If you want to know what "as such" means, find the person who wrote it into that particular law, and #*&#@ ask them what they meant by it
Why would you expect the person who wrote it to know what it means?
That was a serious question. Yes, seriously.
I'm not sure exactly how EU laws get written, but it is almost certainly similar to the way laws nearly everywhere else get written, so with that assumption, I'll continue. Those words probably came out of a committee, after much going back and forth over the language of the proposed law. Eventually, the committee was happy with it. But no two people on the committee necessarily agreed on what exactly those particular two words meant, nor did they necessarily agree on what the person who actually first wrote them thought they meant.
And then it would have been debated upon and voted upon by some sort of legislative body. The legislators voting on it may have had their own ideas of what those words meant. Is the law as passed supposed to mean what the legislators thought it meant when they passed it, or what the committee meant when they wrote it?
Generally, it is what the legislative body thinks a law means that counts, and a large part of what judicial bodies do is try to figure out what the majority of the legislative body thought a given law meant when they passed it.
I was under the assumption that software patents in the EU were not valid
It's more complicated than that. Article 52 of the European Patent Convention excludes, among other things, "schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers". (emphasis added)
However, it also says of those exclusions, "The provisions of paragraph 2 shall exclude patentability of the subject-matter or activities referred to in that provision only to the extent to which a European patent application or European patent relates to such subject-matter or activities as such". (emphasis added).
Those last two little words, "as such", are a heck of a big loophole. You could drive a truck through it. And if you were a patent attorney, you could drive a software patent through it, and many have. The courts in Europe are all over the map in trying to figure out what the hell "as such" means.
Wikipedia has a pretty good article on this. It's very confusing, but that is not the fault of the article. It is the fault of "as such" and the confusing attempts of the courts and others to figure out what it means.
There's also a pretty good article there on UK software patents, but it hasn't been updated to reflect this latest development.
Can I send 40 different versions of cease and desist letters to the US Copyright office and then sue any law firm that uses one that looks a bit too similar to one of mine?
Not if is is treated as a contract, and that's what courts have tended to do when people have sued over free software license violations.
If it is a contract, and he terminates it in a method not allowed under the contract, then he's breached the contract. That would not make the termination invalid, though. It would just give those who have had their contracts breached a cause of action against him, so they could sue. Assume they sue and win--what would the courts do?
That's also a pretty dang interesting question, because of the concept of "efficient breach". Suppose you have a contract with me for me to sell you 1000 widgets at $1 each. You will use them, and end up making a profit of $0.10 from each one. Before I deliver the widgets, someone offers me $1.20 each for them, so I breach the contract, and tell you I'm going to give the widgets to him. You sue. Courts will NOT force me to sell you the widgets for $1. What they will do is make me pay you $0.10 damages per widget--the profit you were going to make if I had not breached the contract. They won't add punitive damages to discourage me from future breaches, so I'll make my extra $0.20 for breaching (net $0.10 after I pay your damages) and you'll get your profit. It doesn't matter that you wanted to get that profit reselling widgets. The law just looks at the money. This is called an efficient breach because my breach was GOOD economically. You found the widgets to be worth $1, but someone else found them to be worth $1.20, which means he was likely going to put them to a better use than you, so economically it is more efficient for them to go to him. Thus, contract law does not want to discourage my breach.
Replace those widgets with free software, and how does it work out? I have no idea. What are the economic damages to someone when a blob of code stops being available to them under a free license? Well, one thing that comes to mind is the cost of purchasing or otherwise obtaining a license under the new licensing. But that license won't allow redistribution, I'd guess...what is the cost of that? As I said before, I think this will be highly dependent on just who is suing.
Ooh, I just thought of another thing. Since the original, free, license, was basically a license to everyone in the world, could a class action be appropriate?
Or is the license to the whole world really just an offer of contract, with the contract not actually formed with any given person until they accept by actually getting the software and using it? I did not even know the ATSC Capture and Edit Tool existed until this story broke, so it is hard to make a case that I have accepted an offer of contract from the author.
I know the FSF likes to say that the GPL is not a contract so the ordinary contract rules don't apply, but the courts have tended to see free software licenses as in fact being contracts. So I think we need to operate under the assumption that it IS a contract and this is a contract issue.
It gets interesting then. If he sues someone for copyright violation, I think it might end up coming down to whether they had already started using the software before he attempted to revoke the license or not, and if not, whether or not they were aware of the attempted revocation. If they had already started using the software, they could maybe make a good promissory estoppel argument that the license should continue for them.
All these branches lead to some puzzling legal questions, but let's just go down the promissory estoppel path. Say the defendant gets a continued license via promissory estoppel. Can they then redistribute? Or does this license from equity just extend to the use they were making of the software? What if a big part of their business was based on the fact that their product was built from GPL software, so getting a non-GPL license would not be the same for their business?
My conclusion is that it may be possible to in theory revoke the license, but it is fraught with practical problems. If you have GPL (or any other free software license) software that you've written, and want to take non-free, don't bother with the existing and past releases. Just make the license change going forward.
OOo supported ODF in version 2, which came out over a year before ODF was an ISO standard.
And furthermore, that ISO standard is quite incomplete. ODF 1.2, which is now in the process of being standardized, adds things like a specification for spreadsheet formulas. Should we refrain from using ODF until that is finished? Are we to believe that minor differences between Office 2007 and what will be finally standardized is fatal, but the gigantic additions ODF is currently undergoing are just fine?
This article was just another in a long line of articles that point out "flaws" in OOXML that also exist in ODF.
I don't recall any dire warnings that we should avoid saving in ODF at the late stages of its journey through the standardization process. Why is it suddenly an issue for OOXML?
Amusingly, US copyright law used to be much closer to your suggestions, but it was changed in order to make it fit better with Europe, so the US could join the Berne Convention. We used to have registration requirements, and a fixed term with one renewal available only to the author.
Solaris was not a joint project with Microsoft. OS/2 was.
Solaris has remained a viable product under active development, allowing any code that Sun might not have had full rights to to be rewritten during the ordinary course of development. OS/2 has been effectively dead from a development standpoint for a long time. There has been no opportunity to write it away from outside code. Taking an existing, thriving, project (Solaris) and making it open source is orders of magnitude easier than pulling dead code from a long disbanded development group out of the dungeon and digging up from the grave people who remember what was what, in order to figure out how to open source it.
IBM cannot make OS/2 open source, as they do not own all of it. Parts were developed by Microsoft, and are owned by Microsoft. Many of those parts were rewritten by IBM for later versions of OS/2, but at this late stage, it would likely be a difficult task for them to determine whether or not everything in there is free of third party licenses, and if they can't clear everything, no way in hell are their lawyers going to approve.
The idea of IM providers like Google and MS and AOL and Yahoo seems broken to me. Why isn't IM a distributed system, like email, with a standardized protocol?
In fact, if you think about it a bit, it isn't hard to come up with a design that would work a lot like email. You have a local IM server (or your ISP provides one). You have a record like mail's MX record in your DNS data that points to your IM server. When you want to IM me, your IM server looks up my IM server in my DNS record, and connects to my IM server, and our clients then talk to each other, relaying through our IM servers.
What idiot moderated this as "troll"? Go read the damn ODF patent license from Sun. It is only half a page, and is written in quite clear language, for a patent license, and says exactly what I said.
Ron Paul supporters include a wide variety of people, most of whom ARE loopy. For example, who are the conspiracy theorists, the ones who think the CFR and the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission are secretly running the country for? Ron Paul. (Note: I've seen no evidence that Ron Paul is one of these people--but for some reason he attracts them).
And how about the medical fringe groups? The ones who think vaccinations are a secret way to introduce mind control drugs, or that fluoridation is a commie plot to weaken us..guess who they are for? Yup, Ron Paul. Again, I've seen nothing that suggest Paul believes this stuff, but those people flock to him.
You want creationism taught in your local public shcools? Paul is your man. Yet again, not a position he would take, but those who want it tend to pick him.
You want to suppress blacks, or gays, or jews? Ron Paul is your man. And, as with the above, he himself doesn't want that, but those who want it tend to go for him.
The reason for this is that if all of Ron Paul's policies were enacted, all of these loopy groups would better be able to advance their agendas. For example, Ron Paul has introduced legislation that removes the power of the Federal courts and the Supreme Court to hear cases involving First Amendment challenges to State and local laws respecting establishment of religion. That's because he believes that the Supreme Court was wrong when it decided that the 14th makes those parts of the 1st apply to the States. So, he wants to use a legislative trick to overturn the effect of the Supreme Court in this area.
But a side effect of that would be that it would be a lot easier for, say, creationists, to get the Bible taught in schools. They just have to achieve a majority in their school district, get a majority on the school board, and they would be safe from a First Amendment "establishment of religion" challenge. So, those creationists who consider getting the Bible into schools as their main issue are for Ron Paul.
Sun does control ODF, through patents. Read the patent license Sun gave when they submitted ODF for standardization. It only covers that specific version, plus future versions whose standardization Sun participates significantly in. That means if OASIS starts going in any direction that Sun objects to, Sun can just step away, and their patents stop development in that direction.
correct me if I'm wrong- but amazon only sells drm free tracks - and itunes sells a few drm free tracks
It takes time to make songs available on an online store. Amazon currently has RIGHTS to sell more DRM-free songs than Apple, but Apple's been loading EMI DRM-free songs and DRM-free songs from independents for almost twice as long as the Amazon store has existed. The figure I've seen is that they have about 2 million DRM-free tracks (out of the 6 million total they have). That's about the same size as the whole Amazon store, so I think saying iTunes has "a few" DRM-free tracks is a bit of an understatement at the moment.
Well, one problem is that the skills required for a PI have little to do with forensics skills, so this makes as much sense as requiring a hazardous waste transporting licensing would. If there is a need for regulation of forensics, then make a new license for that.
Apple runs on expensive hardware; Linux runs on whatever the hell you want it to run on
My ass fits on an expensive couch, and also fits on a hard wooden bench. Guess which I have in my living room for sitting on when watching TV or playing Wii?
Go watch The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly a few times. It has a lesson for you.
How?
Provably incorrect. Just make a list of common tasks that a serious user would need to do, and do usability tests on those, and you'll see OOO is nowhere near as good as Office.
OS X sales can be counted, Linux downloads more or less can't
But Linux use can.
Re:RTFM 'against' OOXML
on
RTF Vs. OOXML
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· Score: 0, Redundant
That was thoroughly torn apart last time it was posted here. One example of a fatal problem with it: the author edits the XML of a spreadsheet and breaks it, and then tries to blame this on OOXML. News flash: the exact same problem happens with ODF, and with every other XML format in the world when you edit it so as to make it no longer follow the schema for whatever type of document it is. Make the by-hand edit actually following the spec, and it works fine.
If OOXML is so bad, how come opponents have to resort to purposefully corrupting files, and other underhanded tricks, to argue against it? Why can't they stick to non-FUD arguments?
Most students, business and personal users don't wish to be unable to open their 10 year old document because it's no longer supported. Students want to be able to access old study notes
If a student has been held back that long, the old notes are probably not going to help!
What the RIAA said in their court filing was that copies that are ripped and placed in a shared folder are unauthorized copies. They did not say anything about copies that are ripped but not shared.
This is significant because fair use depends on the purpose of the copying. Copying to put on your portable player would be a totally different situation under a fair use analysis than copying to give away to strangers on the internet.
At least in this case, they aren't trying to argue that all ripping is illegal--just this defendant's ripping. (And in other cases, they have said that ripping for your portable player is OK).
I believe that there are similar considerations if a defense under the Audio Home Recording Act, rather than under fair use is considered. The nature of the defendant and the reason for ripping would be relevant as to whether that covers him.
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Why would you expect the person who wrote it to know what it means?
That was a serious question. Yes, seriously.
I'm not sure exactly how EU laws get written, but it is almost certainly similar to the way laws nearly everywhere else get written, so with that assumption, I'll continue. Those words probably came out of a committee, after much going back and forth over the language of the proposed law. Eventually, the committee was happy with it. But no two people on the committee necessarily agreed on what exactly those particular two words meant, nor did they necessarily agree on what the person who actually first wrote them thought they meant.
And then it would have been debated upon and voted upon by some sort of legislative body. The legislators voting on it may have had their own ideas of what those words meant. Is the law as passed supposed to mean what the legislators thought it meant when they passed it, or what the committee meant when they wrote it?
Generally, it is what the legislative body thinks a law means that counts, and a large part of what judicial bodies do is try to figure out what the majority of the legislative body thought a given law meant when they passed it.
It's more complicated than that. Article 52 of the European Patent Convention excludes, among other things, "schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers ". (emphasis added)
However, it also says of those exclusions, "The provisions of paragraph 2 shall exclude patentability of the subject-matter or activities referred to in that provision only to the extent to which a European patent application or European patent relates to such subject-matter or activities as such ". (emphasis added).
Those last two little words, "as such", are a heck of a big loophole. You could drive a truck through it. And if you were a patent attorney, you could drive a software patent through it, and many have. The courts in Europe are all over the map in trying to figure out what the hell "as such" means.
Wikipedia has a pretty good article on this. It's very confusing, but that is not the fault of the article. It is the fault of "as such" and the confusing attempts of the courts and others to figure out what it means.
There's also a pretty good article there on UK software patents, but it hasn't been updated to reflect this latest development.
The courts seem to disagree.
Yes, you can. It's called "breaching the contract", and you have to deal with the consequences (namely, being sued for breach of contract).
No. You've confused copyrights and patents.
Not if is is treated as a contract, and that's what courts have tended to do when people have sued over free software license violations.
If it is a contract, and he terminates it in a method not allowed under the contract, then he's breached the contract. That would not make the termination invalid, though. It would just give those who have had their contracts breached a cause of action against him, so they could sue. Assume they sue and win--what would the courts do?
That's also a pretty dang interesting question, because of the concept of "efficient breach". Suppose you have a contract with me for me to sell you 1000 widgets at $1 each. You will use them, and end up making a profit of $0.10 from each one. Before I deliver the widgets, someone offers me $1.20 each for them, so I breach the contract, and tell you I'm going to give the widgets to him. You sue. Courts will NOT force me to sell you the widgets for $1. What they will do is make me pay you $0.10 damages per widget--the profit you were going to make if I had not breached the contract. They won't add punitive damages to discourage me from future breaches, so I'll make my extra $0.20 for breaching (net $0.10 after I pay your damages) and you'll get your profit. It doesn't matter that you wanted to get that profit reselling widgets. The law just looks at the money. This is called an efficient breach because my breach was GOOD economically. You found the widgets to be worth $1, but someone else found them to be worth $1.20, which means he was likely going to put them to a better use than you, so economically it is more efficient for them to go to him. Thus, contract law does not want to discourage my breach.
Replace those widgets with free software, and how does it work out? I have no idea. What are the economic damages to someone when a blob of code stops being available to them under a free license? Well, one thing that comes to mind is the cost of purchasing or otherwise obtaining a license under the new licensing. But that license won't allow redistribution, I'd guess...what is the cost of that? As I said before, I think this will be highly dependent on just who is suing.
Ooh, I just thought of another thing. Since the original, free, license, was basically a license to everyone in the world, could a class action be appropriate?
Or is the license to the whole world really just an offer of contract, with the contract not actually formed with any given person until they accept by actually getting the software and using it? I did not even know the ATSC Capture and Edit Tool existed until this story broke, so it is hard to make a case that I have accepted an offer of contract from the author.
It gets interesting then. If he sues someone for copyright violation, I think it might end up coming down to whether they had already started using the software before he attempted to revoke the license or not, and if not, whether or not they were aware of the attempted revocation. If they had already started using the software, they could maybe make a good promissory estoppel argument that the license should continue for them.
All these branches lead to some puzzling legal questions, but let's just go down the promissory estoppel path. Say the defendant gets a continued license via promissory estoppel. Can they then redistribute? Or does this license from equity just extend to the use they were making of the software? What if a big part of their business was based on the fact that their product was built from GPL software, so getting a non-GPL license would not be the same for their business?
My conclusion is that it may be possible to in theory revoke the license, but it is fraught with practical problems. If you have GPL (or any other free software license) software that you've written, and want to take non-free, don't bother with the existing and past releases. Just make the license change going forward.
And furthermore, that ISO standard is quite incomplete. ODF 1.2, which is now in the process of being standardized, adds things like a specification for spreadsheet formulas. Should we refrain from using ODF until that is finished? Are we to believe that minor differences between Office 2007 and what will be finally standardized is fatal, but the gigantic additions ODF is currently undergoing are just fine?
This article was just another in a long line of articles that point out "flaws" in OOXML that also exist in ODF.
I don't recall any dire warnings that we should avoid saving in ODF at the late stages of its journey through the standardization process. Why is it suddenly an issue for OOXML?
Amusingly, US copyright law used to be much closer to your suggestions, but it was changed in order to make it fit better with Europe, so the US could join the Berne Convention. We used to have registration requirements, and a fixed term with one renewal available only to the author.
Solaris has remained a viable product under active development, allowing any code that Sun might not have had full rights to to be rewritten during the ordinary course of development. OS/2 has been effectively dead from a development standpoint for a long time. There has been no opportunity to write it away from outside code. Taking an existing, thriving, project (Solaris) and making it open source is orders of magnitude easier than pulling dead code from a long disbanded development group out of the dungeon and digging up from the grave people who remember what was what, in order to figure out how to open source it.
IBM cannot make OS/2 open source, as they do not own all of it. Parts were developed by Microsoft, and are owned by Microsoft. Many of those parts were rewritten by IBM for later versions of OS/2, but at this late stage, it would likely be a difficult task for them to determine whether or not everything in there is free of third party licenses, and if they can't clear everything, no way in hell are their lawyers going to approve.
What they should do is use this. It seems to address all of the problems with machine votes, AND all of the problems of the traditional system.
In fact, if you think about it a bit, it isn't hard to come up with a design that would work a lot like email. You have a local IM server (or your ISP provides one). You have a record like mail's MX record in your DNS data that points to your IM server. When you want to IM me, your IM server looks up my IM server in my DNS record, and connects to my IM server, and our clients then talk to each other, relaying through our IM servers.
What idiot moderated this as "troll"? Go read the damn ODF patent license from Sun. It is only half a page, and is written in quite clear language, for a patent license, and says exactly what I said.
And how about the medical fringe groups? The ones who think vaccinations are a secret way to introduce mind control drugs, or that fluoridation is a commie plot to weaken us..guess who they are for? Yup, Ron Paul. Again, I've seen nothing that suggest Paul believes this stuff, but those people flock to him.
You want creationism taught in your local public shcools? Paul is your man. Yet again, not a position he would take, but those who want it tend to pick him.
You want to suppress blacks, or gays, or jews? Ron Paul is your man. And, as with the above, he himself doesn't want that, but those who want it tend to go for him.
The reason for this is that if all of Ron Paul's policies were enacted, all of these loopy groups would better be able to advance their agendas. For example, Ron Paul has introduced legislation that removes the power of the Federal courts and the Supreme Court to hear cases involving First Amendment challenges to State and local laws respecting establishment of religion. That's because he believes that the Supreme Court was wrong when it decided that the 14th makes those parts of the 1st apply to the States. So, he wants to use a legislative trick to overturn the effect of the Supreme Court in this area.
But a side effect of that would be that it would be a lot easier for, say, creationists, to get the Bible taught in schools. They just have to achieve a majority in their school district, get a majority on the school board, and they would be safe from a First Amendment "establishment of religion" challenge. So, those creationists who consider getting the Bible into schools as their main issue are for Ron Paul.
Sun does control ODF, through patents. Read the patent license Sun gave when they submitted ODF for standardization. It only covers that specific version, plus future versions whose standardization Sun participates significantly in. That means if OASIS starts going in any direction that Sun objects to, Sun can just step away, and their patents stop development in that direction.
It takes time to make songs available on an online store. Amazon currently has RIGHTS to sell more DRM-free songs than Apple, but Apple's been loading EMI DRM-free songs and DRM-free songs from independents for almost twice as long as the Amazon store has existed. The figure I've seen is that they have about 2 million DRM-free tracks (out of the 6 million total they have). That's about the same size as the whole Amazon store, so I think saying iTunes has "a few" DRM-free tracks is a bit of an understatement at the moment.
Well, one problem is that the skills required for a PI have little to do with forensics skills, so this makes as much sense as requiring a hazardous waste transporting licensing would. If there is a need for regulation of forensics, then make a new license for that.
My ass fits on an expensive couch, and also fits on a hard wooden bench. Guess which I have in my living room for sitting on when watching TV or playing Wii?
But Linux use can.
If OOXML is so bad, how come opponents have to resort to purposefully corrupting files, and other underhanded tricks, to argue against it? Why can't they stick to non-FUD arguments?
If a student has been held back that long, the old notes are probably not going to help!
This is significant because fair use depends on the purpose of the copying. Copying to put on your portable player would be a totally different situation under a fair use analysis than copying to give away to strangers on the internet.
At least in this case, they aren't trying to argue that all ripping is illegal--just this defendant's ripping. (And in other cases, they have said that ripping for your portable player is OK).
I believe that there are similar considerations if a defense under the Audio Home Recording Act, rather than under fair use is considered. The nature of the defendant and the reason for ripping would be relevant as to whether that covers him.
So explain why they have loved other Linux-based systems, like the Asus EEE.