The new software is infinitely better than the Microsoft software was for the DVR.
It is far more stable. The Microsoft software had a tendency to crash when a recording finished. Mine crashed at least 5 times a week. If another recording was scheduled to follow the one that crashed it, you'd lose at least 5 minutes of the start of that second recording, because it took that long for the box to reboot, and then figure out that it was authorized for DVR. Deleting a recording also could trigger a crash, so whenever you finished watching something, you had to check to make sure you didn't have a recording in progress or coming up soon, unless you wanted to risk disrupting it.
The new software is much much faster. It is quite reasonable to actually use it to plan future viewing, or to ask yourself at 3 to 9 what is starting at 9 that you might want to watch. The Microsoft software was close to useless for this. For all but the most trivial planning, it was faster to get up, go to the computer, and look at Comcast's web-based guide.
The back button on the remote does the right thing on most screens, unlike on the Microsoft software.
Yes, the Top Chef think is annoying. But at least with the software being fast and stable, it is just a minor annoyance, as you can quickly delete those spurious recordings. That's the big difference between the old and new software. The old software's problems were fundamental problems that were hard or impossible to work around, whereas the new software's problems are just annoyances.
The funny thing is, Microsoft knows how to do good DVR software. UlitmateTV for DirecTV was quite good (although it also was slow).
Another way to look at 10^60 is that it is a bit over 2^199. Anyone who has something that can brute force something that large isn't going to bother with Go. They'll be busy looking at all those interesting secrets protected by ciphers like AES, with a mere 2^128 keys.
No, even if they believed the law was an ass, this would not be a situation for nullification. Nullification is meant as a last resort, when the other mechanisms for changing the law have broke down. That is not the case here.
OOo will require training. For example, sit someone down in front of OOo who knows how to use Excel, and give them a spreadsheet. Ask them to create a graph and add a regression line. They will most likely not be able to figure out that task without help--and the online help system does not cover it, because it is broken (it has index entries for adding trend lines, but they point to the wrong entries in the help system). There are many examples like this throughout OOo where it works significantly differently than Office does, that have nothing to do with macros.
When you design a product, you have a target market you are going to support. Generally, that decision is independent of the engineering decision as to what technology to use when subsequently building the product.
Why? The defendant used the software without complying with the GPL. The only way they could have done that legally would have been to buy a non-GPL licence from the copyright owners. But they didn't, so the copyright owners didn't get any money. Wouldn't that consitute "damages"?
Generally, actual damages are your lost sales due to competition from the infringing copies. A typical example would be if you made bootleg "Harry Potter" books and sold them through bookstores. Customers who buy yours would probably not by from the authorized publisher, and the amount of sales they lose are their actual damages. Note that this is related to profits--your profits are going to be about the same as their actual damages.
With free software, the copyright holder doesn't have sales that are harmed by the competition from the infringing copies.
Your notion that the cost the infringer would have to pay to get permission to do what they were doing should count as actual damages is novel. But I don't think it would get far in court, because it is too remote. The plaintiffs had no expectation that they would be selling a special license to Monsoon, so Monsoon's failure to buy one does not represent damages to the plaintiffs. The plaintiff expected zero dollars and GPL compliance. They got zero dollars and non-compliance. The dollar difference between what they expected and what they got is zero.
As soon as the defendant complies with GPL, they aren't infringing, so #1 isn't a big deal.
Actual damages? That's a big fat zero.
Profits? At this stage in the product's life-cycle, defendant probably isn't profitable yet, so that's likely to be another big fat zero.
Attorney fees. Finally something that might actually be non-zero!
I don't see much punishment happening here. They'll settle for attorney fees and some nice (to the developers) but insignificant (to the company) payment.
There are plenty of established stock photo providers, with lots of experience in making sure that all the legal ducks are in a row. I'm surprised that a big company, which presumably uses a lot of stock photos, would go take some random photo on Flickr, where they have no assurance whoever put the photo up has rights to it--even if the license says they do, the company has no assurance the poster understood the license.
It just seems to be asking for trouble. I thought stock photos from the established providers were pretty cheap. Is going for free on Flickr really worth it?
Because if someone steals from your bank account, that is a crime, and there is a mechanism to punish them.
If, however, someone cheats with a gamesave, there is no official mechanism to deal with them, and so people would have to turn to vigilante justice to track down and deal with cheaters. That would be bad. Very bad. First, it would start out with roving gangs of gamers, seeking out and punishing the transgressors. Some might see them as heroes, but it would not last. Disagreements would arise over what is cheating, and what is acceptable modding.
This would finally lead to civil war, as the gaming world splits into two (or more!) factions fighting it out. As the gaming world goes, so goes civilization itself, and the new dark ages would be upon us.
Until the government gets off its ass and outlaws fiddling with gamesaves, all we have standing between us and the apocalypse are the game companies, and their gamesave cryptography.
First, he seems unaware that if something is copyrightable, copyright is automatic. So, if paystubs are copyrightable, the city would not have to do anything special. They would be copyrighted the moment they are printed.
Second, he says that they aren't copying the paystubs, just making images of them to display, so it would not fall under copyright. An image of a document is a copy as far as copyright law is concerned, so that's strike two.
finally, he says that this would be covered by fair use because there is no market value in the pay stubs. Affect on market value of a work is just one of the four factors considered in determining whether a use is fair use. Strike three.
Lawyers who do not specialize in copyright often make mistakes, but this guy seems to be setting some kind of record here!
It's no different from Microsoft's Shared Source. None of the licenses counts as Free Software.
Huh? One of Microsoft's Shared Source licenses (The Permissive License) satisfies every one of the conditions RMS gives for Free Software (and every condition given by OSI for Open Source).
Having a bunch of tags with no definition as to what they do is not an ingredient of a good standard. If you wanted to define a bunch of custom tags, it could just as easily be done as an extension to ODF, which, if it was well-defined, ISO and the open source community would surely have no problem with
So, the OpenOffice (Linux's big free office suite) developers developed ODT, a format whose description is open and one that can be read without having to be reverse-engineered (at least in theory)
That "in theory" part is important. Examine ODT documents actually produced by OpenOffice, and you'll find a ton of application-specific elements that are not covered in the standard, that you have to understand in order to accurately represent the documents.
Further the goods in that bag are now your personal property, they gave up any right to look in that bag when the transaction completed
The goods are yours, but who owns the bag? I've never seen the bag show up on the receipt, nor have I been charged for it, so presumably it is their bag, which I have possession of with their permission. I wonder if a good lawyer for a store could use this to justify searching the bag?
Reselling an item does not release you from your obligation to obey copyright. So, you can't buy a used book and start copying it. What first sale does, basically, is remove distribution of that particular copy from the list of things that require permission from the copyright holder.
Flash card provider in the hypothetical is not doing anything that requires permission of the copyright holder, and so GPL is not relevant to them. All they are doing is distributing particular copies, which is covered under first sale. If they want to do any of the other things covered by copyright, such as make copies, then the have to obey GPL.
You've overlooked the key point: flash card provider is just passing along, unmodified, one-to-one, the copies he received from his upstream provider. This does NOT require permission of the copyright owner. But if you aren't doing anything with software that requires permission, you have no obligation to obey GPL.
I can't see why this is germane, since both parties are still bound by all terms of the license except any terms that might otherwise have prohibited sale.
There are more than two parties here. For example, suppose author A write a book, and owns the copyright on that book. He contracts with a local print shop, P, to print copies and sell them from the print shop. There will be a license involved between A and P. If P were to sell these copies without A's permission, P would be in violation of copyright.
Consumer C walks into the print shop, and buys a copy of the book. There's no license between A and C involved in this. All C has to be concerned about is obeying copyright law, so he can't make copies of the book, prepare derivative works, and things like that. Because of the first sale doctrine, though, C can resell that copy of the book. C does not need A's permission to do so.
In your CD fulfillment house example, the key question is who is pressing the CDs? If the fulfillment house buys the pressed CDs from the copyright holder (or someone authorized by the copyright holder to press them), or on the open market, and is just providing to you the service of shipping them, then no one in your example is doing anything against copyright law. You are inducing the fulfillment house to distribute copies, but that is a distribution covered by first sale. As long as you don't have an actual contract with the copyright holder saying that you won't do this, you are fine.
If, on the other hand, the fulfillment house actually presses the CDs, then they aren't merely distributing copies that were lawfully made under copyright law. They are producing new copies (which requires permission of the copyright holder), and they are distributing those copies for the first time, which also requires permission. You would be likely liable for this, either because the fulfillment house is acting as your agent in this, or because you are inducing them to violate copyright...there are a couple of different legal theories that could be used.
First sale is a major area of copyright law, but it is almost never discussed when copyright issues relating to free software are under discussion. I think that this is because mostly we think of free software in terms of copying and modifying, so the notion of someone taking a particular copy and passing that particular copy around, instead of making new copies, is just something that doesn't come up. This needs to change. If Microsoft and Novell structured the voucher arrangement correctly, they will be able to use first sale to keep Microsoft safe. But it goes beyond that, because as free software becomes more and more common in commodity items, more situations will arise where first sale will lead to results that some may not like. Let me give an example of that, which, as far as I know, has not happened yet.
Suppose I were to make a small generic single-board system running Linux out of some built-in flash memory, with ethernet, wireless, USB, and a slot for flash memory. The modified Linux system I put in the built-in flash memory is set up to boot, look for a filesystem on the flash card in the slot, mount it, and look for and run a shell script in the root of that, named init.sh.
The idea here is that if you want to make, say, home routers, you can buy my boards, put them in a nice looking case with a power supply, and put whatever software you need for your router (scripts to set up iptables, a web server to provide a UI, and so on) on a flash card. You ship your box with my board in it, and your flash card preinserted. To the user, it's just a router. And others might be my board, attach a hard disk and a video capture device via USB, put all that in a nice box, add some application software, and sell it as a DVR, and so on.
To obey the GPL, every board I ship is accompanied by a CD-ROM containing the complete source code. So, when you order 5000 of my
MS would argue that merely giving out the vouchers is not distribution but most people (the FSF included) see it differently
There are two problems with this. First, there is no support whatsoever in either copyright statute or case law for the notion that distributing vouchers to a copyrighted work is legally a distribution of that work. (And the very idea is weird. Would the FSF say that if I went to the theater and bought tickets for a movie, and then gave those tickets to someone else, I'm distributing the movie?).
Second, even if it were distribution, it would not obligate Microsoft to GPL, because it is a ditribution that is allowed by copyright law. Microsoft bought a given number of vouchers from SUSE, and they are redistribution those vouchers. (At least, this is what the early stories about the deal implied...anyone know for sure if this is correct?). Microsoft is not printing new vouchers, or modifying the vouchers--just doing a one-to-one passing on of the vouchers they received from SUSE. That puts them squarely under the first sale doctrine. For those not familiar with first sale, it basically says that if you legally obtain a copy of a copyrighted work, you can pass that on to someone else, via sale, rental, gift, etc., without needing the permission of the copyright holder. Once the copyright holder places a particular copy in the stream of commerce, it is beyond his control.
First sale is what makes used bookstores legal, for example, and also what makes loaning your books to your friends legal. I suspect that one of the reasons the deal between Microsoft and Novell was structured to use vouchers supplied by Novell was to make sure Microsoft would be covered by first sale when they used the vouchers.
What makes you think ODF would free customers of lock-in? ODF leaves an astonishing amount as implementation-defined, including most of spreadsheets. Microsoft could easily make Office read and write ODF 100% following the standard, and have horrible interoperability with OpenOffice, simply by not recognize OpenOffice's non-standard elements.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the Top Chef think is annoying. But at least with the software being fast and stable, it is just a minor annoyance, as you can quickly delete those spurious recordings. That's the big difference between the old and new software. The old software's problems were fundamental problems that were hard or impossible to work around, whereas the new software's problems are just annoyances.
The funny thing is, Microsoft knows how to do good DVR software. UlitmateTV for DirecTV was quite good (although it also was slow).
Another way to look at 10^60 is that it is a bit over 2^199. Anyone who has something that can brute force something that large isn't going to bother with Go. They'll be busy looking at all those interesting secrets protected by ciphers like AES, with a mere 2^128 keys.
No, even if they believed the law was an ass, this would not be a situation for nullification. Nullification is meant as a last resort, when the other mechanisms for changing the law have broke down. That is not the case here.
And any juror who understood jury nullification would know that this was not a situation for it.
I haven't checked 2.3 yet. Perhaps they fixed the bad indexing problem. That would be good.
OOo will require training. For example, sit someone down in front of OOo who knows how to use Excel, and give them a spreadsheet. Ask them to create a graph and add a regression line. They will most likely not be able to figure out that task without help--and the online help system does not cover it, because it is broken (it has index entries for adding trend lines, but they point to the wrong entries in the help system). There are many examples like this throughout OOo where it works significantly differently than Office does, that have nothing to do with macros.
When you design a product, you have a target market you are going to support. Generally, that decision is independent of the engineering decision as to what technology to use when subsequently building the product.
Generally, actual damages are your lost sales due to competition from the infringing copies. A typical example would be if you made bootleg "Harry Potter" books and sold them through bookstores. Customers who buy yours would probably not by from the authorized publisher, and the amount of sales they lose are their actual damages. Note that this is related to profits--your profits are going to be about the same as their actual damages.
With free software, the copyright holder doesn't have sales that are harmed by the competition from the infringing copies.
Your notion that the cost the infringer would have to pay to get permission to do what they were doing should count as actual damages is novel. But I don't think it would get far in court, because it is too remote. The plaintiffs had no expectation that they would be selling a special license to Monsoon, so Monsoon's failure to buy one does not represent damages to the plaintiffs. The plaintiff expected zero dollars and GPL compliance. They got zero dollars and non-compliance. The dollar difference between what they expected and what they got is zero.
- Injunction to stop infringing copyright
- actual damages
- profits from the infringement
- attorney fees
- anything else the court might want to do
As soon as the defendant complies with GPL, they aren't infringing, so #1 isn't a big deal.Actual damages? That's a big fat zero.
Profits? At this stage in the product's life-cycle, defendant probably isn't profitable yet, so that's likely to be another big fat zero.
Attorney fees. Finally something that might actually be non-zero!
I don't see much punishment happening here. They'll settle for attorney fees and some nice (to the developers) but insignificant (to the company) payment.
Interesting tacit assumption that following the GPL is punishment. :-)
It just seems to be asking for trouble. I thought stock photos from the established providers were pretty cheap. Is going for free on Flickr really worth it?
If, however, someone cheats with a gamesave, there is no official mechanism to deal with them, and so people would have to turn to vigilante justice to track down and deal with cheaters. That would be bad. Very bad. First, it would start out with roving gangs of gamers, seeking out and punishing the transgressors. Some might see them as heroes, but it would not last. Disagreements would arise over what is cheating, and what is acceptable modding.
This would finally lead to civil war, as the gaming world splits into two (or more!) factions fighting it out. As the gaming world goes, so goes civilization itself, and the new dark ages would be upon us.
Until the government gets off its ass and outlaws fiddling with gamesaves, all we have standing between us and the apocalypse are the game companies, and their gamesave cryptography.
First, he seems unaware that if something is copyrightable, copyright is automatic. So, if paystubs are copyrightable, the city would not have to do anything special. They would be copyrighted the moment they are printed.
Second, he says that they aren't copying the paystubs, just making images of them to display, so it would not fall under copyright. An image of a document is a copy as far as copyright law is concerned, so that's strike two.
finally, he says that this would be covered by fair use because there is no market value in the pay stubs. Affect on market value of a work is just one of the four factors considered in determining whether a use is fair use. Strike three.
Lawyers who do not specialize in copyright often make mistakes, but this guy seems to be setting some kind of record here!
Huh? One of Microsoft's Shared Source licenses (The Permissive License) satisfies every one of the conditions RMS gives for Free Software (and every condition given by OSI for Open Source).
Sun won't let that happen. According to Gary Edwards of the OpenDocument Foundation, Sun limits ODF to those features implemented in OpenOffice.
Some examples are given here.
That "in theory" part is important. Examine ODT documents actually produced by OpenOffice, and you'll find a ton of application-specific elements that are not covered in the standard, that you have to understand in order to accurately represent the documents.
The goods are yours, but who owns the bag? I've never seen the bag show up on the receipt, nor have I been charged for it, so presumably it is their bag, which I have possession of with their permission. I wonder if a good lawyer for a store could use this to justify searching the bag?
So the license that allows the most use of the code hinders freedom?
Flash card provider in the hypothetical is not doing anything that requires permission of the copyright holder, and so GPL is not relevant to them. All they are doing is distributing particular copies, which is covered under first sale. If they want to do any of the other things covered by copyright, such as make copies, then the have to obey GPL.
You've overlooked the key point: flash card provider is just passing along, unmodified, one-to-one, the copies he received from his upstream provider. This does NOT require permission of the copyright owner. But if you aren't doing anything with software that requires permission, you have no obligation to obey GPL.
There are more than two parties here. For example, suppose author A write a book, and owns the copyright on that book. He contracts with a local print shop, P, to print copies and sell them from the print shop. There will be a license involved between A and P. If P were to sell these copies without A's permission, P would be in violation of copyright.
Consumer C walks into the print shop, and buys a copy of the book. There's no license between A and C involved in this. All C has to be concerned about is obeying copyright law, so he can't make copies of the book, prepare derivative works, and things like that. Because of the first sale doctrine, though, C can resell that copy of the book. C does not need A's permission to do so.
In your CD fulfillment house example, the key question is who is pressing the CDs? If the fulfillment house buys the pressed CDs from the copyright holder (or someone authorized by the copyright holder to press them), or on the open market, and is just providing to you the service of shipping them, then no one in your example is doing anything against copyright law. You are inducing the fulfillment house to distribute copies, but that is a distribution covered by first sale. As long as you don't have an actual contract with the copyright holder saying that you won't do this, you are fine.
If, on the other hand, the fulfillment house actually presses the CDs, then they aren't merely distributing copies that were lawfully made under copyright law. They are producing new copies (which requires permission of the copyright holder), and they are distributing those copies for the first time, which also requires permission. You would be likely liable for this, either because the fulfillment house is acting as your agent in this, or because you are inducing them to violate copyright...there are a couple of different legal theories that could be used.
First sale is a major area of copyright law, but it is almost never discussed when copyright issues relating to free software are under discussion. I think that this is because mostly we think of free software in terms of copying and modifying, so the notion of someone taking a particular copy and passing that particular copy around, instead of making new copies, is just something that doesn't come up. This needs to change. If Microsoft and Novell structured the voucher arrangement correctly, they will be able to use first sale to keep Microsoft safe. But it goes beyond that, because as free software becomes more and more common in commodity items, more situations will arise where first sale will lead to results that some may not like. Let me give an example of that, which, as far as I know, has not happened yet.
Suppose I were to make a small generic single-board system running Linux out of some built-in flash memory, with ethernet, wireless, USB, and a slot for flash memory. The modified Linux system I put in the built-in flash memory is set up to boot, look for a filesystem on the flash card in the slot, mount it, and look for and run a shell script in the root of that, named init.sh.
The idea here is that if you want to make, say, home routers, you can buy my boards, put them in a nice looking case with a power supply, and put whatever software you need for your router (scripts to set up iptables, a web server to provide a UI, and so on) on a flash card. You ship your box with my board in it, and your flash card preinserted. To the user, it's just a router. And others might be my board, attach a hard disk and a video capture device via USB, put all that in a nice box, add some application software, and sell it as a DVR, and so on.
To obey the GPL, every board I ship is accompanied by a CD-ROM containing the complete source code. So, when you order 5000 of my
A more accurate analogy would lose the burger, and use two movie tickets. You buy two movie tickets. You keep one, and give one to your girlfriend.
Did you just distribute the movie to your girlfriend?
If the FSF's argument is right, you did!
There are two problems with this. First, there is no support whatsoever in either copyright statute or case law for the notion that distributing vouchers to a copyrighted work is legally a distribution of that work. (And the very idea is weird. Would the FSF say that if I went to the theater and bought tickets for a movie, and then gave those tickets to someone else, I'm distributing the movie?).
Second, even if it were distribution, it would not obligate Microsoft to GPL, because it is a ditribution that is allowed by copyright law. Microsoft bought a given number of vouchers from SUSE, and they are redistribution those vouchers. (At least, this is what the early stories about the deal implied...anyone know for sure if this is correct?). Microsoft is not printing new vouchers, or modifying the vouchers--just doing a one-to-one passing on of the vouchers they received from SUSE. That puts them squarely under the first sale doctrine. For those not familiar with first sale, it basically says that if you legally obtain a copy of a copyrighted work, you can pass that on to someone else, via sale, rental, gift, etc., without needing the permission of the copyright holder. Once the copyright holder places a particular copy in the stream of commerce, it is beyond his control.
First sale is what makes used bookstores legal, for example, and also what makes loaning your books to your friends legal. I suspect that one of the reasons the deal between Microsoft and Novell was structured to use vouchers supplied by Novell was to make sure Microsoft would be covered by first sale when they used the vouchers.
What makes you think ODF would free customers of lock-in? ODF leaves an astonishing amount as implementation-defined, including most of spreadsheets. Microsoft could easily make Office read and write ODF 100% following the standard, and have horrible interoperability with OpenOffice, simply by not recognize OpenOffice's non-standard elements.