Ok, some valid points here, but let us all remember that for the GPL/LGPL none of the above concerns are legitimate. The author is talking about open source licensing in general
Why would they not be concerns for GPL? It's authors intend it to NOT be a contract, making it a bare copyright license, which is inherently revocable, and GPLv3 explicitly forbids sublicensing. I doubt that FSF would ever try to revoke the GPL on code they own, but there are a lot of projects that have been distributed under GPL where the FSF does not own the copyright.
It would be kinda hard to kill since the code is already "open" and out in the wild. Oracle can't prevent the current code base from being forked
The notion that once you make something open source, you can't revoke that, is interesting. It's widely believed, but I've seen very little legal analysis to support that belief. What little I've seen from open source lawyers has said that it might NOT be true. I'd love to see a test case.
Some of the factors that would affect a particular case are whether or not the open source license involved is a contract or a bare license. Bare licenses ARE revokable at will by the licensor. In Rosen's book on open source licensing, that is one of the reasons he recommends against using them, in favor of making sure your license is a contract. This is interesting, because one rather prominent open source license, GPL, is not a contract, according to its authors. They are quite insistent about that.
If a particular open source license IS a contract, then whether it is revocable or not will depend on the terms of the contract. Even then, it may be possible to revoke it, if the licensor is willing to suffer a penalty for breach of contract. Contract penalties are almost always just monetary damages, not an order of specific performance. I'll leave it to others to speculate how that would work out.
Another issue is sublicensing. With some open source licenses, if you give me your software, I get my license from you. If I then give the software to a third person, they get their license from me. With other open source licenses, the third person gets their license from you, rather than getting a sublicense from me. GPLv3 is one of the latter kinds of license--it has a specific statement in the license that you cannot sublicense it.
For licenses that are not sublicensible, what happens if the original licensor simply announces that they are giving out no new licenses? People who have the software could still distribute it, free of risk of copyright suit, since they have a license to distribute. But the recipients would not have a license, so they could not redistribute. It might take a way to kill off some open code this way, because it could take a while for all the current owners of copies to stop distributing, but those would probably eventually go away.
Note that I am NOT saying that open source licenses ARE revokable. Just that no one has given a convincing reason that they are not, and that almost nothing else in contract/licensing law is irrevocable, so the notion that open source licenses are irrevocable should be treated with skepticism at this point.
I can see why this is a problem for you, but not why it is a problem for society in general...The solution is to stop trying to find a way to keep your customers from learning about competitors and start making your product better and cheaper
The problem isn't competitors. The problem is fraud. For example, I work for a company whose product name is quite distinct from that of any of its competitors. We occasionally see ads on Google that are specifically designed to look like they are from us, using our exact name. Click them, and you go to a page showing a logo similar to ours, a layout similar to ours, using slogans and phrasing similar to our (and different from our competitors), that says something like "Looking for OUR_PRODUCT_NAME? Download here!"
Also, I'm not sure what's meant by the clause about maritime and territorial jurisdiction and whether or not it is supposed to apply to the part in (c) about persons between the ages of 12 and 15...
Where that comes in is that different states use different numbers for these things. I believe that 18 section 2241 is the Federal law that is used in those parts of the US that are not parts of states. The other law, that one that criminalizes going abroad to obtain illicit sex basically is making a subroutine call to 18 section 2241 to get the definition of illicit sex, but using it in a different context (sex tourism rather than consent laws for maritime and territory parts of the US)
I am sure you are joking but just an fyi - if you happen to be coming from the US - going to another country with the intent of doing something that would be considered illegal in the US (e.g. sex w/13 y/o) you would be convicted of doing that crime upon your arrival (assuming they 1) knew of your intent and 2) prove that you did it).
That does not appear to be correct. The anti sex tourism law is 18 USC 2423. It prohibits going to foreign countries for illicit sex. It defines illicit sex as that which would violate 18 USC 2241 if it had occurred in the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the US, or any commercial sex act with anyone under 18.
So, going to Spain to use a young prostitute is right out. But if you are going to Spain in the hopes of non-commercial sex with a 13 year old, then 18 USC 2241 is what you need to watch out for.
18 USC 2241 gives us these rules. Under 12 is right out. 12 through 15 is out if the person is more than 4 years younger than you and you used force or threat, they were unconscious, or you got them drugged or drunk either by force or threat, or without their knowledge.
As far as I can see from these statutes, it would NOT violate US law to have a consensual, non-paid, sexual relationship with a 13 year old Spanish person.
The libraries used to write Linux programs don't need to be covered, as they aren't using any technology Microsoft has patents on. People writing Linux programs using Mono normally use C# (covered), the CLI (covered), and libraries like GTK#. Only those who for some reason want to use Winforms, ASP.NET, ADO.NET and such might have a problem.
The 'community promise' does not extend to commercial downstream recipients of open source MONO applications !
Where did you get that idea? I suspect you are confused because you can't sublicense, but that isn't a problem for downstream recipients, for the same reason GPLv3's similar prohibition isn't a problem.
So really, even if MS adds the 2 standards to their Community Promise, that still doesn't mean you get anything useful - if you write a simple app that does nothing, you're fine. If you want DB access, or web serving, or a GUI.. you're still in the same problem as before
No, you get plenty useful. In particular, you get the parts of Mono that are used to write Linux applications. When people write Linux applications in Mono, for instance, they don't use Winforms to do their GUI. They use GTK#. To access databases, they don't use ADO.NET. They use the Mysql or PostgreSQL.NET connectors. And so on.
Only people who are using Mono to try to write code that will run unchanged on Windows might have something to worry about--but they don't need Mono in the first place.
Yes but what should the Mozilla developers do when they run on a system such as Linux which can't legally support H.264 in USA and other parts of the world?
Specifying Ogg for HTML5 doesn't get rid of that problem, as it is beyond the scope of the HTML5 spec to require that the people putting videos up on the web use Ogg. Google will continue to use H.264 for bandwidth and quality reasons, and Apple will continue to use H.264 for performance reasons.
Mozilla will simply continue doing what they do now when they encounter H.264 video on Linux--play it using one of the readily available H.264 codecs commonly found on Linux systems. Whether or not that codec is legally there is not their problem.
And this is what people just can't get a good perspective on. They are basically sentencing her to be a slave for the rest of her life and that is even more cruel than execution
Or she could take the settlement for a few thousand dollars that the RIAA is still offering her.
How does Jammie Thomas stack up against the EXXON Valdez case?
If Exxon had been offered a chance to settle for $5000 at the start, they would have taken it.
if Exxon had been offered a chance to settle for $5000 after their first court loss, they would have taken it.
Hence, you can't really compare Exxon to Thomas, as Exxon is not stupid.
EXXON got its punitive damages reduced.
If Thomas gets lucky, and the statutory damages are reduced from $80k per song to the statutory minimum of $750 per song, it will still come out to more than the RIAA has repeatedly offered to let her settle for.
If one does the math it is easy to see it was impossible for her to have caused $1.92 million damage. The offense occurred in 2004. Back then a typical cable modem had an upload speed of 256kbps shared with the neighbors. A typical song costs $0.99 on iTunes
Your first mistake is using the iTunes price. Last time I checked, if you get a song from iTunes, it does not include a license to make the song available for an arbitrary, untracked, number of uploads to other people. If you were to write to the rights holders for the songs involved and ask what it would cost to get a license for unrestricted, untracked, copying and redistribution, I am pretty sure they would ask for more than $1 per song.
This is why it is often expensive for movie producers to use popular songs in their soundtracks. Did you think they just went to the iTunes store, downloaded a copy for $1, and then used it in their movies, without paying more?
For movies, the licenses can be thousands of dollars per song. If she had to pay similar per song, and had to pay for all the songs she was sharing, not just the 24 that were brought up in trial, it would actually come in the ballpark of $1.92 million. However, that's not really relevant, and that brings is to your second mistake.
The $1.92 million is not meant to represent actual damages. Actual damages are very hard to prove in most copyright cases, and so the plaintiff can elect to take statutory damages, which are defined in the statute (hence the name). They are from $750 to $150000 dollars, with the jury deciding where they go. The jury went for something in the middle of that, per song, for the simple reason that she was not very good at lying to them. Juries do not like it when clearly guilty defendants tell a shifting tale of several badly told obvious lies, and that tends to push damages up.
Carlin had it right: I'd rather my kids saw images of two people making love than of two people killing each other.
It seems unlikely, though, that he would have wanted his kids to see these particular porn movies--I doubt he considered drinking vomit to be making love. The films were sufficiently distasteful that they had trouble getting help with the defense from the rest of the porn industry.
See, this is something that open source accomplishes that stupid fucking arrogant businesses will never get. When something is obsolete or no longer needed, it gets ditched or replaced by something better.
Unfortunately, things that are not obsolete and are still needed often get ditched or replaced by something better. (Or something not better, but merely different, because some developer would rather work on something new instead of work on someone else's code).
That argues for censoring, not against. If covering an ongoing event on Wikipedia has a decent chance of changing the course of the event, then it cannot be covered impartially.
No, they did not allow it. Nor did they disallow it. They declined to hear the case. In all but a few situations, the Supreme Court has discretionary jurisdiction, and can decline to hear a case for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they want to wait until multiple circuits have considered an issue. Sometimes they think the time is ripe for the Court to settle an issue, but the particular case up for review is not a good vehicle for that review, and so waits for a better case. Sometimes they just don't think the case is important enough compared to the other cases competing for their time.
One of the tricks they use to get more battery life is to shape the battery to the available space in the device, which makes standardization difficult if you want maximal battery life.
The two most recent posts, about the repeated downgrading of the goals and slips of the schedule, cite sources. Why does it matter of the blog is trollish? The information appears to be correct and verifiable.
We don't have those right now with mainstream sources. What we have is an image, usually enhanced by leggy blondes with large breasts. Now, I'm all for leggy blondes with large breasts, but don't pretend that this makes the news any more accurate
You've never actually read a newspaper, have you? You've only read about them on the net, correct?
While it might be the death of "Big Media", it will be the birth of "lite media" which consists of the blogosphere, twitter, and Facebook. When the incentive to compile news is financial, we will only get news that is sensational and designed to be sticky. However, when that incentive is removed, we will be able to see a rapid advance in news gathering for its own sake. Such an evolution in news gathering is a huge breakthrough for the little guy who prior to this would never have had his voice heard.
The blogosphere, twitter, and Facebook are very unreliable sources of news. I can tell whenever I get in a political discussion with someone if that's how they get their news, because they believe so many things that are provably wrong. Sure, newspapers make mistakes too, but at a far lower rate.
The blogs or sites that you cited as examples in your second paragraph (Little Green Footballs, Huffington Post, and Daily Kos) either are opinion sites, not news sites (but are well done opinion sites, and will cite to news articles written by journalists), or are effectively online-only newspapers with staff reporters and editors that are professional journalists (the Huffington Post).
VHS went away because something better came alone. Nothing better than professional journalists has come alone to gather and disseminate the information that is necessary for a democratic government to survive.
How is this a new problem? Anyone can currently 'link to or paraphrase' print material. If I say 'an article in The Economist contained a detailed report on the harm done by Fairtrade Products' in a print magazine then I am linking to (although not in a clickable form) and paraphrasing an article. Both of these are usually seen as fair use. It is completely legal currently for me to produce a newspaper that does no original research and just writes articles based on the investigative journalism of other publications.
Your example isn't really paraphrasing the article. It is merely describing the existence of the article and telling the reader the topic of the article.
If you produced a print magazine that told readers of interesting articles in newspapers, and gave the topic, and a cite to the magazine, that would indeed be perfectly legal. It would also do no harm to the newspapers, because people who wanted to read the articles would go to the newspapers, and see the articles in the presentation that the newspaper intended
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, some valid points here, but let us all remember that for the GPL/LGPL none of the above concerns are legitimate. The author is talking about open source licensing in general
Why would they not be concerns for GPL? It's authors intend it to NOT be a contract, making it a bare copyright license, which is inherently revocable, and GPLv3 explicitly forbids sublicensing. I doubt that FSF would ever try to revoke the GPL on code they own, but there are a lot of projects that have been distributed under GPL where the FSF does not own the copyright.
It would be kinda hard to kill since the code is already "open" and out in the wild. Oracle can't prevent the current code base from being forked
The notion that once you make something open source, you can't revoke that, is interesting. It's widely believed, but I've seen very little legal analysis to support that belief. What little I've seen from open source lawyers has said that it might NOT be true. I'd love to see a test case.
Some of the factors that would affect a particular case are whether or not the open source license involved is a contract or a bare license. Bare licenses ARE revokable at will by the licensor. In Rosen's book on open source licensing, that is one of the reasons he recommends against using them, in favor of making sure your license is a contract. This is interesting, because one rather prominent open source license, GPL, is not a contract, according to its authors. They are quite insistent about that.
If a particular open source license IS a contract, then whether it is revocable or not will depend on the terms of the contract. Even then, it may be possible to revoke it, if the licensor is willing to suffer a penalty for breach of contract. Contract penalties are almost always just monetary damages, not an order of specific performance. I'll leave it to others to speculate how that would work out.
Another issue is sublicensing. With some open source licenses, if you give me your software, I get my license from you. If I then give the software to a third person, they get their license from me. With other open source licenses, the third person gets their license from you, rather than getting a sublicense from me. GPLv3 is one of the latter kinds of license--it has a specific statement in the license that you cannot sublicense it.
For licenses that are not sublicensible, what happens if the original licensor simply announces that they are giving out no new licenses? People who have the software could still distribute it, free of risk of copyright suit, since they have a license to distribute. But the recipients would not have a license, so they could not redistribute. It might take a way to kill off some open code this way, because it could take a while for all the current owners of copies to stop distributing, but those would probably eventually go away.
Note that I am NOT saying that open source licenses ARE revokable. Just that no one has given a convincing reason that they are not, and that almost nothing else in contract/licensing law is irrevocable, so the notion that open source licenses are irrevocable should be treated with skepticism at this point.
I can see why this is a problem for you, but not why it is a problem for society in general...The solution is to stop trying to find a way to keep your customers from learning about competitors and start making your product better and cheaper
The problem isn't competitors. The problem is fraud. For example, I work for a company whose product name is quite distinct from that of any of its competitors. We occasionally see ads on Google that are specifically designed to look like they are from us, using our exact name. Click them, and you go to a page showing a logo similar to ours, a layout similar to ours, using slogans and phrasing similar to our (and different from our competitors), that says something like "Looking for OUR_PRODUCT_NAME? Download here!"
Also, I'm not sure what's meant by the clause about maritime and territorial jurisdiction and whether or not it is supposed to apply to the part in (c) about persons between the ages of 12 and 15...
Where that comes in is that different states use different numbers for these things. I believe that 18 section 2241 is the Federal law that is used in those parts of the US that are not parts of states. The other law, that one that criminalizes going abroad to obtain illicit sex basically is making a subroutine call to 18 section 2241 to get the definition of illicit sex, but using it in a different context (sex tourism rather than consent laws for maritime and territory parts of the US)
I am sure you are joking but just an fyi - if you happen to be coming from the US - going to another country with the intent of doing something that would be considered illegal in the US (e.g. sex w/13 y/o) you would be convicted of doing that crime upon your arrival (assuming they 1) knew of your intent and 2) prove that you did it).
That does not appear to be correct. The anti sex tourism law is 18 USC 2423. It prohibits going to foreign countries for illicit sex. It defines illicit sex as that which would violate 18 USC 2241 if it had occurred in the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the US, or any commercial sex act with anyone under 18.
So, going to Spain to use a young prostitute is right out. But if you are going to Spain in the hopes of non-commercial sex with a 13 year old, then 18 USC 2241 is what you need to watch out for.
18 USC 2241 gives us these rules. Under 12 is right out. 12 through 15 is out if the person is more than 4 years younger than you and you used force or threat, they were unconscious, or you got them drugged or drunk either by force or threat, or without their knowledge.
As far as I can see from these statutes, it would NOT violate US law to have a consensual, non-paid, sexual relationship with a 13 year old Spanish person.
The libraries used to write Linux programs don't need to be covered, as they aren't using any technology Microsoft has patents on. People writing Linux programs using Mono normally use C# (covered), the CLI (covered), and libraries like GTK#. Only those who for some reason want to use Winforms, ASP.NET, ADO.NET and such might have a problem.
The 'community promise' does not extend to commercial downstream recipients of open source MONO applications !
Where did you get that idea? I suspect you are confused because you can't sublicense, but that isn't a problem for downstream recipients, for the same reason GPLv3's similar prohibition isn't a problem.
.
So really, even if MS adds the 2 standards to their Community Promise, that still doesn't mean you get anything useful - if you write a simple app that does nothing, you're fine. If you want DB access, or web serving, or a GUI.. you're still in the same problem as before
No, you get plenty useful. In particular, you get the parts of Mono that are used to write Linux applications. When people write Linux applications in Mono, for instance, they don't use Winforms to do their GUI. They use GTK#. To access databases, they don't use ADO.NET. They use the Mysql or PostgreSQL .NET connectors. And so on.
Only people who are using Mono to try to write code that will run unchanged on Windows might have something to worry about--but they don't need Mono in the first place.
Yes but what should the Mozilla developers do when they run on a system such as Linux which can't legally support H.264 in USA and other parts of the world?
Specifying Ogg for HTML5 doesn't get rid of that problem, as it is beyond the scope of the HTML5 spec to require that the people putting videos up on the web use Ogg. Google will continue to use H.264 for bandwidth and quality reasons, and Apple will continue to use H.264 for performance reasons.
Mozilla will simply continue doing what they do now when they encounter H.264 video on Linux--play it using one of the readily available H.264 codecs commonly found on Linux systems. Whether or not that codec is legally there is not their problem.
And this is what people just can't get a good perspective on. They are basically sentencing her to be a slave for the rest of her life and that is even more cruel than execution
Or she could take the settlement for a few thousand dollars that the RIAA is still offering her.
How does Jammie Thomas stack up against the EXXON Valdez case?
If Exxon had been offered a chance to settle for $5000 at the start, they would have taken it.
if Exxon had been offered a chance to settle for $5000 after their first court loss, they would have taken it.
Hence, you can't really compare Exxon to Thomas, as Exxon is not stupid.
EXXON got its punitive damages reduced.
If Thomas gets lucky, and the statutory damages are reduced from $80k per song to the statutory minimum of $750 per song, it will still come out to more than the RIAA has repeatedly offered to let her settle for.
If one does the math it is easy to see it was impossible for her to have caused $1.92 million damage. The offense occurred in 2004. Back then a typical cable modem had an upload speed of 256kbps shared with the neighbors. A typical song costs $0.99 on iTunes
Your first mistake is using the iTunes price. Last time I checked, if you get a song from iTunes, it does not include a license to make the song available for an arbitrary, untracked, number of uploads to other people. If you were to write to the rights holders for the songs involved and ask what it would cost to get a license for unrestricted, untracked, copying and redistribution, I am pretty sure they would ask for more than $1 per song.
This is why it is often expensive for movie producers to use popular songs in their soundtracks. Did you think they just went to the iTunes store, downloaded a copy for $1, and then used it in their movies, without paying more?
For movies, the licenses can be thousands of dollars per song. If she had to pay similar per song, and had to pay for all the songs she was sharing, not just the 24 that were brought up in trial, it would actually come in the ballpark of $1.92 million. However, that's not really relevant, and that brings is to your second mistake.
The $1.92 million is not meant to represent actual damages. Actual damages are very hard to prove in most copyright cases, and so the plaintiff can elect to take statutory damages, which are defined in the statute (hence the name). They are from $750 to $150000 dollars, with the jury deciding where they go. The jury went for something in the middle of that, per song, for the simple reason that she was not very good at lying to them. Juries do not like it when clearly guilty defendants tell a shifting tale of several badly told obvious lies, and that tends to push damages up.
Carlin had it right: I'd rather my kids saw images of two people making love than of two people killing each other.
It seems unlikely, though, that he would have wanted his kids to see these particular porn movies--I doubt he considered drinking vomit to be making love. The films were sufficiently distasteful that they had trouble getting help with the defense from the rest of the porn industry.
See, this is something that open source accomplishes that stupid fucking arrogant businesses will never get. When something is obsolete or no longer needed, it gets ditched or replaced by something better.
Unfortunately, things that are not obsolete and are still needed often get ditched or replaced by something better. (Or something not better, but merely different, because some developer would rather work on something new instead of work on someone else's code).
They should be COMPLETELY impartial
That argues for censoring, not against. If covering an ongoing event on Wikipedia has a decent chance of changing the course of the event, then it cannot be covered impartially.
No, they did not allow it. Nor did they disallow it. They declined to hear the case. In all but a few situations, the Supreme Court has discretionary jurisdiction, and can decline to hear a case for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they want to wait until multiple circuits have considered an issue. Sometimes they think the time is ripe for the Court to settle an issue, but the particular case up for review is not a good vehicle for that review, and so waits for a better case. Sometimes they just don't think the case is important enough compared to the other cases competing for their time.
There is no fair use law here so they couldn't use that excuse either
It's called "fair dealing" in the UK. It's not as extensive as "fair use" under US law, but it is there.
One of the tricks they use to get more battery life is to shape the battery to the available space in the device, which makes standardization difficult if you want maximal battery life.
I take it that Apple isn't part of this little bandwagon
If you aren't going to read the article, you should at least read the summary.
The two most recent posts, about the repeated downgrading of the goals and slips of the schedule, cite sources. Why does it matter of the blog is trollish? The information appears to be correct and verifiable.
We don't have those right now with mainstream sources. What we have is an image, usually enhanced by leggy blondes with large breasts. Now, I'm all for leggy blondes with large breasts, but don't pretend that this makes the news any more accurate
You've never actually read a newspaper, have you? You've only read about them on the net, correct?
For people who still don't get that monopolies are always created by government coercion
How did government coercion create the Windows monopoly for PCs?
While it might be the death of "Big Media", it will be the birth of "lite media" which consists of the blogosphere, twitter, and Facebook. When the incentive to compile news is financial, we will only get news that is sensational and designed to be sticky. However, when that incentive is removed, we will be able to see a rapid advance in news gathering for its own sake. Such an evolution in news gathering is a huge breakthrough for the little guy who prior to this would never have had his voice heard.
The blogosphere, twitter, and Facebook are very unreliable sources of news. I can tell whenever I get in a political discussion with someone if that's how they get their news, because they believe so many things that are provably wrong. Sure, newspapers make mistakes too, but at a far lower rate.
The blogs or sites that you cited as examples in your second paragraph (Little Green Footballs, Huffington Post, and Daily Kos) either are opinion sites, not news sites (but are well done opinion sites, and will cite to news articles written by journalists), or are effectively online-only newspapers with staff reporters and editors that are professional journalists (the Huffington Post).
VHS went away because something better came alone. Nothing better than professional journalists has come alone to gather and disseminate the information that is necessary for a democratic government to survive.
How is this a new problem? Anyone can currently 'link to or paraphrase' print material. If I say 'an article in The Economist contained a detailed report on the harm done by Fairtrade Products' in a print magazine then I am linking to (although not in a clickable form) and paraphrasing an article. Both of these are usually seen as fair use. It is completely legal currently for me to produce a newspaper that does no original research and just writes articles based on the investigative journalism of other publications.
Your example isn't really paraphrasing the article. It is merely describing the existence of the article and telling the reader the topic of the article.
If you produced a print magazine that told readers of interesting articles in newspapers, and gave the topic, and a cite to the magazine, that would indeed be perfectly legal. It would also do no harm to the newspapers, because people who wanted to read the articles would go to the newspapers, and see the articles in the presentation that the newspaper intended