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The Biggest Legal Danger For Open Source?
itwbennett writes "Brian Proffitt is blogging about the undercurrent of legal issues troubling the open source world these days and offers up this question: Are patents or copyright a bigger threat to the open source community? Patents are the obvious choice, with inflicting fear being the 'obvious intention of those who have instigated the various legal troubles on open source practitioners.' But the issue of copyright and copyright assignments is no less troublesome, argues Proffitt. And copyright assignment can be confusingly Machievllian, even in open source land."
Because copyright can only cover a specific implementation but patents can now cover an idea in such a way that there is no alternative way to implement it. Not only that but all copyleft open source licenses actually rely on copyrights in order to make the mandates of the license enforceable.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Copyrights are a big threat, but, ultimately unless the open source project is funded by some pretty well off corporate backers, patents represent a far greater threat. Copyright issues can be avoided with the proper licensing agreements. Whether it be the LGPL, GPLv2, v3, BSD, etc.
Patents on the other hand can stop a project cold.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Proffitt? Dude, SAY it don't SPRAY it.
And anyway you forgot. 1. and 2. Only when you get to 3. can you Proffitt!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Open Source generally doesn't have a bankroll funding it. It has a community. Communities of like-minded individuals don't usually have the finances or the will to defend (or instigate) legal battles.
As they say, "You will never know who was really right. But you will know who had more money."
......maayy suufferr frromm aa sttuuckk kkeyyboaardd annd//orr mminddssett.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I would argue that open source is a danger to patents and copyright, not the other way around.
What about THE BSA who may count by system even when windows is not on them.
1 - Make blog with ads
2 - Get slashdotted
3 - Proffitt
Who the fuck is Brian Proffitt? What are his credentials? Has he done anything of note?
you can't trademark that green sorta-circle, because that is the pattern made by "magic eye" tubes from the 1930s with no grid voltage.
Ok, patents are the biggest threat, but here's another.
Suppose Larry decides he's not happy with just changing the license on one of the dozens of open source products he's acquired and decides to actually start demanding payment for use of earlier versions of the software.. Does a copyright owner have the legal right to retract an issued license? Does that right apply to the GPL? This is a massive blindspot in copyright law.
How we know is more important than what we know.
OK, in light of this. If a company were to use Open-source software, would that make them a for-Proffitt or a non-Proffitt organization.... Now I'm really confused...
Perhaps you shouldn't reference Machiavelli if you don't even know how to spell his name.
Nice try, but I know who you really are... it's no use trying to disguise your name like that.
Thought you could fool us, huh? Well, tough luck!
Oh, Machiavelli... you're so... machiavellian!
Lawyers and companies who compete by legislation over innovation
. .
Imagine a bunch of small kids making sand castles on a beach.
Copyright abuse would be analogous for one kid to say, "I own this castle and I don't care if you guys helped build it. Get out of here and go make your own." That would be harsh, but the beach is pretty big, right? Besides, who wants to play with such an obnoxious kid anyway. Let him play with himself, and be more careful with whom you work with in the future.
Patent abuse would be like if one kid said, "You can't build a sand castle anywhere on the beach because I thought of doing that first." If he could enforce that, that would be bad news. Because another kid would have thought of bodysurfing first, another lying on a towel reading a book, another running parallel to the shore with a dog, etc. Pretty soon it would be hard to figure out what you're allowed to do, legally. Patent abuse is much more intrusive and restrictive.
A clever pseodonym given the topic.
DRM and signed hardware is the biggest legal threat beside patents.
If we liberate the PC, only to find that people are doing their computing on handheld computers (such as phones) and games consoles which won't boot if the software's not approved, then we'll be shafted.
The answer is (as it always was) that we have to educate people about what sovereignty/liberty/independence means for computing, and that having freedom is valuable. That takes years (ask RMS), but it's the only way to win successive battles. There's no point in defeating some current problem if the same attack will succeed later under a different guise.
After DRM and patents, the big problem is centralised social networking, where people do their computing on remote servers which they have no control over.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
With copyrights, you can write around the infringing part et voila, you no longer infringe. You can do this a lot easier than writing around a patented algorithm which may lay at the core of your software.
SCO brought up many busted hypotheses why Linux infringed on SCO IP, up to and including "negative knowledge" - i.e., "don't do it that way". None of it stuck. "Similarity" is not enough. Header files are not enough. Some evidence of word-for-word copying in the source code must be there for the accusation of copyright infringement to stick at all. And even then, it's proportional to the amount of infringement. And *even then* courts want you to hammer it out privately before ever going to trial. Courts frown upon plaintiffs going to court without letting the defendant try to mitigate what might be wrong.
And to this day, they have still not shown any copied code from Unix in Linux, on their path to their "utter destruction" as Darl McBride so succinctly put it. And Linux has come out only stronger because of the ordeal while SCO's entire market cap is 2.1 million on the pink sheets.
http://www.smallcapdirectory.com/Listing.aspx?CompanyId=21987&Mode=Profile
Apple sued Microsoft over UI for "copyright" and lost - just because it looks similar doesn't mean it's the *same*.
Patents are more difficult to defend against. Because these days, patents cover ideas and general mock-ups (design patents) with no regard for prior art or obviousness in the eyes of someone skilled in the art. That last bit has especially been removed from the "obviousness" test. It seems like patent examiners lowered the bar to "Dumb and Dumberer" for obviousness.
--
BMO
just #s. no good deed, unbridled greed.... never looked good on the penguin anyway?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_(TV_series) Yeah.
This article is so lopsided that given the long time free software licenses have been around, one must assert malicious intent instead of plain incompetence. Yeah, Canonical and even the FSF require copyright assignments that allow them to release the code under non-free licenses. And yes, even the FSF may turn rogue one day and work against the interests of the community (some claim the invariant sections of the GFDL are already a step in this direction). But why should I really care about this? I can always take the last release that was published under an acceptable license and fork it. The ability to fork is the only thing that really protects software freedom. Anything else is just secondary.
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
There is no significant threat to open source, legal or otherwise.
Know that we are.
Know that we are well.
Fear not, for as we are we will be.
The biggest legal problem open source has is fear mongering from the likes of "old industry" rags like IT World and corporate executives. This puts a financial burden on everyone that shouldn't have to be there.
Failing that, there's always copyright being all but null and void in its applicability to the common man. I suspect corporations would like that; they're pushing for it as it stands today.
Someone/some people believe SCO is worth $2.1M? Wow. It might have been, when they declared bankruptcy, but they've spent rather more than that on the bankruptcy since then*, and if I recall correctly are trying to sell off everything they have left which might be of value for $0.6M, but are in legal difficulties because Novell says the sale (of licenses from Novell) can't go through without their approval.
* No, this doesn't make any sense to me either.
(Note: everything I know about SCO I got by reading Groklaw.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Make something that violates a software patent, then file a declaratory judgment action seeking to determine the invalidity of the patent--after you've built up a big war chest. Come at the opponent (MS, IBM, Oracle, etc.) Straight On.
Why not? The corporations always avoid the showdown out of self-interest.
What a strange article. Lots of words, but no clear meaning comes through to me. He seems to be taking one sentence from a Canonical license and saying that it proves there's lots of problems for open source because copyrights fwibble a gwabbit. Well, if he's making up stuff I might as well start making up stuff too. Copyrights are what keep open source open - i.e. you can't ignore the license and stop other people using the open source code you distribute without breaking copyright law yourself.
I really don't see the problem. Contributed code where copyright is assigned to the company can be distributed under a license specified by the company it was contributed to. How is this different from any other company that takes in code? Code that is already under the GPL stays under the GPL - you can't hijack it for your own license, thanks to the copyright laws. If Canonical start being bastards and distributing copyright-assigned contributed code under a non-free license then people will stop contributing. The stuff they have already distributed under a free license remains free forever and they can't revoke it.
Because software patents are not legal where I live (you insensitive clod!) and because the last time I read the French legislation, I got this strange feeling that a source code is not a copyrightable entity in France.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
IP is hampering innovation by promoting laziness among IP owners. It creates a government-enforced monopoly on certain ideas, so companies do some R&D, find one idea, and stop doing R&D to profit from the only single idea that they came up with.
Maximization of profit stem from innovation rate, not government enforcement of ideas and information scarcity. It's the fucking dark ages elitism. Old stuff is new again.
... and while you are at it ask RMS what he thinks about passwords being used to lock people out of systems. You may find he's looking at this from a very different mindset to your own.
Stuff that is locked down to stupid levels is not going to sell to the point where it obliterates things that are sold with the convenience of no DRM as a selling point.
Software, business method and other insane patents covering wide areas of similarity on the other hand are a very stupid obstruction. It's a case of "don't even think about doing X" where X can be something that has never been implemented as a product and may even be so tangentially related that the filers of the patent never thought of it. It's almost a case of destroying innovation and a large chunk of the economy for the temporary gain of a tiny bit of extra government revenue.
While there are no laws to impose DRM it is not much more than an annoyance avoidable by using different products that still exist. Software patents on the other hand prohibit things and reduce your choices far more than DRM with no legal teeth can do.
We saw it with DVD players - most made in China for a global market with the DRM available to be turned on for the US market but entirely usable without it. It's a social thing and not a technological thing so you can expect each generation of DRM to fall to those that can get around it with no consequences - which really is going to be the majority of the population of the world.
The bigger legal threat to open source is not the actual legal threats, it's the fear of misunderstood potential legal threats.
I can understand why the title talks about Open Source---it would look weird for a "Mr. Proffitt" to talk about "Free" software.
[For the uninitiated: the FSF, fsf.org and gnu.org, is about software freedom and software that's free as in free speech. It tends to have a price of zero, but that's a consequence rather than a definitional requirement.]
If they combined their efforts into one or two distros, it--
Oh wait, you said "legal", my bad, carry on.
If the US (and by that I mean its industrial/political complex) continue to suppress open source, file sharing, whatever - then thats up to them.
The rest of the world will carry on, and with a competitive advantage.
Anyone who remembers what Soviet era cars and computers looked like will know what happens when an entire society decides it doesn't need openness any more and relies instead on the "innovations" of an elite whose status is based on who they know and not what they know..
Google has meddled in open-source projects (i.e. Android) in ways that are surprising:
1. Closed source 3.0 (at least for now)
2. Google has filed cease and desist against CyanogenMod
Either it's open or it isn't. If 800lb gorillas can just walk over open source projects at will, aren't they all at risk?
I worry about liability. While the GPL and other licenses can disclaim liability all they like, a litigious user could still file a lawsuit, forcing the developer to spend money defending themselves. I have a Firefox extension that I've avoided releasing for exactly that reason.
I believe acknowledgement is due where its' due, but what ever happened to sharing? ... this dude wrote this and I'm using it to leverage what I'm writing." I would appreciate if someone would show the same respect.
I think what it all really boils down to is greed.
If I take something that someone built and build off of it, I'm fine with saying, "Hey
Is it really too much to ask? Guess so.
With proposed law such as these:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2011032316585825
Which protects only M$ and the other big ones, and the legislation purposely leave FOSS alone if you read carefully.
China still has a favorable IP laws and nobody should get punish for it. Buy "Made in China"!
"Canonical will ordinarily make the Assigned Contributions available to the public under a 'Free Software Licence,' according to the definition of that term published by the Free Software Foundation from time to time. Canonical may also, in its discretion, make the Assigned Contributions available to the public under other license terms." Need to see the full agreement. So a contributor must basically assign copyright for the contribution to Canonical? I would assume so since, in the case of GPL'd code, only the copyright holders can license the same code out under another license - at least I believe so. That is what is happening with X264 - there is the open source X264 code under the GPL and there is also non-GPL'd X264 library code licensed out by the same authors which is not copyleft so programs that link to the latter do not have to be GPL'd also. But in the case of BSD-style permissive licenses, Canonical can do what they want and distribute the contribution under a different license regardless provided the copyright notice is distributed with the binaries.