CBS Interactive Sued For Distributing Green Dam

Dotnaught writes "Solid Oak Software, maker of Internet filter CYBERsitter, on Monday filed a $1.2 million copyright infringement lawsuit against CBS Interactive's ZDNet China for distributing the Green Dam Internet filtering software. Green Dam was going to be mandatory on all PCs in China starting in July, but widespread criticism, including reports of stolen code, forced the Chinese government to reconsider. The lawsuit, if it succeeds, could force companies to give more thought to the risks of complying with mandates from foreign governments that violate US laws."

Comments

Nostalgia

[Ed Avis]

Yes, I remember Cybersitter. Back in the day (1995ish) it used to block me from pages hosted at Oxford University and other random things. This was running on Windows 3.1 with Program Manager crippled so you couldn't start any programs apart from those already in the program groups. I got around it by opening winword.exe with Notepad and randomly changing a few bytes at the start of the file. Now, on trying to run Word, Windows would abruptly crash to a DOS prompt, where I could fix a few things. Ahhh... those were the days...

Re:Nostalgia

[TheRaven64]

If you could run Word, there was a much easier way around this. Go to the Insert menu and select 'other'. This would open package manager. Select the DOS box app as the object that you wanted to package and hit insert. You then had a Word document containing a link to the DOS box. Double click on the link and the DOS prompt opens. From there you can run any other programs.

Oh, and Oxford University was probably blocked for having too many occurrences of the letter X in their URLs or page texts. That was a popular heuristic for spotting porn in the '90s and made looking for information about Linux, UNIX, or XFree86 very difficult.

Re:Reaching Out To Sue Anyone You Can

[Zantac69]

/laughs - why not sue ZDNet China?

Green Dam is made form code stolen from Solid Oak. (yeah its crap code but that is not the point)
ZDNet China is knowingly distributing material that violates copyright.
ZDNet China profits from this distribution via advertisement.
ZDNet China is owned by CBS American.
CBS American is liable for the actions of its subsidiaries.
CBS American is borked.

And yes...CBS KNOWS that there is copyrighted code in there. This has been going on for months - this was not a "suprise - that violates - here is your lawsuit!" situation.

And this is not even close to the same thing that was with Pirate Bay, because they are actually hosting the download.

And this wont kill free software. It will either encourage new novel code...or implementation of coding tricks so that copied code does not look like copied code.

Re:Well

[rinoid]

Just because I left words unspoken, for effect, doesn't make the post a "troll" post ... hopefully meta-mods will see this as a totally crazy mod. So some mod who is hyper-capitalist modded me a troll, what for?

I am not a troll, I am a 6'2" fit male who knows a few languages and can make his way through a crowd.

But yeah, capitalism has spawned the ability for a very small minority to amass a very enormous amount of wealth. These people are not contributing more to the world, are not necessarily smarter, and it is immoral to think that somehow they are worth 10,000 times more than the average human being. Capitalism has given a majority in America the delusion that they too can win the lotto, they too can be the next 10million dollar a year winner but instead they don't realize that they are stuck as economic vassals.

The pres of my company makes a modest salary by ceo/pres standards. I will work 20 years at a decent salary (top 10%) for my region, save 20% of my salary a year and it will not equal what he makes in one year! There's something woefully wrong with our system.

I agree with @commodore64_love ... no need to kill it off completely but we need some serious reform, and, as a society, neigh, as a civilization we need to come to terms with who we are, what humanity is, and where we see ourselves in the world. Will it be some dystopian vision of capitalism writ large, or some blinded by mythologies version of this?, or can we be reasonable?

Re:Well

[Garrett Fox]

The builder's skill, effort, tools, raw materials, and workplace are his capital. Those who denounce capitalism deny that he should be able to own any of those; they're the property of the State to redistribute. Note that that list includes the builder's mind and body.

Re:What realistic choice does ZDnet have?

[jc42]

So if the company does something illegal, let the shareholders be personally responsible and serve time for the company's crime.

Probably a good idea. But it goes against the basic reason that corporations exist. If you dig into the history, you'll find that one of the primary motives in creating such legal entities was to insulate the officers and shareholders from legal liabilities. The whole point of a corporation's existence is to allow the people running it to say "I didn't do it; the corporation did". Stockholders' fines for corporate criminal behavior is usually limited to their investment, and it's exceedingly rare for such fines to be imposed. Instead, the corporation is fined.

Of course, there were and are other reasons for corporations, such as different tax laws. For example, here in the US and many other places, people pay income tax on their full income, while corporations pay tax on only their "profits". A corporation can deduct all expenses of doing business; if a living human tries the equivalent and doesn't pay taxes on the portion that they pay for food and/or shelter, they are likely to end up with a good fine or jail time. (Yes, tax laws often make some portion of such things deductible, but rarely all of them.)

Also, a corporation usually doesn't pay the same taxes on equipment (vehicles, machinery, office supplies, whatever) that a human would pay. This is why individuals or families sometimes form corporations. That way, equipment can be bought and owned by the corporation, not the individual. This is also used to avoid inheritance taxes, since the deceased didn't own the money or building or equipment; the family corporation did, and it didn't die.

In all of these examples, we see that the corporation relieves the people running it from legal liability for something. Usually it's liability for taxes, which are lower for corporations. But all too often, the laws only impose a minor fine on a corporation for actions that would be criminal violations if a human did them.

There was a fun bit of journalistic "research" a few years ago in the US, that consisted in tallying the punishments that the courts gave to corporations for actions that resulted in deaths, such as contaminated food, incorrect medicines, overly dangerous equipment of various sorts, etc. The bottom line was that corporations were on average fined about $300 per documented death. This is a whole lot "better" than the sentences handed down to killers that are humans. It explains why many corporations consider criminal law to be not much more than a minor tax on their business operations, and why such fines often have little effect on corporate behavior. If the likely fine is less than the profit, there's no reason a corporation shouldn't do it.

It's true that in a few especially egregious cases, the officers have been charged and tried for their part in the actions. But it's pretty rare that they are actually convicted of anything.

See also last week's PartiallyClips comic.