linus certainly is being a bit more forgiving than he is in some of his Linux related newsgroup responses.
I expected something like:
"Mr. McBride. Obviously you cannot read so I have decided not to put any effort into a response. Maybe you should try the SCO-general list instead."
Go Linus!
If you think this is fun, maybe SCO will go after Apple/Jobs. I'm sure Steve would hold his tongue?
of a programmer from Norway having a better understanding of U.S. law than a CEO from Utah? Hahahahahah
It's like when 20/20 or 60 minutes does a special on how kids from China know US Geography or History better than US students.
What the hell is so bad about copyrights? Okay, I create a work. It's not a physical creation, but rather an intellectual work. A book, a piece of music, a new recipe. It's a product of my own effort, and it's uniquely my own. Now, what the heck is wrong with me having the rights to that work, at least for a limited amount of time? Am I not allowed to control my work? Or do you think that, because what I've created isn't "physical", I'm not allowed to "own" it?
Frankly, I think your apparent dislike of copyright is a misguided reaction to the disaster that is the US patent system. As it stands, the PTO is seriously hindering scientific advancement, at least IMHO, because it allows what the patents were never intended to allow: patenting of a thought, an idea, something where there is no concrete invention. Hell, back when patents were invented, in order to get one, you had to demonstrate a *working prototype*! But, those days are gone now, and I think that, in general people can agree that things have gotten out of hand.
However, don't think that, just because the patent system is a disaster, all "intellectual property" is a bad thing. Copyrights are a very good thing, if used correctly. And I would argue that the concept of copyright is very natural. After all, if I write a poem or a book, I refer to it as "my poem" or "my book", and I would be very offended if someone "stole" my work (notice the word "stole"... it immediate implies ownership), copied it, and made gobs of money off of it. Of course, the system is abused by some (eg, RIAA), but overall, I can see no real reason to abandon the concept of copyrights.
Won't work now. SCO is being counter-sued by IBM, and is facing lawsuits from other parties as well. They're in this for good, with or without Darl. SCO is a corporation, and as such has no choices to make at this point; they must hold position and keep the shareholders' stocks as high as possible. Anything else will result in massive legal action against Darl'N'Friends by the shareholders themselves. He's really backed himself into a corner, and he must get out by trying to plow through IBM... or at least go down fighting. Otherwise he, personally, will be held responsible...
End of lesson. You may press the button.
The Constitution definitely does have something to do with copyright.
i en ce/constitution_transcript.html
Section 8 of the US constitution contains this:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
http://www.archives.gov/national_archives_exper
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
Mr. Lessig had an equally interesting rebuttal of the latest FUD from Darl the other day:
l
http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001611.shtm
Despite RMS's aversion to the term, the GPL trades on a property right that the laws of the US and EU grant "authors" for their creative work. A property right means that the owner of the right has the right to do with his property whatever he wishes, consistent with the laws of the land. If he chooses to give his property away, that does not make it any less a property right. If he chooses to sell it for $1,000,000, that doesn't make it any less a property right. And if he chooses to license it on the condition that source code be made free, that doesn't make it any less a property right.
The laws of the US and the EU don't purport to restrict the conditions under which the owner of a copyright in software might license his software (except in ways that are not relevant to this debate). Under those laws, the owner of this property right has the right to sell his property, or license his property, or lock his property in a drawer. Again, it is his property, and he gets to do with it as he wishes.
The GPL thus precisely advances the "effect" of Congress's and the EU's copyright laws: it gives the owner of a property right the right to do with his property what he wants.
Basically, Darl seems to be saying that copyrights exist only where financial gain is to be made...and somehow overlooks the fact that a copyright is a property and thusly may be dealt with as the owner wishes within the context of law.
It's easy to see why SCO recklessly continues their pursuit of a fatally flawed litigation when the management of SCO has such a skewed and obviously fallacious view of American law. At the same time, you have to wonder why their legal team continues this pursuit with them. Surely they are smart enough to know at the end of the day (hopefully real soon now) they are all going to end up with large chunks of egg all over their collective faces.
I think what has gotten out of hand is granting patents for software as, PJ said in her interview on Linux Universe, "Software is math. There are only so many ways to write 1 + 1 = 2. If you let math be patented, you are bound to choke off the ability to write new software eventually, because programmers can't write without eventually needing to write 1 + 1 = 2, and if they can only write it by paying a toll to the big guys who can afford to patent 1 + 1 = 2, you've limited who can write software and/or what they can write. Meanwhile, other countries that don't do patents the way the US currently does will be innovating like crazy and leaving the US and Europe, if it follows their lead, in a walled-in software prison controlled by the Microsofts of the world."
Just because some chose to ask for money for ther work dosent make it wrong, since if its only copyrighted someone can go out and reimplement it for free, in that way Copyright promotes competiton.
in sumary:
patents->bad;
copyright->fair (as in fair use);
Did Glenn Beck rape and kill a girl in 1990? gb1990.com
With Linus of course providing a link allowing the reader to see the law for themselves.
That's low.
Darl would have provided a URL to SCO's business model - you know, the one based on RAMBUS -- but he quickly realized that such a business method was likely to already be patented.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
SCO's contention that copyright is primarily for the economic benefit of the copyright owner is utterly without merit. Copyright law exists to promote the advancement of knowledge. One of the tools it uses is allowing authors to be rewarded.
The classic example is "Noah Webster[,] who supported his entire family from the earnings on his speller and grammar during the twenty years he took to complete his dictionary." (House Hearings on Copyright Term Extension Act of 1995, at 165.)A better example would be "Linus Torvalds, who used the notoriety he received from Linux to allow him to do what he wanted to do: write code."
(I'm a computer geek, not a lawyer)
sigs, as if you care.
Otter: Ladies and gentlemen, I'll be brief. The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules or took a few liberties with our female party guests -- we did. But you can't hold a whole fraternity responsible for the actions of a few sick, perverted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you ... isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do what you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America!
Hold the broken rules, substitute profits for females, open source community for fraternity, and Darl for Dean Wormer.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Look, as much as I enjoy hearing Lessig, Linus, et al dismantle Darl's insane FUD, it's already been done to death. Particularly with this last GPL-violates-constitution lunacy, Darl and SCO have become self-mocking. I fully expect the next press release from Darl to claim that the GPL makes apple pies taste sour, especially ones made by nice old grandmothers. Is this news? "Lunatic continues to babble, tricks 'reporters' into listening" is kinda newsworthy, I guess.
The real news is that SCO got a sizeable portion of their ass handed to them last Friday. SCO has one month to put up or shut up, and all their actions so far (in court!) have shown them very reluctant to put up. In the meantime its unlikely that Darl will shut up, but that is really, truly irrelevent. The FUD portion of this fiasco is over. It's court time now, and we're going to see exactly how shoddy SCO's claims were put together. Nothing SCO does or says until they walk into court next is of any significance.
January. It's not that long to wait. In the meantime, I'm all for ignoring SCO's public spewage.
The enemies of Democracy are
I think Linus should be very careful when he starts discussing the law. Look at the quote he uses:
"The term 'financial gain' includes receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value, including the receipt of other copyrighted works."
I think it's a tough argument that releasing code under the GPL includes receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value.
When I release code under the GPL, there is definitely no receipt of anything of value, and I would argue that there is no expectation of receipt of anything of value.
The fact that copyrighted works are included in anything of value does not validate the GPL in any way.
Explain to me how I get more access to copyrighted works (my financial gain according to Linus) by releasing code under the GPL.
While the front page article looks like some one just felt the need to show the caldera icon once more there seem to be interesting things happening at SCO, apparently some of the investors are not that happy with the current state of events:
SCO Finalizes Agreements With Investors and Law Firms
and...
Santa Claus Operation
A new look for SCO - not supreme but funny enough to take a look.
sco_christmas
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
But how on earth could the GPL "violate the United States Constitution". Isn't the Consitution only binding to the Federal govt? ie, even if there was a clause in there saying "RMS is a kook and the GPL == evil and bad, use SCO Unixware instead", that wouldn't prevent anyone but the Feds from using/dealing with the GPL. Right? Have I been smoking too much crack?
(Yes, I know, it's Darl, I shouldn't assume it makes even the slightest bit of sense.)
isn't government, at best, just a necessary evil?
Linus makes an excellent case for the legality of the GPL under the constitution as it stands, but who's to say that the constitution, in its current incarnation, is anywhere close to adequate? What if, for once, Darl actually got something right and the constitution DID say that copyrights REQUIRED a pure profit motive? What sense is there in enforcing an antiquated law if the result of that action ran contrary to the best interest of society, progress, or just general common sense?
I mean, fundamentally speaking, all governments begin with the purest form of democracy - a person or group of persons decide what is in their best interest and then act upon that decision. It is only later, when a group becomes too large to govern itself effectively, that it chooses to allow some other person or group to act on its behalf. There is always choice involved; even dictators would be powerless if their soldiers simply laid down arms and said "screw you buddy".
All i'm saying is that MAYBE we (and by we, i mean "the government") should be debating wether Darl's ideas on copyright are in anyone's best interest other than his OWN rather than trying to decide if he has some shaky, defunct legal leg to stand on.
The constitution is and has always been a dynamic document . . . else women would still be a silent majority.
** Chigusaaa!!! You're the coolest girl in the WORLD!!! **
Or do you think that, because what I've created isn't "physical", I'm not allowed to "own" it?
Actually, you're not. Not even under current law, and not under any copyright law since the American Revolution. Copyright is a limited-term monopoly granted by the government. You DO NOT own the work you hold copyright on - it is the property of society, whose resources you used to create it. You do own the rights to a temporary monopoly on the reproduction of that work.
Because if the GPL is held to be valid (which it of course, IS, to anyone with half the brain of an ant), SCO can't escape the fact that they distributed linux under the GPL for a LONG time, even after their lawsuit was filed.
For charging licensing fees and whatnot for other works, and NOT following the GPL.. sco will either win this suit, or die.
Several ideas...
1) Non-transferrable copyrights, that expire when you die and cannot be owned by a corporation, only by humans (after all, corporations don't have ideas, humans do).
2) Required five-yearly renewal of copyrights to keep them active (would allow all sorts of untracked materials to fall into the public domain naturally, and still allow Disnazy and co. to keep their precious Mickey Mice).
3) Remove the "viewing/listening/reading" right from copyright law. The fact is, once you've released something into the wild you have no rights as to who may view it or listen to it. Return copyright law to its original purpose: protecting artists from malicious publishers, not from their audience.
Those are just of the top of my head, recalled from past discussions...
Daniel
Carpe Diem
That's copyright my man! The part that has been bent over and turned into goatse.cx is the "limited time." It used to be only four years now it is untill the end of the world.
NarratorDan
"If you're not confused by quantum mechanics, you really don't understand it." - Niels Bohr
I'm a full-time writer, and I've been living off savings for the past eighteen months writing a new book. Thanks to copyright, I can reasonably expect to earn enough money once my book is published to stay afloat financially, and to tackle additional projects.
When I see posts like the parent one, it makes me think that there's a lot of Slashdot people who truly believe that every creative product that can be digitized or photocopied should enter the public domain.
I'm a huge advocate of open source, and I think I'm very generous with allowing access to my own work. Fr'instance, I made my first book a free PDF download on my website. But I keep seeing a sizable number of posts on Slashdot that argue that every piece of computer code, writing, music, or art ought to be exempt from copyright. That's nonsense, and it would destroy the foundation that allows a vast amount of our best art to be created.
I'm the first one to agree that today's Bono-fied, Disney-fied copyright terms are outrageous. I tend to think ten or twenty years on a book or film ought to be plenty. After that, the public domain would be enriched -- while the people who created it would still have time to be compensated for their work. But take away all copyright protection and people like me would be stripped of our financial viability, and our ability to contribute.
This book I'm finishing now has taken me eighteen months, and every day I've woken up and worked until I could no longer think clearly. Writing this thing, to make it as good as it is, in this short of a time, would never have been possible if I had a day job. And without the prospect of future financial return that copyright delivers, I could never have devoted myself full-time to this project. Take copyright protections away and my work, plus a whole lot of other great music/art/writing, could never be created.
Sure, there will always be some people who can afford to create and give away their work, and some of these creations will be superb. But copyright vastly increases the number of people out there who can devote huge chunks of their time to putting their heart and soul into creative projects. Just because my stuff can be digitized doesn't mean it should be seized by law and put into public domain the moment I show it to anybody. If the parent poster sincerely feels that way, perhaps he can apply that same spirit and send me his next paycheck -- by his standard, I'm just as entitled to it as he is.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Since when has the GPL prohibit[ed] any proprietary use of software? One is free to sell or give away their software.
Red Hat's position is that current U.S. intellectual property law ?impedes innovation in software development? and that ?software patents are inconsistent with open source/free software.?
These comments by RedHat are taken way out of context to bolster SCO's arguments! Shame on SCO!
Whoa! I thought is was "'free' as in beer, not 'free' as in money". Anyone can own the software. Really, though, the community owns the software.
Not to slight the Euros, but when did legal precedent in the EU bear any relevance to US law?
What Darl needs to learn is that the Open Source idea/belief/movement is all about choice and the betterment of the community at large.
It is blanantly obvious that SCO is only doing this to make Darl and his buddies as much money as they can, before this issue is finally put to rest (pump and dump anyone?). And there is little or no merit to their claims chatsoever. So given that, is there any merit to grace their blathering with rebuttals?
I appreciate IBM's stance in this whole affair. They have their lawyers do the talking (in the courtrooms), and outside of that they dont bother to comment on it, thereby not providing any more fodder to the scumbags that is SCO.
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be
Or do you think that, because what I've created isn't "physical", I'm not allowed to "own" it?
And what if it is physical? Remember, in the words of a great philosopher: "You can't, like, own a potato, man. Potatoes are mother nature's creatures."
More seriously now: in some sense, all property is a legal fiction. How does it make sense that drawing lines on a map allocates a region of the ground to be my property? How is it that I can accumulate goods, and others are prevented from taking or using them, even if they are left unprotected?
Of course, all property is legal fiction in the natural world -- but a useful one. Property permits us to engage in commerce with knowledge that there will be legal consequences for those who deprive us of our property. As such I don't buy the arguments of anti-copyright folks who claim that because intellectual property is legal fiction, it should not exist.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
This whole SCO thing has become such a joke. I find it hard to believe that anyone can take it seriously. I find it amazing that a company with such idiotic management can survive this long.
In any case, I don't think Linus should grace this crap with a response. He's shown in his discussions on binary modules that he doesn't understand copyright law. If he wants to respond with legal arguments, he should get a lawyer who knows a lot about copyright law to do it for him. In this particular case, it seems he got it right, though.
>It's not just a crazy idea that some lefty
>Commie hippie dreamed up in a drug-induced stupor.
So, Linus... why don't you tell us what you really think of RMS?
Sitting Walrus Blog
I don't think Linus' rebuttals will have any effect on SCO. SCO seems fixated on the idea the the opensource community stole code from them and GPL'd it. SCOs argument is still on the fact that "their" code cannot be legally distributed simply because a GPL notice is distributed with it.
Any arguments put forth that attempt to clarify the GPL for them won't have any effect because I think that SCO would see this as the OS community avoiding the real issue at hand.
I read the GPL in its entirety once, and it was perfectly clear to me, and I believe it is perfectly clear to SCO as well. But if you put yourself in SCOs shoes and truly believe (as SCO does) that your code has been jacked and the GPL is a way to legalize this action, then SCOs arguments do make sense.
One has to wonder if maybe Boise et al weren't railroaded into signing up for this case in the first place. They may have thought better if they knew what ground they'd eventually be treading on. Now on the other hand, they may just be greedy lawyers rooting for the bad guys, but in the past Boise has had nothing but a good reputation. Kinda makes you wonder, or at least makes me wonder. Contracts are contracts and there probably is no turning back for the lawyers at this point. (IANAL but then again, most of us aren't so I probably don't really need to put that.)
Speak for yourself.
Bít, zabít, jen proto, ze su liska!
Here's a template to help understand what they are saying. Where (roughly): -- MarkusQ
Actually, you're not. Not even under current law, and not under any copyright law since the American Revolution. Copyright is a limited-term monopoly granted by the government. You DO NOT own the work you hold copyright on
Oh please, you're arguing semantics. Fine, you are granted rights to control how the work is distributed, for a limited period of time. That doesn't change the point that, as the creator of the work, I naturally expect to be able to control said work.
Worse yet, without this control, I can gain no benefit from my efforts, since anyone can now simply reproduce what I've created at very little cost. So why would I ever create anything of value?
Oh, and BTW, before you cite OSS as an example of creation without compensation, you should ask yourself, how the heck would someone write War and Peace OSS-style... my point is that not all creation is distributable, and as such, requires a massive investment in time, resources, etc, in the work by a single person. Without compensation, this kind of investment is practically impossible.
it is the property of society, whose resources you used to create it.
Really. Well, I wrote my book/poem/etc with my own computer in my own home using electricity I paid for. Oh, wait, because all those things were built by society? Okay, can I have your house, then?
It's worth pointing out that the GPL is an example of a way for companies to cooperate for mutual benefit without running afoul of antitrust.
There is nothing in the Constitution or common sense or antitrust laws that requires companies to engage solely in cutthroat competition for profit, or that says that companies can't cooperate for their mutual benefit. Care, however, is needed to make sure that cooperation doesn't run afoul of antitrust.
The GPL provides one of a number of available mechanisms for companies to cooperate for mutual benefit in a way that does not create antitrust problems.
Another way is the creation of voluntary industry standards--such as C, Unicode, the use of 120 VAC 60 cycles for home wiring in the U.S., etc. Presumably SCO opposes this, too.
SCO may win the FUD war if we aren't careful. We should make the point that SCO is fundamentally opposed to the whole notion of cooperation.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Yes, this is important because authors never made any money before copyright. Amazing how with one act of law, whole fields of human endeavour, writing, music, art, finally become worthwhile. Thank you Government, I don't know what we'd do without you.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Until Open Source came along, software innovation needed such encouragement.
That statement is either incorrect, or misusing terms.
If you think that the original development of software was in any way due to copyright protection, you're just wrong. Most important pre-1975 programs were either explicitly public domain, or owned but given freely to anyone with the hardware to use it. (The idea that software should be owned is largely a Bill Gates innovation)
Or, if you definition of "Open Source" is so expansive that you categorize that original development as part of it, then you're only engaging in light anachronism.
They are dumping it. Go to SCOX on finance.yahoo.com and click on the 'insider' action. They've been dumping it off and on since this whole thing started. They can't keep on doing it though because there are SEC regulations on insider trading -- you cannot action your stock as an insider for something on the order of 6 weeks (months maybe?) of a big public announcement. While I don't know the details, my dad wasn't able to action any shares in the company he works for when then announced the acquisition of another subsidiary. I don't know if that applies to lawsuits, but I'm betting it does.
Speak for yourself.
Do you think SCO is just keeping these lawsuits up to pay for the bandwidth of being Slashdotted four times a day?
I think we're all waiting for the other shoe to drop. None of the things McBride has said either via his legal proxies in the courtroom or in the public arena come particularly close to passing a giggle test.
We know he's going to be laughed out of court, and then SCO sued into oblivion by IBM (go, IBM!), and Darling Darl himself will probably be put in jail for his accumulating crimes.
At this point, all we wanna do is hit the fast-forward button and see the punchline. How the rest of this will all turn out is a foregone conclusion at this point.
Should be allowed, encouraged, kept working by stabalizing kernel interfaces and not harassed by any type of intellectual property.
Linux is not so hot on the desktop, where lots of drivers are needed and I suspect most vendors write a Linux driver to make a small minority of users happy, not because it makes them a lot of money. This could be improved perhaps if they only need to update their driver once a year, not for every kernel patch and distribution.
As for releasing the source code, well sometimes they don't own it all in the first place and getting/buing permissions from everyone would be too expensive. Or in case of NVIDIA, driver optimizations could be easily used by competitors. Again, they don't have a huge market to look forward to as a compensation.
I think this is one case where Linus and a few other kernel developers care more about having fun - freedom to change interfaces to do something cool - then the end users of their work. Nothing wrong there too - it's their code and thanks to GPL other people can even make other versions more to their taste. The thing is, someone might do just that with Linux or BSD one of these days.
Good point! Note that Linus didn't say "It's not a crazy idea that some lefty Commie hippie dreamed up in a drug-induced stupor." The word "just" implies that it is indeed "a crazy idea that some lefty Commie hippie dreamed up in a drug-induced stupor" but that there is more to it.
But one should be cautious...
While the SCO menace may be simply a minor diversion (akin to Lurtz) the true menaces may be more corrupting and more difficult to fight.Defending or defeating attacks from the closed source enemy means a need to unite and to pool the copyrights we each develop individually. But such power placed in any one man is a difficult thing to manage, to defend, and to resist the corrupting greed that arises from it.
Of course there doesn't seem to be much alternative:
- Stay low, hidden in the woods while others feed the corruption of the ruling closed source
- Unmake the power and release all copyright into the public domain. This destroys the corrupting influence, but it strenghthens the enemy as well.
- Continue to weild the GPL until the problems and corrupting influence of the intellectual property system can be worked out and the evil truly unmade.
Sorry, if the above arguments are a bit muddled. I guess I have something else weighing on my mind.If you want to find the collective IQ of an assembled group, you take the IQ of the lowest person in the group and you divide it by the number of people in the group.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
There's an article over at Motley Fool that gives some insight into the minds of investors on this issue:
...on Friday, The SCO Group postponed filing its fourth-quarter earnings report until December 22. The reason: To allow time to hammer out the details of its $50 million private placement.
While the company insists this would not affect its prior guidance for revenues of $22 million to $25 million, it does seem strange that a public company would have problems with what looks to be a relatively routine process. For short sellers, this is a textbook clue that there may be internal disarray or perhaps, even some finagling.
I guess today's post by Linus will also help investors get out while the gettin's good.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
Been to Russia recently?
Can someone please translate the law into normal english speak?
There is a reason we have lawyers and politicians...to prevent this very thing from happening.
I'm a full-time writer, and I've been living off savings for the past eighteen months writing a new book. Thanks to copyright, I can reasonably expect to earn enough money once my book is published to stay afloat financially, and to tackle additional projects.
:-)
I agree. I'd imagine a lot of the "profit is bad" comments come from the teenage populous. I'm not trying to discriminate against age, but I used to think money was the root of all evil when I was younger. When I turned 20 and wanted to get married, it became apparent to me very quickly that no woman wanted to marry a guy who couldn't support a family. I then checked the "root of all evil" quote and found it was from the Bible, and it actually says "money is the root of all kinds of evil" not "all evil".
If you still need convincing, go to your local library and check out "Just for Fun" by Linus Torvalds. In it he does a pretty good job of explaning the pros/cons of IP rights in the latter part of the book. For those of you who've moved past your aversion towards capitalism, you can go to a bookstore and buy it instead, like I did.
Gotta run. I'm 34 now, married, and my wife and son need me to spend some time with them
Ruby on Rails Screencast
Copyrights is what makes your thing your. Even a drawing is copyrighted to you. The Swedish wording is better "upphovsratt". It's 'the legal right to your creation'.
I do however enjoy some of this fud like the blatant misquote of RedHats patent statement. (They don't even mention copyright, so what pipe did Darl smoke when he saw that??)
We don't need no litigation
We don't need no spin control
No Darl McBride praise in the chatroom
Pumpers, leave this stock alone!
Hey! Pumpers! Leave this stock alone!
All in all it's just another turd in the stall
All in all you're just another turd in the stall
We don't need no litigation
We don't need no spin control
No Darl McBride praise in the chatroom
Pumpers, leave this stock alone!
Hey! Pumpers! Leave this stock alone!
All in all it's just another turd in the stall
All in all you're just another turd in the stall
"Wrong! Dump it again!"
"If you can't beat the street, how can you have any earnings...
How can you have any earnings, if you can't beat the street?"
"You! Yes, you behind the bodyguards, stand still laddy!"
Yes, this is important because authors never made any money before copyright.
Well, that was exactly what happened. They made money not as authors, but by other means.
Most writers/musicians had patrons(Leonardo, Michelangelo, Haydn), were performers (Liszt, Chopin) or impresarios (Shakespeare, Moliere, Haendel).
Obviously, the Sixtine Chapel was rather hard to fake, but for musicians the standard copy protection method was: never let the scores out of your sight!
Cheers,
Then you'll need to throw out the whole concept of copyleft, upon which the Free Software Foundation is based. You cannot have copyleft without the legal basis for the ownership of creative works. And that's copyright. You cannot control the distribution of a work unless you own it.
Of course, there will be those that argue that without copyright there would be no need for copyleft, but that ignores the fact that the four "freedoms" of the FSF cannot be guaranteed without it. One might be able to legally share copies of a copyright-less binary, but without the source code to it, no one can improve it.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Actually, Mozart survived on a combination of royal grants (govermental pork) and income generated from commissions and students (workaday stuff). Works were rarely "pirated" because of the extreme talent needed to transcribe from memory based only on real-time in situ listenings. No recording devices. No photocopiers.
Mozart was one fo the few who could remember a full score from a listening...and IIRC he pissed off at least one composer by transcribing a symphony (from memory, from a single? listening) and then mailing the copy to the composer.
Yes, until the advent of recording and playback devices, one of the few ways to make money was to be a performer or your own art. Writing might be considered in the same boat, with stories and non-fiction being "performed." But since writing came along with the post-(forage/hunt,barter) economy there isn't really a good parallel for written prose.
I do agree that copyright terms have gotten completely out of hand. 20 years from date of publish, or date of register, or claim of ownership should be sufficient. If I patent a new invention (just as "creative" as a written work) I will not receive exclusive right ot that invention for more than 20 years (I think). I suppose in the event of death, the remainder of the term shall be treated as property for the survivors.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I don't feel that is an appropriate comparison. Shakespeare, Mozart, and most other artists prior to the 20th century had an implicit "copyright", since they made their living in one of two ways:
In Shakespeare's case, he controlled access to his plays. You only got to experience a play by going to the Globe Theatre and paying the admission price. The money helped him eat long enough to write something else, whether that was another play, a sonnet, or whatever. Other artists made their living in much the same way, creating works that were presented at local venues that charged admission.
Bach, Handel, Mozart, and many other composers were essentially payrolled. Some worked for the church, some for royalty, and others for wealthy nobles. They were free to work, safe in the knowledge that there was food on the table, but they almost always turned over the finished work to their sponsor / employer.
(Sidebar: Isn't this starting to sound like the same options we have when we write code today? We can work on our own and control it ourselves, including the option to give it away freely, or we work for someone else and they keep what we write.)
Either way, it was difficult for their work to be stolen. The manuscripts could be physically stolen (but that is a physical object, subject to ownership) or their sponsor / partner could refuse payment (but that is breach of contract). The artist had recourse either way.
Copyright law came into play to prevent talented, but unethical people from going to hear the opera or see the play and then depriving the author of their livelihood by recreating it somewhere else. Prior to that, the independent artist's options were very limited. In short, copyright law provided additional protection for the artist's livelihood, but otherwise simply codified what had already been happening for centuries. The main difference is that prior to formal copyright law, the "copyright" expired upon the death of the author, which makes sense because the creator no longer needed to make a living.
How can the eyes be the Windows of the soul when they never blue screen?
In software, there's always another way to do it. In a sense, some proprietary copyrights (when not abused) simply spark innovation. If Joe Developers writes an app everyone likes, then Sue Programmer can work on making a similar/better product. How many office suites were there before MS squashed the competition like a bug? For a while there, each was trying to outdo the other in features, and the public benefitted from that competition.
Back to the (when not abused) part, however. Fast forward to today where innovation is either quelled by copyrights, or innovators are eliminated by buyouts and monopolies.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
So why would I ever create anything of value?
If you have to ask, it's very improbable you'll ever do.
Cheers,
I'd plonk everything from Darl and SCO, but like the kook he is, he'd just morph the name and keep posting. (Of wait, they already morphed to SCO. See!)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
So, according to US copyright law, even if Linux is an "unauthorized derivative" of UNIX, SCO still doesn't own the copyright!
SCO is simply a troll at this point. Under US law, they can't assert ownership of Linux, regardless of the origins. Maybe this is why HP chose to idemnify their customers - they knew that even if SCO's claims of Linux being a UNIX derivative were true, SCO still couldn't collect royalties. (legally, at least).
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
The surprising thing about all this is the stock price. SCO is locked in a legal battle with IBM, isn't doing well, and is being sued by others. That's not a good position to be in. Yet SCOX is still hovering around $16. Volume is low; yesterday's news doesn't seem to have induced much trading.
that is classifiedized.
Here is a direct link to the insider trading info...
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=SCOX
Linking is not hard. Searching for it is annoying...
Think like the enemy and you will come to understand him.
Business is war. McBride sees open-source as a real threat to his business. He realizes that he can not fight a conventional war against this enemy. How can you under-cut the price when your competition happily gives their product away? How can you build a better product when the enemy doesn't pay it's developers so they can have as many as they want? The only weapon in his arseneal that can gain an upper hand is the legal system.
McBride may be right (in this assumption).
Lawyers, good ones, don't usually work for free. The companies that are exclusivly open source are not (yet) cash rich and don't have much of a war-chest. Companies like IBM and Novell can not fully defend open-source because they have plenty of conventional closed-source software themselves and in some ways have a conflict of interest. They will defend themselves against the charges leveled directly against them but their shareholders wouldn't let them go beyond that.
So this is a war that is being fought in the courtroom, an arena where true open source issues may be under-represented and, under-funded. McBride hasn't found a hole in the defenses but he has found the position most weakly defended and he is attacking there.
Still since he played the "unconstitutional card" I'm wondering how long it will be before the open-source side of the issue says that software is written and that it is a freedom of speech issue? Given the size of the work it has to be expected that some of the sentences used within it may appear in someone else's work? I am sure that a writer like Steven King has probably used a sentence or two that appeared in someone else's book. This alone is not a copyright violation. If someone copied an entire chapter out of his book he would be compelled to show that his work was copied before a court would hear his complaint. That is pretty much what is happening to McBride right now. Show us the stuff or go away.
Personally, I think he will go away.
If you say corporations can't own copyrights, you are effectively limiting MY right as a natural person to sell my copyrights to a willing buyer. I don't see how that levels the playing field.
Corporations are a natural response to the uncertainty of life. For instance, Stephen King was in a nasty accident not that long ago. If he hadn't pulled through, cancelling his copyrights would have destroyed a sizable company and the value they have accumulated for a number of employees. A modest guarantee -- a fixed number of years with no reference to the author's lifespan -- would seem a more reasonable approach.
Oh, I suppose a publisher could take out an insurance policy on an author -- but that could lead to a whole other set of abuses.
"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."
This text sounds awfully familiar. Wasn't it placed there by the No Electronic Theft Act just a few years ago in response to the Brian LaMacchia case? He was accused of exchanging copyrighted software not for money, but in expectation of receiving other pirated software. At the time, I believe you had to take money or tangible property for piracy to constitute a criminal offense. Non-commercial file swapping didn't qualify; it was merely grounds for a civil suit by the copyright holders. NETA plugged up this "loophole".
That Linus could take a lemon like the NETA and turn it into lemonade like this is just wonderful.
...well, probably not, but he should stick to writing code, not about law. His understanding of the law is nearly as messed up as Darl's.
Whenever the law provides definitions, those definitions are valid ONLY WHEN THOSE TERMS ARE USED IN THE THE LAW ITSELF. The sec. 101 definition of financial gain therefore applies only to uses of the term "financial gain" in title 17. Linus's analysis would be correct if somewhere else the law said something like "Copyright law should be interpreted to promote financial gain." But it doesn't.
The only time "financial gain" is used in the copyright law (that I am aware of) is to show when certain copyright violations are elevated to criminal, as opposed to civil, wrongs. See http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/506.html
The fact that sec. 101 defines financial gain doesn't mean a anything outside of that very narrow context which is inapplicable to the discussion.
Darl's "interpretation" is clearly bogus, of course. I won't get into why here, but I could tear apart his argument very easily. Anyone who knows anything about US copyright law got a good laugh from the screwed up analysis of both articles.
IANAL (I will be eventually, but that doesn't mean this is legal advice, it isn't)
Their latest was issued hours before a _very_ adverse judge's ruling, forcing SCO to comply with IBMs discovery. Clearly, the letter was designed to distract attention from the financial press.
USENET also has a response: "Don't feed the Trolls"
Also note that the yahoo site has no information on purchases available. So we can't see how many shares these insiders may have been purchasing over the same listed two year period.
Selling a few thou shares does not equal dumping. When those sell totals start really climbing, and more importantly the when the total numbers of shares held by these people is being shoveled out the door, then you have dumping.
I also noticed that while the insiders who have been selling have been making a tidy profit, Only one of the people selling is one of the big time holders. Overall, the people officially counted as insiders hold %45.83 of the stock, out of a total of 13.85 million shares that's about 6.3 million shares. When that number starts declining rapidly is when the dumping is occuring.
Oh and Darl has yet to exercise any of the 600,000 options granted him in 2002.
As to when they can sell, yes there are blackouts that the insiders have to observe. I know of companies where the executives are given a one month period each year in which to sell their shares. It was AOL back when I worked there. And every August I believe it was, the AOl haters would start crying Pump and Dump, because suddenly the executives would sell off huge blocks of shares, but it was merely the execs taking the only chance they got each year to sell and get the income those shares meant to them.
As an employee there were frequently blackouts of about a month or less where we could not trade.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
There are several reasons why the GPL is attacked by SCO:
-Raphaël
> As we see from these two legal morons
If the law is written in such a way that even Linus can't understand it, the law should be changed. The layperson ought to be able to understand it fully. Obviously it's now full of contradictions and special cases and exceptions and it's just way too large (U.S. tax code alone is 46,000 pages).
A non-lawyer is just as likely to be right as a lawyer -- look at what SCO is doing with their excess of attorneys and deficit of developers.
Lawyers are right, on average, LESS than 50% of the time. In every case, at least one side loses; and you may win not because of your arguments, but because the judge finds something applies that the winning side didn't think of, or because of a technicality.
"Seek legal advice" -- how many times have we all read that? And yet, the advice differs so much from attorney to attorney that we have a constant stream of legal cases to settle them, and APPEALS after that!
All that the convoluted, arbitrary and ambiguous laws and regulations get us is an endless succession of lawsuits and employment for lawyers.
640 laws ought to be enough for anybody.
You're wrong.
First of all 'Boise' is the capital of Idaho. (I know it was the grandparent that started it, but still...)
Boies was a lawyer for the DOJ in their case against Microsoft, not a lawyer for Microsoft. The first google hit for "boies microsoft doj" is here. He actually did quite a good job, and I had a lot of respect for him until he started representing SCO.
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
society hasn't provided anything, That small minority of indiviuals who are capable of creating are the ones who provided it all
Society is the banding together of individuals to provide things for the group that individuals cannot provide for themselves. In return, the individual agrees to abide by the rules/mores of the group. Your "small minority of individuals" is not going to produce anything while searching for grubs or being eaten by bears. Society provides the gifted individuals with the time (the most important thing we have) to do something new. Why do you think we have survived as social creatures rather than anti-social units?
"-- but a useful one."
The problem is that in it's current incarnation, copyright law isn't as useful as it should be. It's supposed to encourage innovation by granting a temporary monopoly on distribution, but since the length of copyright has been extended too far it actually discourages innovation. The corporations who own copyrights have no incentive to innovate when they can simply remarket what they already have. There is also a huge difference between physical and intellectual 'legal fictions', because of the limited nature of physical things.. there are only so many plots of land, pounds of potatoes, and widgets, but ideas can be distributed indefinately without ever diminishing the source. In this case it is clear that all people should benefit from them just as we all benefit from our seemingly endless supply of air. That is why the original intent of copyright law was to encourage innovation to enrich the public domain. Contrary to what Darl McBride and his insane lawyers may think, it is not about financial gain. That is merely the intent of the law makers who have subverted the constitution by passing laws such as the DMCA. That is fine if we wish to create a class of people with ownership of ideas held up by the proletarian masses below them. If our intent is, as it should be, to produce the greatest works possible to benefit us all, maybe the GPL should be codified into law.
My Blog
Just thought everyone might be interested in knowing where the definition of "financial gain" came from in section 101.
I think Linus's reliance on the definition is misplaced; see my above post.
The term "financial gain" was defined as part of the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act in 1997. The purpose of the phrase "including the receipt of other copyrighted works" was to create criminal copyright liability for file swappers. Criminal charges for copyright infringement would otherwise only be applicable when the infringement was done for financial gain in the traditional sense of the term. By adding "including the receipt of other copyrighted works", Congress expanded criminal liability to include file swapping, not just the resale for cash of illegally copied works.
Section 101's definition of financial gain really has nothing to do with the underlying purpose of copyright law and certainly does not equate to "explicit encoding" of the idea into copyright law as Linus seems to think. (Not that McBride has any logical legs to stand on.)
See the text of the bill.
Your honour, 'It's the constitution... it's Mabo ...it's the vibe'
HEY SCO
Hey SCO, it's time to go.
Take your sad code and make it better
Remember you knew it all from the start
Now you can start to make it better
Hey SCO, don't be dismayed
Scams are made to crumble and shatter
The minute you let the GPL in
It would begin to make things better
And anytime you feel the blame, hey SCO, relate
To USL they still have the t-shirt
For all we know your precious code is all a load
Of BSD stuff any way
Hey SCO, don't make me laugh. You have sent so so many letters
Remember you knew it all from the start
Now you can start to make it better
So take your code and leave the spin, hey SCO begin
You're waiting for someone to compete with?
Well don't you know that it's just you, hey SCO, you'll do
The movement you heed has many shoulders
Hey SCO, don't die just yet
Take your sad code and make it better
Remember we knew it all from the start
Now you can start to make it better
Darl-la-la la-la-la-la Darl-la-la-la hey SCO
-- "Hey Jude" (c) John Lennon & Paul McCartney
-- This is satire
-- IANAL but AFAIK and IIUC this specific parody can be considered to be in the public domain
-- Hi Darl! And your brothers Darl, Kevin and Kevin! Hi!
Selling a few thou shares does not equal dumping.
Yes and no. The current situation is that the stock is not strong enough, and there aren't enough shares in circulation, to support true dumping. If the execs were to try to really unload, they wouldn't get much for their stock because the price would go through the floor. They're far better off selling a trickle at higher prices.
On a more conspiratorial note, there's pretty solid evidence in the SCO charts of "painting", which is large-scale institutional buying designed to prop up the price of a stock. If that is what's happening, the SCO execs would really piss off the people they've got propping them up if they were to start dumping significant quantities of stock. That would push the price down and the painters would have to spend even more to push it back up.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.