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Popular Android ROM Accused of GPL Violation
An anonymous reader writes "A petition has recently been started to get the developer of the popular Android 'MIUI' ROM, Chinese based Xiaomi, to comply with the GPL. While Android itself is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License, and therefore does not actually require derivative works to be FOSS, the Linux kernel itself is GPL-licensed and needs to remain open. Unless Xiaomi intends to develop a replacement for the Linux kernel, they need to make their modifications public."
not just their modifications, but all the gpl sources. they only need to make this available to their own customers.
More popular than Cyanogenmod? As popular? Less popular? I've never heard of this thing. Must be popular in China.
Ah, yes. The GPL. The only copyright most readers here defend.
You go ahead and sign that online petition to "force" a Chinese company to play fair. Hope you have better success than the hundreds of other companies from whom Chinese businesses have taken what they liked and given nothing back...
"So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
Copyrights? Patents? License?
LOL
Copying something that is copyrighted without permission *does* deprive the copyright holder of some of the value behind their copyright.
Copyright literally is a "right to copy"... although it's a legally granted and not a natural right... but the value inherent in it comes from its exclusivity. The copyright holder has an exclusive right to control copies of their work, and everybody else is supposed to obtain permission first. "Exclusive", by definition, means that nobody else is doing it, so when somebody does copy it work without permission, that exclusivity is compromised, and the value of it lessened.
And after all... if the mere right to copy wasn't really of any value to creators, then why would people who bother to make freely distributable works bother to copyright it at all? Why not just put the work into public domain?
The point, therefore, is that copyright *DOES* have value... it's difficult to quantify, but when somebody does infringe on copyright, some measure of that value is actually lost to the copyright holder.
Just because what is lost to the copyright holder is of no value to the person who takes it, doesn't mean that it isn't stolen.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Not correct, at least not for the version of the GPL in question. Read the GPL v2 and look at section 3 which covers distribution. Your options:
You'd be correct for GPL v3, but the Linux kernel license lacks the "or any later version" language so v3's off the table as far as the kernel as a whole is concerned.
Question: Who exactly is the Android Community? Is it Google? Is it the folks at XDA? This statement is just confusing and vague!
What can the authors of the above statement really do? Sue the Xiaomi folks? Impose sanctions on China if it fails to toe the line?
Good luck with that!
IIRC, it's a fork of Cyanogenmod, and (the non-Android part of) CM is also GPL, so they'd have to also distribute the modifications to CM. This, I think, is the larger infringement that people are annoyed about?
I had a sig once. It was lost in the great storm of '09.
If they haven't made kernel modifications, they don't have to release their source code, just host a mirror of the original source.
It's also China and since when was copyright followed in China?
Its easy to calculate losses of GPL violations.
Since the original author makes no money from the distribution of their code, they suffer no losses. Damages awarded: $0.00
Android mod world (modded roms, cyanogen forks, custom kernels, etc) has tons of examples like this. People who distributes compiled kernels and refuses to share their patches because that way they would "loose" their "exclusive l33t" kernel, since some other modder/coder may "steal" their job (which is basically some minor editing or patch merging on top of a real kernel...samsung kernel for example...plus 10 lines of code to make something happen).
No. It doesnt matter what they intend. They still have to make their modifications public regardless.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
GPL does NOT, I repeat, does NOT require PUBLIC release of derivative works. It only requires disclosure to the actual users of the software.
It is perfectly legal to create a derivative work of a GPL work and release the source code to the product users under NDA, forbidding public disclosure.
Let's look at the FAQ for the GPL...
Does The GPL Allow NDA?
Does the GPL allow me to distribute copies under a nondisclosure agreement?
No. The GPL says that anyone who receives a copy from you has the right to redistribute copies, modified or not. You are not allowed to distribute the work on any more restrictive basis. If someone asks you to sign an NDA for receiving GPL-covered software copyrighted by the FSF, please inform us immediately by writing to license-violation@fsf.org. If the violation involves GPL-covered code that has some other copyright holder, please inform that copyright holder, just as you would for any other kind of violation of the GPL.
coding is life
over my little pony toys.
Why do you collect small pony toys, and why do you let him ejaculate over them in the first place? :o
You're correct up to the NDA part. The GPL however requires that I give all the same rights I had to the software to the person I distribute it to. You can't remove rights you received via the GPL.
So I give my binaries to one person, I owe that one person the source, nobody else, but that person can then do whatever they want with both just like I could.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I can tell you are not a laywer, but even you should know that "value" doesn't mean "money". For instance, everything that is valuable that is not money, such as the things one trades money for, are themselves valuable.
So too are intangables valuable. For instance, you pay for the right (within limits) to determin who is allowed to access the contents of your house, apartment, and/or other real property. This is the same as how one might buy a mambership to a club so that one receives the right to enter the premises of owned by that club.
So a copyright is "valuable" as it allows the owner of that right to say how many of that thing may be brought into existence and under what circumstances.
When someone brings more of those things into existence than the owner wishes to allow, or does so in a way the owner doesn't wish to allow, they owners valuable right is diminished by misuse.
Much the way I might diminsih the value of any of your properties by misuse (like by ruining your carpet or driving your car into a ravine).
These are not difficult concepts, and many times as you grew to this age, you experienced a diminishment of yoru intangibles. Every time you ever said "That's Not Fair" and no cash was involved, you experienced circumstantial devaluation enough to prompt outcry.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
I believe only one or two cases have actually made it to court - the vast majority of GPL violators voluntarily release their modified code once somebody complains to them and their legal department takes a look at the license. So yeah, so long as there's a strong legal framework to work in they can be "forced" - the penalties for bald-faced copyright violation are simply too high for a company to bear - especially if they want to continue distributing their product. Think of the outrageous threats made by the RIAA based on the skimpiest of evidence, then imagine they actually had rock-solid evidence of violations and that you're a company with deep enough pockets to actually pay the full amount. Those laws were after all originally written to keep companies in check, not individual file-sharers.
In the face of the Chinese lax approach to copyright law though... it'd probably come down to how badly they wanted to sell phones outside China - neither Microsoft nor Hollywood has managed to make any appreciable dent in the internal copyright violations, I doubt a handful of FOSS advocates would succeed where they failed.
On the other hand, if the company simply doesn't realize that in this case they're actually ENCOURAGED to copy the software in exchange for access to the (probably minor) modifications they've made... well the potential positive feedback loop might tempt them into compliance anyway.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
That actually isn't necessarily the case. A GPL violation by another company on code I wrote may put my product at a disadvantage functionality wise. Even though I have given away my code and allow people to use it in other products it is not without benefits to me. Those benefits may be what sell my service/hardware/etc. The value isn't in selling exclusivity as it is in profiting from the benefits of software freedom.
That's because the GPL is essentially the antithesis of copyright, hence that whole "copyleft" thing. It's essentially a way to fight copyright within the confines of copyright itself.
oh no you mentioned hosts
try telling the mpaa that
Ah, yes. The GPL. The only copyright most readers here defend.
It may become as a surprise to you but most people are only interested in what they see as "their Social Group", if you feel like your life is/was a struggle then you will mostly be interested in people who struggle. If you are a billionaire you will most likely only be interested in billionaire's problems.
On the other side of the coin are people who don't believe the GPL is even a valid license.
Everyone will voluntarily defend their believes.
Welcome to slashdot!
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
There are a few ultra ritch people, even less of those who don't believe in GPL.(some people don't believe in evolution) It doesn't make them right. GPL is fair license. It's worth defending it, so if many people here say it's good - they define meaning of word good, since they are the majority. And no, copyright breach is not theft, cause we said so.
I'm curious as to how many of you are using the XiaoMi phones
As far as I know the XiaoMi only sells their phones in PRC - and even inside PRC their phones are in short supply
Not saying that they shouldn't release their MIUI code .... but if one does not have XiaoMi phones, MIUI won't do any good at all
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
From the article:
The article is correct. Xioami only needs to make their kernel modifications public. The fact that there happens to be a GPL program in Android (the kernel) doesn't mean all of Android is tainted by it. Showing whatever else they've modified is nice, but not required.
A foolish consistency is the hob-goblin of small minds.
I needed a sig so people would know who I am, but I was too drunk to make something witty, so you get this instead.
Crutchy, the brave apk-baiter...
This tagline was transcoded to result in at least one smirk. If you experience failure to smirk, please consult your Gen
In the case of GPL, there is an implicit payment in the form of work. I give you many hours of my work in exchange for the hours of work you put in to improve it.
To me, GPL is an alternative to closed source rather than a true open source license. I use GPL when the quality and continued maintenance of a product is of greater strategic value to me than the monetary value I could get from it when sold. When GPL is violated, the monetary value of that violaton would be the monetary value I could have sold my work for.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
>It is not copyright. It is a license.
Yeah, see that is why /. is so confused. Let me explain, so you understand why the stronger copyright is, the stronger the GPL is. The right that the license is granting is the copyright. Without the copyright, you don't need the license and can use it for whatever you want.
Source code is protected partially by copyright. The copyright holder has the right to prevent others from using/copying/distributing/performing/etc their work under copyright law. Thus, without copyright, if your source code leaks, there is nothing you can do to prevent others from abusing it to death, because you have no rights against them to stop it. Copyright is your ownership as an author of the source code. Thus, when you distribute it as open source, you usually grant a license that allows others to use your copyright material without fully surrendering your right. Those holdbacks are the conditions of the license. Again, if there is no copyright law of any strength, then I don't need a license to rip off your source code, I can just do it and there is nothing you can do to stop me.
Conversely, if copyrights are all-powerful, then I can't rip off your source code unless I comply exactly with the granted license that gives me limited rights to your copyright.
I sincerely hope that offers some clarity to you, and the others who don't understand copyrights. You can't argue that on one hand, copyright isn't theft when it is downloading an mp3 and listening to it, but then on the other hand, copyright is theft when you "steal" an open source library without following the GPL. They are the same law and rights.
What about if I distribute the source code but tell them off the record that if they pass it on I will 'send the lads round to have a chat with them'.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Then you can be both sued for breach of contract and charged with a felony.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
The lads are only coming round for a chat though, i.e. using their rights to free speech and free assembly. The lads are very protective on their human rights, and don't like them being curtailed.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
The GPL may be an unconventional usage but it requires copyright. If there was no copyright (i.e., all works were public domain), then companies would be able to take code, modify it, and obfuscate it with impunity. We would see the behavior evidenced in the article, in short. In short, RMS would have encountered that same software issue and been in the same boat that caused him to start the FSF (the key difference would have been that it was legal to disassemble the binary).
That is, free (as in libre) software requires legal protection to exist.
This article is bullshit. They have all their modifications accessible on their GitHub account: https://github.com/MiCode . This is way better than most Chinese companies using GPL.
Uh, the GPL doesn't prevent you from making money from the distribution of code, not even by selling it.
Dilbert RSS feed
people are only interested in what they see as "their Social Group"
People are part only part of social groups that they see as interesting.
Chicken and egg.
Not at all, the purpose of the GPL is to fight copyright until such a time as it no longer exists, exactly as you state above. If this were the case, RMS would have been able to get the source code to his printer driver, and even if obfuscated, would be able to work with it/find someone to work with it.
How exactly would he be able to get the source code? How does loss of copyright make source code magically appear?
Then point out even a single source file that has that "or any later version" in it from the kernel. Also, the overarching COPYING file for the kernel does not have the phrase in it which would be invalid if any single source file did include it due to the "You may not impose any further
209 restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein" clause.
Of course, that is true of many crimes. If you take an apple from a store without paying, is it only theft if it can be proved that the apple would otherwise have been sold? No, of course not. If you tap into your neighbors cable, is it only theft of service if the cable company is now unable to supply another customer? No. If you kill someone, does the punishment vary based on proof of how long the person would otherwise have lived? No.
This is why laws specify specific prohibited actions, not altered potential futures, and the consequences of performing those actions.
That is complete nonsense. If you (not being the author) violate the GPL (by requiring an NDA for instance), then you have no authorization to distribute AT ALL. Copyright law makes that so, and law trumps contracts.
Of course, if you are the author of the code you can put whatever requirements you want on it, including an NDA. But then you aren't releasing it as GPL code, so there is no point in mentioning it here.
Your statement would imply that if Joe writes a song, and Bobby gives that song to Jane under some contract, Joe magically lost his rights. Complete nonsense.
That's because the GPL is essentially the antithesis of copyright, hence that whole "copyleft" thing.
That's only as true as the statement that Democrats are the antithesis of Republicans in the US.
It's essentially a way to fight copyright within the confines of copyright itself.
No -- it's a way to fight certain uses of copyright with other uses of copyright, like a nation of state socialists using nuclear weapons to fight against the use of nuclear weapons by a nation of fascists. A much less paradoxical way to fight copyright would be to choose neither copyright nor copyleft, but copyfree instead.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
I know people have not been extremely explicit about it, but I still managed to figure out there was some reference to reverse engineering and/or decompiling in preceding comments -- something generally disallowed by commercial, closed source copyright licenses.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
probably BSD refugees
I doubt that. In my experience, many more users of Linux as a "desktop" OS started using MacOS than users of BSD Unix for the same purpose. Large numbers of members (as a percentage) of several LUGs with which I've been involved have started using Macs in addition to Linux-based systems, and none of the BSD Unix users I know have made the same migration. In the cases where people who used BSD Unix heavily started using MacOS laptops and desktops, they were people who used BSD Unix heavily for servers, but used Linux-based systems for desktops and laptops, only replacing the Linux in their lives with MacOS, which to me looks like a case of people who used Linux-based systems moving to MacOS, rather than people who used BSD Unix doing so.
I have, however, seen a few people go from Linux-based systems (only) to MacOS+Linux, and from there to MacOS+Linux+BSD, to MacOS+BSD, and finally to BSD Unix (only). Those people have also, I've noticed, generally tended to become more active contributors to open source projects, which I find interesting as a phenomenon. I suspect the only connection MacOS had to the ultimate path of migration was filling a third OS slot, because from what I've seen people who just move from MS Windows to Linux-based systems tend to be very limited in their thinking about operating system options (not as much as those who've always used MS Windows, period, but pretty limited nonetheless), while those who've moved through at least three OS families (pretty much regardless of what families they are) tend to be much more open to regarding the world as something other than a battleground between One True OS and a major competitor or two.
Unlike the legions of copyleftists who tend to describe Apple as some evil entity that can do no right, and never gives anything to open source software communities, many of the people who actually use Macs along with some open source OS realize that Apple not only regularly releases sources for software that uses copyfree or otherwise permissive licenses (e.g. the Darwin OS basis of MacOS), but also takes on maintenance of existing open source projects (e.g. CUPS) and creates new open source software it shares with the world (e.g. LLVM+Clang).
All of this is, of course, not a defense of all the evil Apple does. Malevolence in patent enforcement and suing customers for doing unauthorized things with hardware they bought with their own money is only the tip of the iceberg of stuff that Apple does wrong. It's just silly to make hand-wavy accusations that haven't much basis in truth the way a lot of copyleftists do when there are so many legitimate gripes to have with Apple. It similarly doesn't make any sense for copyleftists to pretend that BSD Unix users choose to defend Apple as a class, or to pretend they use descriptively accurate terms for a license longer than some Microsoft EULAs only as a means of defending Apple.
You go ahead and pretend that the only way anyone could ever disagree with you is by being consciously and irredeemably evil, though. See how far that gets your advocacy efforts.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
Yes, but that is still not access to the source code. If decompliing or reverse engineering is the equivalent to having the source code, then why does the GPL require distribution of the source? Instead, the license could just prevent you from disallowing reverse engineering or decompiling. In this case, you could just decompile the whole Linux kernel, and you have the source. Surely that is good enough?
Eliminating copyright would not eliminate the need for the GPL. Source would not magically appear if copyright were eliminated. Even in the absense of copyright source code can still be protected, both by technical means (keep it tightly secured, encrypt it, use a proprietary language to write it, whatever) and legal means (trade secrets, NDAs for anyone seeing it, etc). Eliminating copyright would make the GPL impossible, no matter how people try to spin it.
All that is required for infrigment purposes is the ACT of copying or distributing. And since you can not calculate the 'value' of the harm in any meaningful way (because all of the value is based on either unknown future or personal/human value), the consequences of performing that act have been assigned by statute.
Copying something that is copyrighted without permission *does* deprive the copyright holder of some of the value behind their copyright.
It only reduces artificial value, because copyright is a mechanism for manufacturing artificial scarcity in support of rent-seeking behavior.
And after all... if the mere right to copy wasn't really of any value to creators, then why would people who bother to make freely distributable works bother to copyright it at all? Why not just put the work into public domain?
Interestingly, that is increasingly becoming the case, as it becomes decreasingly possible to enforce copyright in a cost effective manner. That's a good turn of events, too, because (among other reasons) copyright stifles a lot of creative work that might otherwise flourish.
By the way, it's not "the mere right to copy" that is of value to copyright holders (who are usually not the creators themselves in the case of commercially profitable works) -- it's the enforced prohibition on copying imposed on the rest of the world that is of value to them.
Just because what is lost to the copyright holder is of no value to the person who takes it, doesn't mean that it isn't stolen.
You do not seem to understand the meaning of the term "stolen". Stealing is appropriating something for oneself by removing it from someone else, an act that has meaning only for rivalrous goods. When you talk about "stealing" in this context, you basically have three options for what you are saying is stolen. One is a physical representation or medium for a work, in which case what is stolen has nothing to do with copyright itself (as in the case of a meatspace dead-tree book, or of a physical optical medium like a CD regardless of what is stored on it). Another is the work itself, in the abstract, in which case it is non-rivalrous and can only be copied, not "stolen", thus increasing the wealth of the world through essentially cost-free replication. The third is the "value" of the work under circumstances of artificial scarcity, where some enforcement of circumstances of scarcity is imposed on a market where scarcity effectively has no natural meaning, but as you pointed out the value itself is not transferred in this act you describe as "stealing"; the recipient may not have the same value in the work that the copyright holder previously had. The closest you could reasonably get (at least if you try to be rational, honest, and consistent about it) to theft in the case of a wholly subjective sense of value is vandalism -- not stealing.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
Agreed. *IF* the Chinese companies respect the GPL. If they decide to take the codebase proprietary... well probably still good for Linux in that it has a larger deployed codebase to tempt developers and hardware support and undermines the Microsoft hegemony, but beyond that it would be just another proprietary *nix.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I think the point the previous coward meant to make (though made the effort in terms of "freedom" rather than actual economic effects of commercial activity using the GPL as leverage, which is understandably confusing) is that copyleft licenses create anticompetitive benefits for the copyright holder in that various business models built on holding copyright on copyleft licensed software creates asymmetries with recipients of the software in question. A common case is maintaining a public open source project with copyright assignment for all contributions, offering the software under a copyleft license, then producing commercial closed source "value added products" of some kind, as MySQL AB did with MySQL's multi-licensing scheme before Sun bought the company and all its assets. This sets any would-be competitors using the copyleft codebase of the software at a disadvantage, because their modifications have to be made public and, to take advantage of continuing development of the original codebase, they then have to either expend significant resources on continuous re-merging of custom modifications (which can be specifically targeted for manufactured incompatibility by the copyright holder of the original codebase, making that re-merging more expensive, because of the necessarily public nature of the competitor's modifications) or contribute their improvements to the project maintained for the original codebase by the copyright holder, complete with copyright assignment, so that the copyright holder can then incorporate those improvements into its own closed source "value added product". The upshot, then, is that I do not believe the lost value to which the previous coward meant to refer was limited to a feeling of warmth and fuzziness for altruistic sharing, even if altruism is part of his product's marketing.
Many opportunities for using copyleft licenses as leverage in anticompetitive business practices exist, and any violation of the copyleft license in those business models may then have a negative effect on the profitability of the copyright holder's business model, which could then be argued in court to constitute damages.
(I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, et cetera, et cetera, et alii, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, insert further disclaimers here.)
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
Individual bits may, but to make use of that you have to separate those bits out from the kernel and distribute them as independent parts. When combined with the kernel, you have to distribute on terms that fit all of the kernel. So if the kernel as a whole is "GPLv2 only" and one driver is "GPLv2 or any later version", you can distribute just the driver under GPLv3 but when you distribute the whole kernel you have to follow GPLv2 because if you used GPLv3 you'd be violating the license to the rest of the kernel (it only permits GPLv2).
The point made wasn't about whether you could make money on the software -- it was about whether violating the license causes any quantifiable damages according to the law. While there may be a reasonable argument that the $0 statement is wrong, your argument wasn't it. I don't even think it was relevant.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
Fallacy.
If that were true, there would be no merit to copyrighting source code that a person decides to make freely available, whether under the GPL or BSD licenses.
If the only value from copyright came from monetary inducement, then for material that is supposed to be free, there is no advantage to it over public domain. Yet the majority of freely released works are not issued under public domain. They are copyrighted.
You have been deluded into thinking that money is the only measure of worth or value. It is not. It is merely a very objective one.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If value is reduced, then it stands to reason that it is *THAT* amount of value that has been stolen.... not all of it, obviously.
The disconnect comes from the fact that the "value" that is stolen is not actually of any value to anybody except the copyright holder.
Again... just because that is the case, does not mean it cannot be stolen.
Do not conflate the issues of value and financial worth. They are not the same thing. If they were, nobody would bother GPL'ing their software or putting under a BSD or MIT license, or any of the dozens of free source code licenses that exist. they would instead just put it into public domain. Clearly the copy control that copyright offers has some amount of worth to the person who holds that right which has absolutely squat to do with financial incentive.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You wouldn't need to get that convoluted. All you need to show is if the copyright violation had happened without a violation of the copyright, that the copyright owner would have gained something of value.
Suppose I went into my garage and a bicycle fairy had packed it full of bicycles. I decide to rent them out at $80 a pop for as long as you wanted to use them and didn't care about the condition they were returned in or if they were ever returned- you could rent a bike for the rest of your life and pass the rental down to your grandchildren. Now, if you take a bicycle without paying the rental fee, even though the bicycle fairy will replace it, am I not out $80 from your use of the bike? If you violate my copyright, am I not out at minimum what I would be owed for the use of the copyright? If you didn't rent the bicycle, I wouldn't have made more, but because you took it without paying the rental, I have made less. It is the same with copyright violations.
It's worth highlighting this as the best argument I've heard for GPL violation being translatable into monetary damages so far. I have a vague recollection of some kind of precedent that established the GPL as being enforceable in civil court through damages, but don't recall the specifics. Regardless of those specifics, though, your explanation is pretty damned cogent, I think.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
Copyright license cases (as with GPL violations) are not about theft. They're about damages. This is why an apple theft would be a criminal case, but a GPL violation would be a civil case.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
Technically, I think it would make it a license violation to combine the "or any later version" files with the project as a whole, and not just make the project license invalid.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
Nope. Copyright violations are violations of a specific law, with penalties for that violation set down in the law. No damages need to be proven, only that a certain prohibited act was committed. Just like with theft. The only thing you have right is that it would be handled in civil court, thus shifting the burden of prosecuting the case to the infringed party instead of the state.
If there's a reduction in value, then that value is lost to the person who once had it, and in the case of copyright infringement, that reduction is not merely caused by the infringement, but the actual act of infringing itself, since the act of infringing on copyright directly compromises exclusivity, which is the thing which is of value to the copyright holder.
Again... the disconnect happens because what is of value to the copyright holder is worthless to the person who is taking it... and is why it is so easy to discount the notion that anything was ever stolen in the first place. This is, however, only rationalizing, whose purpose serves probably little more than to make people who do such things feel less guilty about it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It kind of does. If I buy software from you that is GPL licensed you're not allowed to stop me distributing it. If I sell it, you're not allowed to ask for a cut.
If you didn't give me the source code when I bought your software you must provide it for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution
You may as well be suggesting that if I were to somehow siphon some money from a person's bank account and redirect it elsewhere, because I have merely "lowered" their financial worth, I haven't stolen anything.
Of course it's BS... I stole whatever I took. Nothing less and nothing more.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If decompliing or reverse engineering is the equivalent to having the source code, then why does the GPL require distribution of the source?
Absolutely. Stallman and the FSF demand source code:
"In order for freedoms 1 and 3 (the freedom to make changes and the freedom to publish the changed versions) to be meaningful, you must have access to the source code of the program. Therefore, accessibility of source code is a necessary condition for free software. Obfuscated "source code" is not real source code and does not count as source code."
Eliminating copyright would make the GPL impossible, no matter how people try to spin it.
Stallman said so himself:
"So what would be the effect of terminating this program's copyright after 5 years? [..] Thus, the Pirate Party's proposal would give proprietary software developers the use of GPL-covered source code after 5 years, but it would not give free software developers the use of proprietary source code, not after 5 years or even 50 years. The Free World would get the bad, but not the good. The difference between source code and object code and the practice of using EULAs would give proprietary software an effective exception from the general rule of 5-year copyright -- one that free software does not share."
Whether the taker gains an equal value to what the person being taken from lost does not change whether or not it was still taken without permission. A child can steal money from their parents' purse because they like playing with paper. Completely different value systems are involved, yet there's no disputing that it was still stolen.
Of course, things like money in somebody's purse are tangible... and if you're going to argue that intangible things cannot be stolen, then I'm not really equipped to dispute that.
My point was only that if you define theft as the unauthorized deprivation of something from its owner, then copyright infringement does, indeed, amount to the theft of something. Suggesting that the copyright holder still has just as much exclusive control over who can copy their works when somebody else copies their works without permission as they did before blindly ignores the definition of "exclusive"... which is what makes copyright valuable in the first place.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
not much else for entertainment on here nowadays
Kinda true, actually. I had a huge run-in with apk - I think it actually had nothing to do with HOSTS but ended up being steered that way. In fact I may have been steering, I just can't remember...
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I didn't say reverse engineering was the same as getting the source code. I pointed out that you were ignoring what others had said about reverse engineering.
Eliminating copyright wouldn't eliminate the "need" for the GPL -- it would just eliminate the ability to place many systematic restrictions on what people can do with things they possess (including the restrictions in the GPL).
By the way, saying that eliminating copyright would make the GPL impossible in the tone of a doomsayer is kind of silly, considering I would rather the GPL (and all other copyleft licenses) just went away. The last thing we need is more restriction in the name of "freedom".
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
Fallacy.
I'm not sure you understand that word.
If that were true, there would be no merit to copyrighting source code that a person decides to make freely available, whether under the GPL or BSD licenses.
If the only value from copyright came from monetary inducement, then for material that is supposed to be free, there is no advantage to it over public domain. Yet the majority of freely released works are not issued under public domain. They are copyrighted.
The fact you do not understand how copyright law works internationally, or how people benefit from various licensing models, is a failure in your argument, and not in mine. Some businesses use copyleft licenses to establish anticompetitive advantages over their competitors, to say nothing of the fact that there are many people who simply don't understand what the hell they're doing with licensing and as such end up using restrictive "free" licensing to serve ends that are actually undercut by their own license choices. Then, of course, there's the fact that something released into the public domain in the US (which hasn't really been comprehensively tested in court, as far as I'm aware, and the laws on the books that I've seen are hopelessly vague about that, but let's just assume it works) is not considered public domain in France, where the law does not recognize the power of individual people to release a copyrighted work into the public domain before the expiration of its copyright -- which is why SQLite, a supposedly public domain piece of software, still gets $1000 licensing deals in some countries for people who don't want to be sued when they use it.
That's pretty much the whole reason that copyfree licenses (including the Unlicense and CC0 License) exist.
You have been deluded into thinking that money is the only measure of worth or value. It is not. It is merely a very objective one.
Uh, no, I haven't. I fully recognize that there are things of worth other than money. In fact, I probably know better than you that the crap people tend to call "money" isn't even worth the ink in the bills. This does not change the fact that the courts measure the worth of something in a civil suit by its measurable dollar "value", which means that if you cannot attach a dollar value to something you aren't going to get anything in a lawsuit beyond statutory damages, which usually costs less than buying a license anyway -- and that assumes there are even any statutory damages for the case in question.
I'm really not sure why, but you've responded for some reason as though my commentary about artificial scarcity was a statement that the only way to measure the value of something is with dollars. That's absurd and, frankly, kinda irrelevant to my point. Perhaps you'd like to try again.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
I think you're confusing statutory damages with the kinds of penalties applied to criminal cases. If there are penalties, apart from those that must be specifically shown to have occurred by way of evidence in court, that is because they were specified by statute (thus the term "statutory damages"). This is not always the way it works, though; it depends on the specific violation committed. Sometimes (often, in fact) there simply are not any statutory damages for a particular violation -- and statutory damages are often less costly than buying a commercial license, so it's often a win just to have gotten statutory damages assessed rather than playing by the rules all along. Of course, that mostly only applies in cases where the license violation is not itself shown to be measurably damaging, because otherwise damages can be assessed above statutory damages. This is why the GPL (along with other restrictive "free" licenses) is kinda special when it comes to enforcement -- because it can be violated by the licensee, but does not have an easily applied standard for determining damages due to the fact there is no cost for the license, which is offered freely to the public.
Meanwhile, theft lands you in jail. It's a different ball of wax entirely. Ultimately, the difference is that civil cases are about damages -- a fact that leads to the possibility of someone being acquitted of a murder charge in a criminal court case, then found guilty of wrongful death in a civil court case, where the penalty assessed is . . . wait for it . . . damages.
At least, that's the case in the US, as far as I'm aware. Where are you located?
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
apk is an idiot, but entertaining nonetheless
So where the heck is he then? This will be the third time I've attempted to "summon" him in this thread - he's usually there sooner. Even if I mention him as AC, he'll be there sometimes, so he must like read every thread at -1 looking for HOSTs or whatever... that's just sad. I pity the guy :-(
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http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3261471&cid=42076719
/. was something that could replace all of apk's dodgy reverse string code with a single command.
this is the latest thread where i've been taking pokes at him... i think he's pissed off that i keep bringing up the bug in his stupid reversing string function that he loves posting repeatedly, and now he's trying to make some kind of counterargument about how i don't "error trap" my code or whatever, even though the only code i've ever actually posted on
he's also doing some more linux bashing here if you're interested http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3263923&cid=42057067
hahahahaha....there we go :)
c'mon apk... give us something good... that little tid bit of lame bullshit just isnj't enough any more
Hooray!!! Dutifully summoned.
(Turns to APK)
Hello APK x
lol...
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Are you stupid?
92.41.251.219
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found that bug in your Python function yet?
i'm smarter than you... that's all that matters... and i can find a bug that you are oblivious to hahahahahahah!!!!! (there's your proof)
he hasn't. he's an ameteur noob, and a stupid one at that. at least i get paid to develop software.
jealous much :)
and why do i need to prove my professional status again? just because someone asked... pfft riiiiiight. i can indicate my professional status, and you can choose to believe it or not. i don't give a shit either way. i didn't post my professional status to prove anything, merely to make a statement that i don't play minecraft despite a previous post indicating its supposed popularity.... maybe if you actually read through the whole thread you might take it in its intended context... wait a minute this is APK we're talking about, who doesn't even understand the difference between "don't" and "can't"... expecting him to understand anything is a lost cause.
you prove you're a noob... over and over again