Slashdot Mirror
Hamstersoft Ebook App Rips Off GPL3 Code, Say Calibre Devs
Nate the greatest submits news of a claim that a recently released ebook application from Hamstersoft is actually built from code lifted from calibre, the ebook library app. He writes "It turns out that one calibre contributor is now reporting that his code was pirated for Hamstersoft. You can find the full details over on John Schember's blog. It's technically complicated and quite long. You can also find a non-technical summary. The short-short version is that Hamstersoft needs to give away a complete source code for the Hamstersoft Ebook Converter because that app uses parts of calibre, which is licensed under GPL v3. John gave Hamstersoft a month to comply and they did not. Now that app is clearly a GPL violation."
There's a lot of libertarians around here. But most folks are just concerned with the abuses of power that the RIAA and MPAA engage in and the robbing of the public domain to profit an oligarchy.
Few people here think that a person shouldn't be able to make a living creating copyright works, just that the time period needs to be balanced with the right of the people to own their culture.
The DMCA take-down notices are to be sent to the providers that are hosting the content. The search engines are not hosting this content, and sending them take-down notices is a heavy-handed abuse of the law.
So either John misunderstands the DMCA or is willfully abusing it. Either way it makes it a lot harder to sympathize with his attempt to address violation of copyright law, when he himself is willing to resort to the very behavior of other copyright abusers.
But at the very least, shouldn't the OSS community have an army of lawyers willing to work probono, or financed by various foundations, for this kind of thing exactly?
What exactly do you expect them to do? The offender is in Russia and is hosted in Russia. How is a small donation-funded organization supposed to enforce copyright in situations where even large well-funded companies like Microsoft have been unable to do so?
People sometimes get away with breaking the law, especially far away countries. It sucks, but it's life and you have to learn to accept it. The people who won't are exactly the ones that drive us further and further into a police state in their unending drive to "decrease crime", not understanding the trade-off they are making.