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USAF Violates DMCA, Escapes Unscathed
eldavojohn recommends coverage at Ars on a Byzantine case just thrown out by an appeals court. The US Air Force cracked the code that would expire a piece of software. For this they were sued under the DMCA in Blueport v. United States. The Court of Federal Claims heard it and threw it out. "The reasoning behind the decisions focuses on the US government's sovereign immunity, which the court describes thusly: 'The United States, as [a] sovereign, "is immune from suit save as it consents to be sued... and the terms of its consent to be sued in any court define that court's jurisdiction to entertain the suit."' ... 'The DMCA itself contains no express waiver of sovereign immunity,' the judge wrote, 'Indeed, the substantive prohibitions of the DMCA refer to individual persons, not the Government.'"
Just for a while.
In most civilian jobs you have to sign a paper that states something like "what you do for the company is the company's property". I suspect that most agreements are a bit more stringent than that. When you are in the Armed Forces of the United States, I'd say that those rules apply, even more so.
It appears that this guy took his employer's 'system', redesigned it and then tried to profit from it by having a vendor sell it back to his employer. That stuff would get you fired at my company. I wouldn't expect it to go over well for somebody in the armed forces either.
I'm sorry dude. You did a great job by helping out. But... Your job is to help out. Suing the US Government over something that you produced while working as a government employee isn't going to work.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
are immune from the restrictions and laws they help write to rule the people that put them in power.
In fact they may do the very thing the laws were written to prevent, with impunity.
Couldn't that be considered a definition of corruption?
You have an odd idea of what makes a work for hire. The guy's job was explicitly not programming. He actually asked for training in programming and was turned down. It appears that he in fact did do all of the work on his own time with the possible exception of listening to requests for improvements in the software that he graciously provided at no cost.
Even if he did do some of the work while on duty, that wouldn't make it government property. It would only be government property if it was the product of his job. Suppose that a soldier while on duty works on his novel or that a sailor carves scrimshaw. Do you think that the resulting novel or carving cease to be his property? No, they don't, because they weren't made in the course of his job.
Okay, I may be biased here, being a career officer and all...
BUT: he writes a piece of software at home, and then brings it to work to 'test'? In fact, he's running unverified, non approved software on a military computer, most likely networked to other military computers? Seriously, WTF?
It boggles me that IT security is that lax in a military organisation - our setup won't let me run anything than the approved, verified apps delivered over the network - operational security being key. And don't even think of executing something of a removable media...
We all know that pretty much anyone can be bought (if the offer is high enought) - what if he had been less upright and loyal and had put a trojan or two into his program?
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Democracy as the ancient Greeks understood it meant rule by a certain group of people, not all people. In ancient Athens (5th century BC? please correct me) this meant men over a certain age who owned land. Not women, not slaves (it was fine to have slaves in this democracy) and not free men who didn't own land. Thus "democratic" can have a wide range of meanings. I think it would be fair to say that several of the founders of the US constitution wouldn't be too happy to have women and certain ethnic groups having the vote but still feel they were being true to the statement "of the people, by the people and for the people".