Slashdot Mirror
Germany Muzzles SCO
skyryder12 writes " We have news from Germany. It seems, according to Computerworld, that SCO Group GmbH (SCO's German branch) agreed, on February 18, 2004, to an out-of-court settlement between it and Univention and will refrain from saying in Germany some things it says in the US constantly. There are four things they have agreed not to say in Germany, on pain of a fine of 10,000 euros per offense -- that's about $12,500 USD -- and one thing they can't say unless they present proof within a month of the settlement date. Story at GrokLaw"
As a British guy, I hope we get similar things brought in in Britain soon.. SCO needs to be stopped once and for all, and this seems like a fine (excuse the pun) way to do it.
tim
Now, what will make the remainder of my day great is a falling SCO stock price. Now I just have to wait for the markets to open...
If I am wrong, someone please help clarify.
Link
/PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The SCO Group, Inc. ("SCO") (Nasdaq: SCOX - News), the owner of the UNIX(R) operating system and a leading provider of UNIX-based solutions, today announced an intellectual property licensing agreement with EV1Servers.Net, a dedicated hosting division of Houston-based Everyones Internet (EV1.Net). Under the terms of the agreement, SCO will provide EV1Servers.Net with a site license that allows the use of SCO IP in binary form on all Linux servers managed by EV1Servers.Net in each of its hosting facilities."
Quote: "LINDON, Utah, March 1
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
So telling SCO they have to shup up now instead of six months ago doesn't appear to be doing much that hasn't already happened.
The real question is why Darl has felt it necessary to deprive us of his rather unique insights into intellectual property ownership.
Enforcement of consumer law under the Enterprise Act
I don't mean this as a troll, but it seems to me that if the US courts did something like this to a small business man (rather than to Satan), the slashdot crowd would be screaming about Ashcroft and free speech rights.
Two issues here: even an ACLU liberal like me won't argue that free speech is so absolute as to preclude laws against slander or libel. And most of us would be willing to have limits on threatening speech, although this is more subject to abuse.
The second issue is that "free speech" is very much an American idea. That's not to say that freedom is unknown in Europe, but Europe is far more willing to restrict speech that would (generally) be considered protected in the U.S. Germany, especially, is far more willing to subjugate free speech to social order, as a result of seeing the particular zeal with which certain very bad ideas were formerly so lovingly embraced by German listeners.
I'm referring, of course, to Germany's Nazi past: as a result, Germany law holds social order -- the protection of ideals of democratic government -- to be more important that a right to the exhortation of Nazi "hate speech", including not only speech in favor of Fascism but also Fascism's ugly underpinnings, such as racist and anti-Semitic speech, and minimization of Fascism's consequences, such as Holocaust denial.
Other European nations are also more leery of speech that is too stark a reminder of history, as we saw with France's restriction of eBay's sale of Nazi memorabilia. Britain, too, is less concerned about free speech, but limits speech less through hate-speech laws than through far easier to get judgments against libel and slander.
One of the strongest arguments of free speech advocates in the U.S. is that the best antidote to "bad" speech is not suppression, but instead the "free marketplace of ideas": "bad" speech is supposed to generate counter-arguments against what it advocates, allowing a free people to freely weigh both sides of the question and -- presumably -- end up even more strongly against the "bad" speech. (I keep using scare quotes around "bad" not because I'm a fan of hate speech, but because this argument for free speech presumes that it is up to each listener, and not a government, to determine in his own conscience what speech is "bad".)
I'm inclined to agree with this analysis, but furthermore, I can't see what alternative to it allows a people truly to be free, and I worry that suppression of hate speech in Europe -- and Germany in particular -- is just a tacit acknowledgement that these countries don't really believe that all the demons of their past have truly been put to rest, that they fear that Fascism might again prove irresistibly seductive if allowed to be advocated freely.
But I'm an American, not a European, and I have the luxury of living in a land that has never been touched by Fascism or Communist Statism, where Democracy -- however unevenly applied to minorities or women or the poor -- was at least the ideal to which we pledged ourselves. And of course, the U.S. has not been shy about restricting free speech in its colonial possessions, as a perusal of our laws in the Philippines or Cuba makes clear.
Lest we forget, not only Germany, but Italy, Portugal -- until 1974, and Spain -- until 1977 --, were Fascist, and Eastern Europe -- including East Germany -- languished under Communist Statism just as tyrannical until the 1990s. With that perspective, it's perhaps more understandable that Europeans feel they must -- to paraphrase the U.S. doctrine in Vietnam -- restrict freedom in order to save it.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I see Yahoo is doing its typical head-in-sand journalism. No mention of this anywhere, but what the top story?
SCO Signs Intellectual Property License Agreement with Leading Dedicated Server Provider
Makes me sick.
I know that views like yours are common in the USA. However, many of us here in Europe look to the USA and don't much difference in the level of "free speech" in either place. True, there are a few laws in a few countries in Europe that go against "free speech" in the strictest sense. But in the USA you have something we don't have so much of - increadable social pressure to conform to what society thinks is right.
For instance, we don't have any type of speech that is publicly ridiculed for being "Un-european". We don't have ridiculous over-reactions like that of your country to the exposure of a woman's breast. And what is "free speech" if your actors cannot give their personal opinions about current events when accepting awards?
First of all, I'm aware that history books in the USA do a bad job at this, but you really should differentiate between fascism and nazism.
Fascism was the system in place in Italy, Nazism was the system in place in Germany and has a lot in common with it, but there are a few very significant differences.
The most important one is evident from Muscolini's opinion about Hitler, he thought the man was obsessed with racial issues.
In fact, the system as the USA has today is very close to fascism, it is a system in which big business runs the country, and where the government acts on their behalf. Traditional fascism comes with a fair amount of nationalism and national pride, and usually (but not by definition) results in expantionalism. At any rate it perfectly matches Muscolini's own definition of fascism.
This very aspect of Nazism is what provokes very strong reactions among jewish people specifically, but also among almost anyone who has lived through it in EUrope, and those who were brought up knowing about what happened.
Both Nazism and Fascism heavily lean on glorifying the past, and use a lot of symbolism in order to keep people from looking at reality.
What was forbidden in France is selling things that have been used in such a way by Nazis speicifcally, interestingly enough, you wont see the same vigorous attempts at suppression with purely fascist things.
When looking at the response to nazism in much of Europe, you have to think back to events on sept. 11 and what emotions it triggered in the USA. multiply it a few 1000 times to get to the scale of what Europe experienced under Nazi rule, and you can also count on emotions being proportionally stronger.
Regarding Germany, laws there are not much different from those in the rest of Europe, tho tend to get implemented more strictly (but hey, that is a german thing to do, they do that with lots more then just those rules and laws)
That for example Mein Kampf is not available in Germany is first of all due to the current copyright holders preventing that (happesn to be the government of bavaria if I'm not mistaken) and not because of it being forbidden by law.
Finally, not allowing 'hate speech' as is the case in many European countries is just putting a slightly different line then is done in the USA. Which line is better is up for debate, but neither have absolute free speech.