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UK Government Confiscates Firefox CDs
Alsee writes "The idea that Free Software can be sold has some government officials perplexed. Times Online has the story. A UK Trading Standards officer contacted the Mozilla Foundation to report catching a business selling copies of Firefox. The organization confiscated the CDs with the intent to prosecute said business. When informed that such distribution was authorized, the officer first expressed disbelief that Free Software could be sold then said 'If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation'."
"we are too stupid to make a distinction between Free software and commercial software. We can't read nor do we understand licence agreements."
In other words, they can't do their job in a proper way.
If they bothered to read the license Mozilla has attached to its products, they wouldn't be so surprised.
"If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted."
Here is the crux, Miss, what is/is not permitted regarding software is entirely a function of the license that is agreed to by the involved parties. There is no blanket set of rules - what one party's license prohibits, another party's license may encourage or require. The 'general advice' you should give to businesses is that they need to read and understand the licenses associated with whatever software that they are involved with (something you apparently had difficulty doing yourself)
Anyone notice how "A Trading Standards Officer" has mutated into "UK Government...."
Because stories are more interesting when it's "Entire Government Proved to be Incompetent" and less interesting when the story is "Some Guy/Gal screws up".
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Um, people who violate OSS licenses, perhaps? It shouldn't matter who gets paid, as long as the lawyers get paid, you know?
(I know you tried to be funny, and succeeded, too. =)
when the executive branch does not understand, and thus cannot enforce, what the legal branch created. This could probably mean that the laws don't make sense? Just maybe?
It's even sadder to realize that the bullspit around "copying is illegal" appearantly managed to take precendence over actual and factual law in the heads of the executive branch.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The Trading Standards Officer's reply was incredulous: "I can't believe you are giving away food for free. This makes it virtually impossible for the police, from a practical point of view, to catch and prosecute shoplifters."
Paid Q&A/Research
"Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
Because basically what is happening lately is the legal community is trying, for fun and profit, to use EULAs and licenses and things like UCITA, to make every transmission of information into a contract negotiation of unlimited dimensions.
Imagine a "negotation" between, for instance, a team of 30 Sony corporate attorneys in New York, versus a 12 year old in Arkansas who just wants to listen to Eminem. One where the outcome is never recorded but always presumed. And now you see how absurd the legal fiction of the EULA really is.
And here is our biggest gift ever. unintentionally, the government itself is admitting that it is "virtually impossible" to handle this situation.
Everybody throw a party.
This wild-west/mafia nonsense with "IP law" needs to stop, because it's hurting our economy and rendering us unable to compete effectively against countries with sane, normal laws.
The GPL has been a wonderfully subversive attempt to fight the system within the system, but ultimately even the FSF will tell you that "the proliferation of licenses" is a problem. No fucking duh it's a "problem;" it plainly illustrates how completely fucking ridiculous, egotistical and largely futile the whole concept of a "license" is.
The powers of copyright holders to make licenses need to be delineated; EULAs need to be explicitly outlawed. Types of copyright exercise should be explicitly codified (a "whitelist" of acceptable options): i.e. conventional, bsd, gpl, etc. Then things can begin to be sane. No more EULA fine print preventing "benchmarking" or "backups," or "disclaimers of fitness" for commercial products... and all such games. And don't even get me started on software patents, a concept so obviously corrupt and ridiculous that we are frankly a laughingstock for ever considering them, let alone occasionally honoring them...
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In fact, restricting commercial distribution would make the software non-free (see the FSF's free software definition, the Debian Free Software Guidelines or the OSI's open-source definition).
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
The problem here is NOT that they misunderstand free software licenses. It's that they don't understand COPYRIGHT. Companies with proprietary licenses have been selling this piracy thing so much that they've convinced everyone that copyright infringement always happens when software is copied. The fact is, copyright licenses can say almost ANYTHING. It's not the government's place to sell one specific (and incorrect) interpretation of what copyright is. uk.gov needs to completely rethink this.
Not a huge department I'd guess, maybe 4 or 5 people if that. I think it's outrageous that they are not all experts in software licensing issues. How dare they check back with the originator of the material to find out what the score is. On the whole it sounds like she dealt with this in a very professional and sensible manner.
Don't put off until tomorrow what you can leave until the day after.
Slashdot is not about, and as long as I've been here never has been about, having the news first. Every story is a link to somewhere else - frequently the NYT, the Guardian, the BBC, Groklaw, the New Scientist or some guy's blog. Usually we've heard the news somewhere else before it hits Slashdot. Hell, most of us don't even bother reading the article; we read the summary and go 'Oh yeah, that - I heard that on [Site X]'.
What keeps us coming here is the discussion. Plagued though it is with trolls, and clueless though the typical moderators are, /.'s system nevertheless manages to disappear the most egregious flamers and pick out the worthwhile posts. And in any long /. discussion there are going to be a dozen or so clueful posters, and one or two experts in the field, giving much more in-depth analysis of the issue than you'll get from mainstream journalism.
If I read a story about something interesting on, say, the BBC's technology pages, I know it'll probably hit /. in a few hours, or at worst a couple of days, and once it does there'll be Interesting Discussion.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
This is one of the most asinine things I've heard in a long time! Just because one piece of software says that it can be distributed even though it's free does not mean that suddenly anti-piracy legislation is unenforceable!
I don't disagree with you that it's asinine, but you have to understand it from their point of view.
The word is coming down from on high to start policing copyright infringement, because some politicians are getting paid by the RIAA (or the UK equivalent). So government kicks into action to try to police that sort of thing. They encounter somebody burning copies of software and selling those. This is an instant red flag to them. Then they come to find out that not only is it totally legit, but actually encouraged.
In their mind, this makes the main thing they're looking for suddenly not always illegal. They don't know the license on each and every piece of software or other copyrighted material. They are looking to do their job in the easiest way possible. They were thinking somebody selling burned CD's = illegal. They were operating on that assumption. Now they are told that they must actually verify what's on those CD's and the licensing terms.
The "virtually unenforcable" is the giveaway line here. It's still perfectly enforcable, this woman just found out that it's not easy to enforce. They could see two people selling burned CD's, and one of them is legal while the other is not. The actions, on the surface, are identical, now they actually have to do work to determine legality.
It's a simple failure of comprehension of the task that they have been asked to do. They thought it was simple, but it's not, and they're understandably in shock at that fact. Okay, you and me understand copyright, and we knew this from the beginning, but this person clearly didn't. That is the disturbing part, and shows that the message being put forth by the RIAA is taking greater hold. Violating copyright is indeed illegal, but what constitutes that violation is more complex than simply burning CD's and selling (or giving) them to other people. The message they're pushing is that it's always wrong, and that message is getting through.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
"Don't be overly harsh."
I'll be as harsh as I damned well please. If your JOB is to enforce the law, and you don't even bother to TRY and understand it, you deserve everything you get.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
If you want to eliminate ELUA's, you need to get your local taxing authority educated on them.
If I paid for Microsoft Office and all I got was the right to use it, it's pretty worthless to the taxing authority in terms of property tax. But whoever owns the license is leasing property in their taxing jurisdiction. They own property tax based on the ELUA. So if Office sells for $500, a certain amount of personal property tax needs to be paid by Microsoft each year.
Disclaimer: I don't know anything about UK copyright law, a small amount of the US stuff and more than I wish to know about Australia copyright law.
I'm seeing this sort of problem a lot lately. A vast number of people (including people who should know) don't seem to realise that most copyright laws are just a fallback state for authors of works who don't specifically set the terms that their work is distributed under. It is still always up to the author, isn't it? If the author of the work (OK, the copyright owner) says that it's OK, then there's no problem. Nobody's breaking any copyright law. If Mozilla had been developed and there wasn't a specific license agreement, they'd probably find themselves in trouble.
It's like the music I make available for nothing over the web. People can redistribute it and copy it under the terms I've specified. If I hadn't specified the terms, they'd be limited to what the (Australian) copyright laws allow.
Probably. The issue with trademark law is whether customers are likely to be confused. You could certainly argue that pencils and operating systems are sufficiently different that no one would be confused, but the specficity of your chosen name would probably do you in. Of course, this has absolute nothing to do with copyright law, as you haven't copied anything. On the other hand, if you sell copies of Microsoft's operating system under that name (or any other), you are in violation of copyright law, not trademark law. Open source software is concerned with copyright. You are explicitly granted the right to make copies and do with them what you will, subject to the terms of the different licenses. So you aren't violating trademark, because you aren't trying to use someone else's trademark to sell *your* product, and you aren't violating copyright, because you are explicitly allowed to make and sell copies. Thus, you're legally clear.
The average Trading Standards Officer is expected to have a working knowledge of a huge range of diverse issues from copyright, to advertising standards, to whether a toaster has a compliant plug on it. In practice, they're a downtrodden, government department with all the funding and resource management problems that go with it.
Rather than call into question the competence of the TSO, I'd rather blame copyright law for being unnecessarily complex.
is that they are trying to enforce Piracy Protection for software that wants to be free! Let Them Pirate! It's FREE SOFTWARE!!!
get your dirty sig off me, you filthy APE!
The software licence says what the copyright holder/owner permits the user to do with said software. If it says that freely redistributable software may be freely redistributed, then there is no point to answer.
As has been pointed out (ad nauseam) above, not everyone has access to broadband, or a pal who has. Its often cheaper to pay a couple of quid to someone at a computer fair, a car boot sale or a computer mag to obtain a disk with a copy of the software you require rather than sitting through several hours of dodgy dialup download to get it "for free". Have you ever considered how long it takes to download a 5Mb file (Firefox) or a 6Mb file (Thunderbird) on a nominally 56Kbit modem link?
Anyone who has broadband can take advantage of the fact, those without may well find it more cost effective to buy a CD. Buyers have not been scammed. They paid for what they wanted and probably from an informed perspective. By your standards, anyone who has ever purchased a Linux distribution has been ripped off by s scammer. Nahhhhhhhhhhhhh. Think again.
There's nothing wrong, you just don't understand (rather like that TS officer...).
My high school's bike lab did maintenance for Boulder's "green bike" program. The program took donated bikes, fixed them up, painted them green, put on a basket and some information about the program, and made them available for the public to use with the understanding that when you were done riding the bike (to the library, say) you left it for someone else to use.
We did a short documentary on the program. When we interviewed the guy in charge of maintenance we asked about theft issues. His response was "You can't steal a free bike." The same quip applies to free software. Projects like Mozilla and Linux want as many people to "steal" their software as possible.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
It seems to me that there are a great many people in this thread, a common identifier being the use of the phrase IANAL, who are debating whether or not this is permitted under the law, when the whole gist of the story is that it's a humourous anecdote demonstrating that it's been established as fact that this is permitted. So, um... why not find a more interesting area to discuss, this is kind of past the point of debate.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
No it's not wrong.
Before I got broadband, I used to buy CDs from people like that. Mainly from www.linuxemporium.co.uk at £2 per CD.
It would have cost me more than what they were charging in telephone charges, it would have taken longer to download it than for them to send it by first class post, and it would have tied up my telephone line for days, preventing me from using it for other purposes.
These people do provide a useful service, and that is why the GPL specifically allows it. Competition from lots of different business will prevent them from overcharging for the service they provide.
Sounds like a case of Sour Grapes from the UK Establishment.
Tony Blair and his Cronies are best buddies with Chairman Bill and Steve from Microsoft. In fact, there have been notable large Public Sector contracts in the UK where Microsoft has given huge discounts to get the customer (funded by the UK tax payer) locked in.
It must be much to the chagrin of these PHBs and ignorant politicians to have to acknowledge that there exist cheaper, free-as-in-speech, open alternatives.
The "free-as-in-speech" and "open" parts are doubly painful to the Blair Administration, while they do everything possible to take away our democracy.
Stick Men
...the propeller-heads that coined the term "free as in beer, not as in speech" thought it was so cute and witty that it didn't matter of the average Joe still can't understand the concept.
The overloaded naming convention is one of the largest obstacles to this concept. And it seemed like (prior to finally "getting it") whenever I asked an expert to explain it, I was spoken down to as an inferior for not grasping such and obvious concept.
Maybe a better communicator can rename the entire movement and save some confusion.
Eh, in the words of the ZIL interpreter:
Not bloody likely.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
This is what happens when the criminal branch takes over the enforcement of what should be civil matters. With no basis whatsoever, and with no complaint from an aggrieved party, they jump in and assume a crime is happening - action must be taken! Shoot first, ask questions later.
Being a task force dedicated to enforcing a certain statute, their response is not balanced investigation, but heavy-handed action to justify their own existence.
You also have to wonder where the "problem" came from? Did someone from their task force wander into a store and see $10 CD's and think "My God! They're only charging $10 for something like a program Microsoft gives away for free, so it must be stolen software!". You would think computer literacy would be a minor requirement of their job...
Or did a competitor make an anonymous call to tie the seller up in red tape and legal fees for the forseeable future?
This is the insidious side of these laws and enforcement regimens - The keystone kops and their 'assumptions' can make doing business a risky task full of random expensive potholes. That's a quick way to kill commerce.
A complaints-based system would function much better. If MS feels they're being ripped off, they can file a complaint. If it's a case of a small company that can't afford their own investgators, then the first time they encounter a "pirate", they should be able to file a standard complaint to "please look for this type of software". Generally, I saw (i.e. when FCC standards were being implemented) that honest merchants were quite willing to turn in their cheating competitors.
I don't know where they thought they had "reasonable grounds", but a task force so inept and unknowledgable probably shouldn't be out and about without adult supervision. "It was only $10 so it must be stolen" is not reasonable grounds. If this is the first they've heard of the open software movement, they obviously aren't competent to judge what is reasonable.