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

Blue Dam isn't Green Dam

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Theirs goes, 'Ding ding ding dingy ding-ding.' Ours goes, 'Ding ding ding ding dingy ding-ding.

It's clearly not the same at all.

What realistic choice does ZDnet have?

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

If they want to operate in China, they've got to comply with Chinese laws. If they don't comply, the Chinese government has all sorts of levers to apply (fines, jail, blocking their site, etc).

Personally, I would just choose to not do business in China until such time as there is even a hint of transparency in the business and legal environments, but that's just me.

Re:What realistic choice does ZDnet have?

[ad0n]

I would evaluate the risk vs. reward, but that's just me.

Re:What realistic choice does ZDnet have?

[NoYob]

The Chinese leadership is fighting a losing battle and I believe they know this. When they opened up their country to the West and doing business with free countries, it is only a matter of time for their regime to weaken and for Western influences to take hold. Not doing business in China wouldn't do anything except maybe quiet your conscience.

The more Western entities in China there are, the more their regime weakens. It will take time - maybe a generation or more, but the Chinese people will be doing the changing on their terms instead by mandate from Westerners.

Telling others how to live and how to govern themselves has never worked.Notice that whenever the Chinese government is criticized, the Chinese people are right there backing their Government.

Real change will have to come from within and the Chinese people will have to do it and do it according to their values.

Re:What realistic choice does ZDnet have?

[zippthorne]

To paraphrase the GPL of all things..

If they want to operate in the USA, they have to comply with US laws. Compliance with Chinese laws doesn't absolve them from US requirements, if they can't do business satisfying all applicable law, then they must refrain from doing that business.

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.

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.

Reaching Out To Sue Anyone You Can

[rsmith-mac]

This strikes me as desperation. Solid Oak Software obviously can't sue the violator, who is China proper, so they're suing any 3rd party they can find.

As far I can tell, the ZDNet China site is basically the same thing as Download.com, CBS American freeware/shareware/trialware download site. If this is the case, then CBS isn't directly making any money off of offering the software since they aren't selling it (they do however get ad money). It's freeware, and CBS would have no way of knowing that it contained copyright-infringing code. To add insult to injury, Solid Oak wants the full price ($40) of their own filtering software awarded to them as damages, for each copy downloaded from ZDNet China.

If this goes to trial and Solid Oak were to win, it would end up being a precedent-setting event. What Solid Oak is basically arguing is that 3rd parties are fully liable for any copyright violations in the software they distribute. That would immediately make download sites such as Download.com, FilePlanet, and MajorGeeks an impossible thing to offer. And who knows, maybe even Linux mirrors would be liable if some Linux component/package was found to be violating copyright?

If Solid Oak has their way, the idea of rehosting free (as in beer) software is dead.

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.

From precedent...

[Anonymous Coward]

... 2 billion PCs multiplied by 1 million per infringing copy ...

CBS Interactive owes CYBERsitter 2 million billion dollars.

Maybe they'll settle for 1.5 bajillion out of court.

For those who could not understand the summary.

[will_die]

Solid Oak Software is using CBS Interactive for $1,238,450 on the claim that CBS Interactive copied 3,000 lines of code from Solid Oak Software's CYBERSitter and used it in Green Dam software.
The amount they are sueing for is $39.95, the cost of the CYBERSitter software, times the 31,000 times they say the Green Dam software was downloaded.

Since both companies are US based this comes down to simple intellectual property lawsuit.

Re:For those who could not understand the summary.

[will_die]

Blue Dam is the Chinese government's replacement for Green Dam. Blue Dam is aimed for the servers and make use of hardware and software and is suppose to be multiple times more effective then Green Dam was. It is not part of this lawsuit.
Found an article that better explains it. The chinese government hired Jinhui Computer System Engineering who wrote the software, and would of been the company that stole the code. They are China based so no lawsuits on them.
CBS Interactive is being sued because they are US based and distributed the software. It is still down intellectual property.

Re:Well

[ground.zero.612]

Capitalism is evil.

I think you more properly meant that the people doing evil are doing it under the guise of capitalism.

Re:Win-win situation

[digitig]

A battle between a repressive government and a company that makes repressive software? So there's basically no downside?

Yes there is. Lawyers will profit.

Re:Well

[commodore64_love]

I really wish people would stop calling "capitalism evil". Capitalism is nothing more than your neighbor building a chair, or bed, or whatever his specialty might be, and you saying, "That's really nice, can I buy it or give you something else for trade?" That's capitalism and it's not evil. It's the basis of human interaction between neighbors and goes-back 5000 years.

Have some of the corporations gotten out of control? Absolutely, but that doesn't mean we need to kill capitalism. We simply need to downsize the corporation (or kill it off completely), same way we removed the kings and replaced them with democratic-elected assemblies.

That's an odd comment at the end

[MartinSchou]

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.

First of all - if you're doing business in more than one country, you are going to have to comply with the laws of those countries.

Secondly, if the recent polls are an indication, about half of Slashdot aren't in the US, so why would we care if some foreign country mandates something that may be illegal in the US? Now, if it had said "could force US companies [...]" it'd be a lot better.

But why are people surprised, that if you operate in a country, you will have to abide by the laws of that country? If you operate in a country that makes it illegal to give your customers' info to any third party without a court order, and another country has a law that says any government official can ask and it's illegal to deny the request - you're going to have to figure out how to build airtight shutters between the two companies.

Duh!