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China Faces Piracy Suit Over Censorship Software
angry tapir writes "Web software filtering vendor CyberSitter has filed a $2.2B lawsuit against the Chinese government, two Chinese software makers, and seven major computer manufacturers for their distribution of Green Dam Youth Escort, a controversial Web filtering package the Chinese government had mandated to be installed on computers sold there. Researchers at the University of Michigan found that Green Dam copied code from CyberSitter."
It does not have this clause in China, because in countries like that suing the government is as bizarre and unimaginable as, say, defecating on the Moon (without spacesuit).
It does not have this clause in the US either — for entirely different reasons... If you were to RTFA, you would've known, that the suit was filed in the Los Angeles federal court.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
A lot of copyright laws are international, and China is a signatory. There are good business reasons to do this, even though such laws are frequently and casually violated in China, even moreso than in the USA.
Well, the USA could take that to the WTO... wait, we don't even respect the WTO anymore.
Exactly. The makers of this software aren't hoping for a settlement. They just want to make the rights infringement public, and lawsuits attract publicity.
Everyone knows that Chinese "programmers" cheerfully copy whatever they get their hands on. This lawsuit is the legal equivalent of a press release.
Do you post multiple top-level comments per story in order to advertise your terrible website?
A lot of copyright laws are international, and China is a signatory.
They could, however, say "We're the fifth of the Earth's population, fucker", and make their own rules. A country of a billion does not automatically have to accept the rules of 300 million.
Nor do we have to accept any rules they make, unless they want to send some of that billion over here to occupy us. Not saying that couldn't happen, but it's not going to happen over a copyright case.
Besides, nobody is trying to say that U.S. law should apply anywhere but in the United States. But China has made a number of trade agreements, signed some treaties, and it's going to be interesting to see if they're willing to live up to those obligations. My guess is they won't.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Sovereign immunity really does mean that you cannot sue the government for monetary damages for any reason, unless they explicitly consent to it. The reason Microsoft could sue the U.S. government for copyright violation is that the U.S. federal government has waived its immunity in advance, for wide classes of torts, via the Tucker Act and Federal Tort Claims Act.
In a much earlier era, the standard way for someone with a grievance against the U.S. government to collect on it was to file a petition with Congress, which would pass special-case legislation agreeing to pay them, if Congress felt that the person in question was indeed owed redress. The fundamental separation-of-powers justification is that an individual claiming that they're owed money is a request for money from the U.S. Treasury, and only Congress may appropriate such money.
This obviously became rather tedious as the volume of claims increased, and didn't give a great perception of fairness, so in 1855 Congress delegated the hearing of most such claims to a newly created Court of Claims, a special court that served as essentially a claims-hearing arm of Congress (a "legislative" or "Article I" court, not a part of the judicial branch), which would report a recommendation back to Congress; Congress typically then appropriated the money as a sort of rubber-stamp, but was still technically in charge. The system gradually shifted to a more and more judicial one, first by having the U.S. Treasurer automatically dispense judgments from pre-appropriated money, and later increasingly by consenting to have claims heard in regular courts.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Exactly. The makers of this software aren't hoping for a settlement. They just want to make the rights infringement public, and lawsuits attract publicity.
On top of making a publicity, it's actually a profitable move. It's so obvious(at least to civilians Chinese like me) the China Government is intending to create another listed company by giving monoplization power to a private company created Green Dam. Law suits like that, international or local, would greatly affect the risk profile and directly affect the estimation of stock value. For mutual benefit, that listed company would pay for the royality eventually. CyberSitter could cheerfully accept compensation as a settlement in the future.
Everyone knows that Chinese "programmers" cheerfully copy whatever they get their hands on. This lawsuit is the legal equivalent of a press release.
To tell you the true, in the case of Green Dam, these programmers are not copying codes, they copied the binary directly, and they don't even bother to change the company name in the executables. XD
:)
But you're right in the sentance "Chinese porgrammers cheerfully whatever they get their hands on". In fact, they're the huge supporter of opensource programming. (I'm recruiting opensource programmers there and I've never found short of them.
So the short version is that an American company is suing the Chinese government because China is violating the basic human rights of its citizens without having a proper software license?
I'm not sure which circle of Hell is reserved for a complete and total inversion of priorities, but I'm sure CyberSitter will find out.
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