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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'."
As Section 3.5 states: Do not confuse the MPL with the GPL, folks. Well, Mozilla falls under the MPL. I'm not sure any other software falls under this license. For that reason, anyone distributing software that falls under other licenses should be investigated. I'm not sure how people distributing Mozilla legally at a charge prohibits you from arresting people who are distributing copyrighted software which they made their own copies of.
My work here is dung.
"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.
Where's the (-1, Too Stupid to Correctly make a <)?
My GOD ! They're giving it away ! How can we control this !
... you're going to put us out of our jobs, I mean, who would we prosecute then??!?!"
As having been arrested for picking up litter - I can understand this problem. Police are mmotivated to enforce the status quo, actual facts are too bothersome.
AIK
If they bothered to read the license Mozilla has attached to its products, they wouldn't be so surprised.
Someone should take this guy to the bar and explain it to him over a 'free beer'.....
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
Thise word..."Free Software"...I do not think it means what you think it means.
The laws of probability forbid it!
A while ago when broadband and CD burners weren't too popular, I tried selling burned Linux CDs on eBay for people with dialup. Within a day or two, they pulled my auctions and said "You can't sell burned CDs of any type on eBay."
Does this mean the DTI is going to try and confiscate all boxed copies of Linux for sale in the UK?
Jonathan Beckett http://www.pluggedout.com
Looks like someone on high has been told to allocate resources to copyright infringment. You can see how the idea that people can sell things which are free would confuse PC Plod.
Here's hoping they get equally confused with the idea you can buy something, but not be able to do what you want with your property and in consequence arrest the chairman of EMI.
Also, see Gervase's blog entry, and it is also on digg.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
The blurb is highly misleading. No CDs were confiscated. Rather, the officer did the right thing: upon uncountering the "suspicious" distributor, he first contacted the copyright owner (the Mozilla Foundation) to ask what gives. In particular, no confiscated CDs had to be returned.
As another poster above points out, the Trading Standards Office should have been able to figure this out by reading the license, but you cannot fault them for going to the people who licensed the software initialy.
"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)
Junior ministers have already been deployed to find out what the government should do about free software...
"It goes against the grain to have this sort of thing going on in Great Britain. We've partially dismantled free speech and the freedom of movement. We will need to review what can be done to combat this new threat." (quote was made up).
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.
They had encountered businesses which were selling copies of Firefox, and wanted to confirm that this was in violation of our licence agreements before taking action against them.
At least she tried to confirm this before running out to arrest people. She may not understand WHY she has to confirm a violation of the licensing agreement... but the fact that she followed the procedure indicates that we aren't all about to be raided for having "pirated" copies of Firefox on our computers.
There is certainly no shortage of dense people in the world. But that's why we have procedures... we say "do this! this way!" And they do... even if it makes them incredulous. Bravo standards-bearers! Bravo.
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.
Will someone please tell me what the hell this is supposed to mean?!
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.
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! In fact, anti-piracy legislation does not even come into play here because there was no piracy going on! Either that quote is being taken way out of context or they are actually trying to say that not being able to prosecute those who copy Firefox means that they won't be able to prosecute those who copy Windows, Photoshop, or other programs that clearly fall under anti-piracy legislation!
In fact, this kind of distribution and marketing has been going on since the Commodore 64 days! Free software would be distributed for about $2 per floppy disk at local computer meets to cover the cost of media and duplication. In fact, that's how a lot of PC shareware got distributed. I used to write some shareware apps that were free to distrubte, just not free to use. I sent disks all over the country to PC user groups with permission to copy and charge a nominal fee for their efforts. I was still getting registration fees a few years after I stopped supporting the software, so that method clearly worked and there was nothing illegal about it. But there certainly would have been laws broken if those user groups tried to do the same with Lotus 1-2-3 or dBase!
Please tell me that I've misunderstood something here!
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
"I can't believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to. Is this really the case?" she asked.
Isn't that something! Maybe you didn't get the memo, but this is how everything works now. Songs play on a radio, but people still buy CDs, because who wants to go recording all the songs. Books are given away for free online, but people pay for the bound version. Artists give tracks away on their website, but people still buy their CDs.
It's called making money off distribution and convenience of medium, rather than off the production of the intellectual property in question. In fact, considering that most software (proprietary or not) has a one-time "production" cost which exists independent of the number of copies distributed. this makes a bit of sense.
The reason we don't mind if people sell copies of Firefox is because the Firefox developers, if they care about the "marketplace" of their product at all (which many developers I'm sure do not), they care only about one thing: more people using the software. If that means Joe in Indiana who only has dial-up and won't download Firefox would rather pay someone $5 for a CD, so be it.
The question asked above shows the general "negative" attitude of the state of our anti-piracy laws. In particular, it seems unfathomable to "let" another company make money off something you give away for free. We're already giving the software away, so how is this in any way a "harm" to us, the developers of the software? We don't "lose" money when another company sells our free product; instead, we simply gain marketshare. Isn't that good enough reason to allow it? Or, put better, wouldn't it be downright silly to disallow it?
I wish more people would sell Firefox. Like, say, Linux machines loaded with Firefox, at Circuit City or Best Buy, for $200 less than the Windows counterparts. Then we'd really be losing money on the OEM deals, us open source developers! We'd have to call the FBI upon all those piraters.
This article is somehow refreshing. Dealing with open source software usually means you see how dark and restrictive the proprietary/commercial world has become.
I was waiting for this to happen--when the legal hacks that are Free Software (they're beautiful hacks, too) run head-first into all of the silly laws that the proprietary software industry keeps enacting.
:)
"I'm sorry, we granted permission implicitly to do that..."
It's a beautiful thing.
Now if I could get my luser friends to stop paying for warez by using Free Software, I'd be happy. Maybe I could make them pay for Free Software?
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
Government official: Must... apply... thought... to... job..... Must... think... *ugh* outside... of... the... box... *gah*.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Bet he wasn't expected Free software to have this direct an effect.
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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first we get a computer that runs without running, now we get people selling free software, for money.
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?
"It goes against the grain to have this sort of thing going on in Great Britain. We've partially dismantled free speech and the freedom of movement. We will need to review what can be done to combat this new threat."
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.
Typically, law enforcement types don't act against businesses without some form of complaint. If Mozilla did not complain then who did? Presumably somebody like the UK version of the Business Software Alliance. If, in the course of investigating said business for BSA type priracy, they also found Mozilla stuff, they might assume (wrongly) that the Mozilla stuff was also pirated.
There is more to this story. I wonder if we'll ever find out.
No different with the RIAA, really. They want to presume that any distribution of digital music (except by their own members, of course) is illegal, and hence they attempt to shut down distribution channels for all large binary files. They're as much afraid of future competition from public-domain (e.g., creative commons) and permissively-licensed music as they are of actual copyright infringement.
But, I digress...
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!
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.
just a quick note to our atlantic cousins, and other non-uk readers. These officials are NOT cops, they are government officials in the same way as traffic wardens and council rent officers. They have no powers other than those related to specific sets of circumstances, for example a traffic warden cannot, as far as I know, arrest someone for murder. Like all public officials 'jobsworth's ', and rules followers often gravitate to these posts and they constantly seek to widen their areas of influence. Their habit of pronouncing on things they're ignorant about seems to be on the increase and is often given more prominence than it deserves. So responce to the article should be: nothing to see, move along....
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
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.
And more often than not it will hit slashdot again a week later too.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
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
From a law enforcement perspective, yes, it is a great difficulty.
Let's say I'm selling Firefox CD's and the cops arrest me, take my computer, take my CD's, publicize information that I'm a thief, yada yada yada. Now the Mozilla foundation rings up and says "hey, that's totally okay with us".. Suddenly not only am I vindicated, but I've got one hell of a good counter-lawsuit against the city.
It's a huge pain in the ass to verify that what somebody was doing was, in fact, illegal before actually arresting them for it. This is something that cops, very generally, don't do. They leave that to lawyers and prosecutors and such.
So in order to prevent wrongful arrest lawsuits against the city, lawyers and prosecutors tend to dumb the law down so that your average cops can understand it. They don't really need to know every single detail, just enough to tell them when to arrest somebody or not.
If you find somebody blatently selling burned CD's, how do you know if they're doing something legal or something illegal? If you have to actually look at the software they are selling and then contact the makers of that software (or find their statements online) before actually shutting the guy down, then yeah, that's a huge pain in the ass. You can't go by the license files the guy himself is giving you (he could be lying), and you can't go by what some random webpage says (it could also be a lie). You need a confirmed truth from the copyright holders mouth before they even take action in the first place.
This basically means that they'll have to know common open source packages, whether selling them is okay, etc, etc. It means a much more difficult training program, it means a much more complex set of guidelines to follow in determining whether or not they should take action against somebody. They have to distill all this information down into what are the possible crimes that can be committed so that the people actually enforcing can understand these things. And yeah, that's a huge pain in the ass.
Oh, and BTW, it's a GOOD thing that it's a huge pain in the ass, because it means that most of these bullshit IP laws will end up going unenforced. That's always nice.
- 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.
...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
And with a bit of luck, people that missed the discussion on slashdot the first time still get the change to read a similar discussion when the dupe is posted a few days later ;)
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
The proper response to her "virtually impossible" comment would be "Ummm, and as copyright holders that's our problem how again?". :)