Exactly. I think their estimate was about 2,397,254,041 low according to recent estimates.
The entire planet has bad IP laws. For any given set of IP laws, it's just a question of which areas are too draconian and which areas are too permissive.
I don't think you're seeing the bigger picture. That's what it has been approved for now. Give it ten years and they might be giving treatments like this one to people prophylactically the moment their PSA count starts up, just in case. And eventually, that could eliminate the need for any of those other treatments you mentioned.
you can't remove source code access to something once it's been released via GPL. Even when forked. You can remove source code access to things that have been released via BSD.
You don't know what you're talking about. If you own the copyright to the software, you can do whatever the heck you want to with it, up to and including creating a closed-source fork. Nothing in the GPL prevents a copyright owner from creating one set of source code and dual-licensing it. MySQL AB made a business out of doing just that.
In your opinion, you're not a lawyer, and you can read the rest off of http://fsfe.org/projects/gplv3/patents-and-gplv3.en.html if you bother to read it (which I know you wont). Your interpretations are incorrect, and you don't even have any standing in any way to imply otherwise.
I read all the way through it and I see nothing on that page that contradicts my opinion. Indeed, that doesn't even talk about patents filed by the creator of the GPLed work itself. The entire page talks about licensed patents and compatibility with licenses that contain patent retaliation clauses, neither of which has anything to do with the problem I was talking about.
According to GPLv3, if the company that created the intellectual property (at the time, unpatented) stops distributing the GPLed software as a piece of GPLed software, they no longer have any obligations to license any future patents that they may file, and because the GPLv3 does not state otherwise, this presumably includes patents on technologies that were previously embodied in that GPLed software. Further, as the original inventor of those technologies, the GPLed software cannot be considered prior art. I'm not saying it would be an airtight case against continued distribution of the GPLed software, but it certainly wouldn't be airtight the other way.
Patent retaliation means, if you sue somebody for patent infringement, then you lose the right to use this code.
A patent retaliation clause is only relevant if the code was written by someone else. If your company is the sole copyright holder, these clauses do not apply to you in any way. A software license cannot put any restrictions on the original authors' right to use their own code. Period. The original author is not a licensee of the software under the terms of the GPL unless the software contains code whose copyright has not been assigned to them. Further, because the original author is not a licensee, it is doubtful that the license clause that covers licensees who convey the software would apply to them at all even for existing patents, much less for future patents.
Does the quoted bit mean that there is an upper limit on how fast you can write to the chip? Or is the total electrical current pulled for max protocol speed lower than the failure point of the chips? Will this generate excess heat? I'd imagine small chips would heat up fast too, since the writes would be more concentrated (lower memory bits to bits able to be written per second ratio.
I think that this translates to "as your laptop gets older, the reduced capacity of your battery will be exacerbated by your mass storage hardware drawing more current during writes.":-)
I would equate it more with a software license. You get to use their web software in exchange for complying with their rules. And software licenses are generally considered binding legally even without consideration in the opposite direction. Otherwise, the GPL would have no weight... which is actually rather curious, now that I think about it.
"The source code you release cannot be proprietary" is not all open source, again, BSD goes around this. Somehow they think it's better to let people take their own code and make it proprietary.
You make it sound like this is just BSD. If you are the creator of GPL code, you can make it proprietary, too. It's actually pretty easy. You just apply for a patent on something fundamental to the software, sell the software copyright to a company along with the patent, and boom. The GPL project is forced to shut down because they're violating a corporation's patent.
It really doesn't matter at that point whether someone has the source code; he/she still can't compile or redistribute it legally, not because of the copyright or license, but rather because of the patents.
And no, IMHO, the GPLv3 does not adequately protect against this, by my reading, as the wording conveys patent rights to existing patents, but does not explicitly include a waiver of the right to apply for patents at a future date. It's like a contract for the sale of firewood. I sign a contract that grants you all the firewood in my possession. You take possession of the firewood. Three days later, I chop more firewood. You are not entitled to the firewood chopped after you took possession of the first batch unless the contract explicitly states that I will chop wood for you in perpetuity.
Even if that clause proves stronger than I think it is, though, you could still make new future versions that are proprietary, assuming that you own all of the code (as your comment implies). And since most software is developed/supported by a very small group of people, if they all agree to develop a proprietary version, the open source version will almost inevitably stagnate and eventually die.
Just another enterprise company that Symantec will acquire, make a half-hearted attempt to integrate it into their company, then systematically lay off all the workers, outsource product development to India, release a nearly completely nonfunctional successor to it, and eventually cancel it outright after the support contract revenue dries up. I've seen this worthless company pull this stunt too many times to expect anything different.
Note to CEOs: getting acquired by Symantec is corporate suicide. If you care at all about your employees or your product, the correct answer is not "no", but rather "hell f**king no". Just saying.
I do understand that there may be a difference between information that a person picks up in their day to day life and information that a company gathers in the course of doing business, so it may be that facebook's default position is more restrictive than a private person's.
Among other things the California Constitution defines privacy as an inalienable right, and the courts generally have ruled widespread invasion of privacy by corporations as illegal. You're right, though, that there's no specific set of laws that covers this, AFAIK, but rather interpretations thereof.
Ad revenue is irrelevant as that is external to to the facebook/user relationship.
Is it really? The fact that you will be advertised to is mentioned in the terms of service, so I don't think that's external to the relationship at all.
In fact, one can use facebook without providing any information about yourself.
Not entirely. I would argue that merely having an account means that other people you know can find you, and thus are more likely to remain users (which brings in ad revenue). Thus, even if you provide no more information than the bare minimum (name and email), you are still providing something of value to Facebook---your connections with other people.
That's really an orthogonal issue. If you're seeking into the file in any useful way, you must have the ability to play one of the codecs, in which case it really doesn't matter whether the data you need is part of the generic container data or part of the codec-specific data. If you can't play any of the codecs, then what's the point of seeking?
I think a better attack against facebook would be that it defrauded its users into giving away valuable information under false pretenses.
Just to be pedantic, we're technically talking about the privacy policy and TOS combined, which since you agree to them at the same time, would be considered a single contract for legal purposes. It's important to understand that the privacy policy plays into this.
If there's no meeting of the minds on those two sets of terms and conditions, then Facebook automatically reverts back to having the minimum authority to disclose your private information to others, which means that pretty much everything they do is probably illegal.:-)
Regarding consideration, yes, there is. The consideration is that you get to use their service. That's a pretty significant consideration on their part in exchange for you providing A. information of value to them and B. ad revenue. Mutual consideration does not have to be money.
Regarding the meeting of the minds, that's certainly debatable with any contract of adhesion. The question becomes one of whether the terms are unconscionable. That might be hard to prove, so I think you'd probably best avoid that tactic.
No, that's not at all what I wrote. The fundamental purpose of a container is to consolidate multiple pieces of information into a single file. Without containers, you would need one file for your audio data and a separate one for your video data. You should not need to understand the video data to play the audio data; it is sufficient to know its length. And *that* is what I wrote.
I'm guessing you've never taken a single class in contract law. This is not even a grey area, IMHO.
Yes, it is true that they can change the terms at any time, but until such time as you agree to those changed terms, they have no right to operate under the assumption that you have agreed to them as Facebook does. More to the point, if the change to the terms is considered large enough to constitute a substantive change to the nature of the contract, they are required to explicitly get agreement to the updated terms or else the new contract is NOT valid.
This is very basic law, people. We're talking first year of law school. Heck, I'm not a lawyer and even I know enough about contract law to know that these terms are invalid. Some citations to start you off:
I think the original comment was implying that Monty's reply contained ad hominem attacks. It sort of did (pointing out that the person complaining had contributed to a competing design, thus at least implying a conflict of interest), but not in a fallacious way.
What possible use could you have for obtaining time stamps within a video stream that you cannot decode? As far as I'm concerned, a container format should provide enough information to determine two things:
A CODEC identifier (magic/FOURCC)
The physical length of each frame's data so that decoders that don't understand a particular CODEC can skip it.
Although there might be advantages of having other data encoded in a consistent fashion for people writing debug tools, when it comes to general software, as long as the CODEC software provides a standard set of accessor functions that return the data in a consistent way across all CODECs, it is by no means a requirement that they be stored in the same way, and in terms of the format's long-term flexibility, it is advantageous to allow the data to be stored in a codec-specific fashion.
And in every case, it's not worth the bits it is printed on.
Terms of a contract cannot be changed at-will by a single party. There cannot legally be a meeting of the minds if one party is not aware of the updated terms. Facebook provided no notice that their terms of service were changing and offered no opportunity to preemptively decline the new terms. As such, Facebook's new terms of service are prima facie invalid. There is no possibility whatsoever that a court would side with Facebook on this one if it ever went to court. Companies that place such terms in their contracts either A. require you to agree to the new terms on next login (which Facebook usually does not), or B. are hoping the public never notice (which Facebook apparently does).
Thus, these contract terms are already completely bogus. What we really need are laws that provide for the following:
Any lawyer who creates a contract with foreknowledge that a term in the contract is invalid shall be disbarred and banned from all practice of law (including corporate) for a period of five years on the first offense, permanently on the second.
Any lawyer who unknowingly creates a contract with invalid terms that were invalid at the time the contract was created shall be disbarred for 1 year and required to attend one year of retraining at the law school of his/her choice.
Any corporation creating a contract with terms that are not valid under U.S. law shall be liable for fines of $1 million per occurrence or 50% of net profit from the previous year, whichever is greater.
Any corporation knowingly creating a contract with terms that are not valid under U.S. law shall be liable for fines of $10 million per occurrence or 200% of net profit from the previous year, whichever is greater.
It's not enough for the contract terms to be invalid. They're already invalid now and companies still pull this crap. We need laws with actual teeth that punish companies who deliberately abuse contract law.
In the case of Facebook right now, the only real question is whether their new terms constitute a breach of their old terms and invalidate any rights they have to users' data or not. I suspect that depends more on the mood of the judge, should this ever go to court. Facebook is in a rather untenable legal position, IMHO, and their legal team should be canned en masse.
IANAL, but as I understand it, RICO charges would not apply unless you can show that the church obstructed justice somehow. AFAIK, there is no evidence that they covered anything up or were anything less than open in cooperating with any police investigations. If there were, we would already have seen OoJ charges against somebody.
AFAIK, the church did not cover anything up, at least from a legal perspective. To my knowledge, when they moved a priest, there was no attempt to conceal that priest's location from authorities. They did not harbor fugitives from justice. They merely did not tell the new church what their new pastor had been accused of (and may not have told the old church where they moved the priest). While such behavior certainly isn't very ethical, it is probably not sufficient to rise to the level of obstruction.
Failing that, the only other RICO-qualifying charge you could come up with is the actual sexual assault, which would require you proving somehow that the church as an organization ordered priests to molest kids. Good luck with that.
Makes no difference where they are. A case between you and Facebook would almost certainly be filed in your district, not in Facebook's. They must comply with all applicable privacy laws everywhere they do business, not just in their own district. Sure, they could try to get a change of venue to a court in California or whatever, but it is unlikely that this would be granted, as holding the case in CA would be a significant hardship for you, but holding the case elsewhere would not be a significant hardship for a large corporation like Facebook.
It was not until Romans "accepted" Christians, that the Romans embolded the cross on their shields to "sub-due/appease" the Christians, and get "God on their side." in battle. This is rediculous, since Christianity was born out of suffering, and now the "government" was using it to breed war and violence. Not the roots of Christianity any longer, but a wholistic change but the use of manipulative governments!
The same could be true of Islam today. It's not the roots of their religion causing the violence in the Middle East.
You're pretty much spot on. IIRC, you can have contract terms that provide for updates to the terms, but only for changes that do not substantively change the nature of the contract. For example, a company could probably get away with tweaking the terms to clarify rules on reverse engineering, but they would get nailed to the wall if they tried to add a term that banned reverse engineering.
Even better, we need to actually get a group of new people to act out the scene from the movie exactly, then subtitle that. It would be doubly funny because YouTube would have a much harder time pulling the "copyright violation" trump card as an excuse for taking down said criticism, and better, as political speech, it enjoys some of the highest protection the Constitution affords....
It's true that it isn't hard, but it is a large, painstaking process that would require changing at least tens of thousands of lines of code. The point was that there are changes that would require at least partially understanding the entire core of the kernel, albeit not necessarily a thorough understanding.
Slashdot Mirror
You should tell them to moof over and get away from the keyboard.
Exactly. I think their estimate was about 2,397,254,041 low according to recent estimates.
The entire planet has bad IP laws. For any given set of IP laws, it's just a question of which areas are too draconian and which areas are too permissive.
I don't think you're seeing the bigger picture. That's what it has been approved for now. Give it ten years and they might be giving treatments like this one to people prophylactically the moment their PSA count starts up, just in case. And eventually, that could eliminate the need for any of those other treatments you mentioned.
You don't know what you're talking about. If you own the copyright to the software, you can do whatever the heck you want to with it, up to and including creating a closed-source fork. Nothing in the GPL prevents a copyright owner from creating one set of source code and dual-licensing it. MySQL AB made a business out of doing just that.
I read all the way through it and I see nothing on that page that contradicts my opinion. Indeed, that doesn't even talk about patents filed by the creator of the GPLed work itself. The entire page talks about licensed patents and compatibility with licenses that contain patent retaliation clauses, neither of which has anything to do with the problem I was talking about.
According to GPLv3, if the company that created the intellectual property (at the time, unpatented) stops distributing the GPLed software as a piece of GPLed software, they no longer have any obligations to license any future patents that they may file, and because the GPLv3 does not state otherwise, this presumably includes patents on technologies that were previously embodied in that GPLed software. Further, as the original inventor of those technologies, the GPLed software cannot be considered prior art. I'm not saying it would be an airtight case against continued distribution of the GPLed software, but it certainly wouldn't be airtight the other way.
A patent retaliation clause is only relevant if the code was written by someone else. If your company is the sole copyright holder, these clauses do not apply to you in any way. A software license cannot put any restrictions on the original authors' right to use their own code. Period. The original author is not a licensee of the software under the terms of the GPL unless the software contains code whose copyright has not been assigned to them. Further, because the original author is not a licensee, it is doubtful that the license clause that covers licensees who convey the software would apply to them at all even for existing patents, much less for future patents.
I think that this translates to "as your laptop gets older, the reduced capacity of your battery will be exacerbated by your mass storage hardware drawing more current during writes." :-)
No, they don't prohibit ad blocking.
I would equate it more with a software license. You get to use their web software in exchange for complying with their rules. And software licenses are generally considered binding legally even without consideration in the opposite direction. Otherwise, the GPL would have no weight... which is actually rather curious, now that I think about it.
You make it sound like this is just BSD. If you are the creator of GPL code, you can make it proprietary, too. It's actually pretty easy. You just apply for a patent on something fundamental to the software, sell the software copyright to a company along with the patent, and boom. The GPL project is forced to shut down because they're violating a corporation's patent.
It really doesn't matter at that point whether someone has the source code; he/she still can't compile or redistribute it legally, not because of the copyright or license, but rather because of the patents.
And no, IMHO, the GPLv3 does not adequately protect against this, by my reading, as the wording conveys patent rights to existing patents, but does not explicitly include a waiver of the right to apply for patents at a future date. It's like a contract for the sale of firewood. I sign a contract that grants you all the firewood in my possession. You take possession of the firewood. Three days later, I chop more firewood. You are not entitled to the firewood chopped after you took possession of the first batch unless the contract explicitly states that I will chop wood for you in perpetuity.
Even if that clause proves stronger than I think it is, though, you could still make new future versions that are proprietary, assuming that you own all of the code (as your comment implies). And since most software is developed/supported by a very small group of people, if they all agree to develop a proprietary version, the open source version will almost inevitably stagnate and eventually die.
Just another enterprise company that Symantec will acquire, make a half-hearted attempt to integrate it into their company, then systematically lay off all the workers, outsource product development to India, release a nearly completely nonfunctional successor to it, and eventually cancel it outright after the support contract revenue dries up. I've seen this worthless company pull this stunt too many times to expect anything different.
Note to CEOs: getting acquired by Symantec is corporate suicide. If you care at all about your employees or your product, the correct answer is not "no", but rather "hell f**king no". Just saying.
Among other things the California Constitution defines privacy as an inalienable right, and the courts generally have ruled widespread invasion of privacy by corporations as illegal. You're right, though, that there's no specific set of laws that covers this, AFAIK, but rather interpretations thereof.
Is it really? The fact that you will be advertised to is mentioned in the terms of service, so I don't think that's external to the relationship at all.
Not entirely. I would argue that merely having an account means that other people you know can find you, and thus are more likely to remain users (which brings in ad revenue). Thus, even if you provide no more information than the bare minimum (name and email), you are still providing something of value to Facebook---your connections with other people.
That's really an orthogonal issue. If you're seeking into the file in any useful way, you must have the ability to play one of the codecs, in which case it really doesn't matter whether the data you need is part of the generic container data or part of the codec-specific data. If you can't play any of the codecs, then what's the point of seeking?
Just to be pedantic, we're technically talking about the privacy policy and TOS combined, which since you agree to them at the same time, would be considered a single contract for legal purposes. It's important to understand that the privacy policy plays into this.
If there's no meeting of the minds on those two sets of terms and conditions, then Facebook automatically reverts back to having the minimum authority to disclose your private information to others, which means that pretty much everything they do is probably illegal. :-)
Regarding consideration, yes, there is. The consideration is that you get to use their service. That's a pretty significant consideration on their part in exchange for you providing A. information of value to them and B. ad revenue. Mutual consideration does not have to be money.
Regarding the meeting of the minds, that's certainly debatable with any contract of adhesion. The question becomes one of whether the terms are unconscionable. That might be hard to prove, so I think you'd probably best avoid that tactic.
No, that's not at all what I wrote. The fundamental purpose of a container is to consolidate multiple pieces of information into a single file. Without containers, you would need one file for your audio data and a separate one for your video data. You should not need to understand the video data to play the audio data; it is sufficient to know its length. And *that* is what I wrote.
I'm guessing you've never taken a single class in contract law. This is not even a grey area, IMHO.
Yes, it is true that they can change the terms at any time, but until such time as you agree to those changed terms, they have no right to operate under the assumption that you have agreed to them as Facebook does. More to the point, if the change to the terms is considered large enough to constitute a substantive change to the nature of the contract, they are required to explicitly get agreement to the updated terms or else the new contract is NOT valid.
This is very basic law, people. We're talking first year of law school. Heck, I'm not a lawyer and even I know enough about contract law to know that these terms are invalid. Some citations to start you off:
And a few older ones that I didn't have time to find links for:
I think the original comment was implying that Monty's reply contained ad hominem attacks. It sort of did (pointing out that the person complaining had contributed to a competing design, thus at least implying a conflict of interest), but not in a fallacious way.
What possible use could you have for obtaining time stamps within a video stream that you cannot decode? As far as I'm concerned, a container format should provide enough information to determine two things:
Although there might be advantages of having other data encoded in a consistent fashion for people writing debug tools, when it comes to general software, as long as the CODEC software provides a standard set of accessor functions that return the data in a consistent way across all CODECs, it is by no means a requirement that they be stored in the same way, and in terms of the format's long-term flexibility, it is advantageous to allow the data to be stored in a codec-specific fashion.
And in every case, it's not worth the bits it is printed on.
Terms of a contract cannot be changed at-will by a single party. There cannot legally be a meeting of the minds if one party is not aware of the updated terms. Facebook provided no notice that their terms of service were changing and offered no opportunity to preemptively decline the new terms. As such, Facebook's new terms of service are prima facie invalid. There is no possibility whatsoever that a court would side with Facebook on this one if it ever went to court. Companies that place such terms in their contracts either A. require you to agree to the new terms on next login (which Facebook usually does not), or B. are hoping the public never notice (which Facebook apparently does).
Thus, these contract terms are already completely bogus. What we really need are laws that provide for the following:
It's not enough for the contract terms to be invalid. They're already invalid now and companies still pull this crap. We need laws with actual teeth that punish companies who deliberately abuse contract law.
In the case of Facebook right now, the only real question is whether their new terms constitute a breach of their old terms and invalidate any rights they have to users' data or not. I suspect that depends more on the mood of the judge, should this ever go to court. Facebook is in a rather untenable legal position, IMHO, and their legal team should be canned en masse.
You mean like the sandboxing in Mac OS X?
IANAL, but as I understand it, RICO charges would not apply unless you can show that the church obstructed justice somehow. AFAIK, there is no evidence that they covered anything up or were anything less than open in cooperating with any police investigations. If there were, we would already have seen OoJ charges against somebody.
AFAIK, the church did not cover anything up, at least from a legal perspective. To my knowledge, when they moved a priest, there was no attempt to conceal that priest's location from authorities. They did not harbor fugitives from justice. They merely did not tell the new church what their new pastor had been accused of (and may not have told the old church where they moved the priest). While such behavior certainly isn't very ethical, it is probably not sufficient to rise to the level of obstruction.
Failing that, the only other RICO-qualifying charge you could come up with is the actual sexual assault, which would require you proving somehow that the church as an organization ordered priests to molest kids. Good luck with that.
Makes no difference where they are. A case between you and Facebook would almost certainly be filed in your district, not in Facebook's. They must comply with all applicable privacy laws everywhere they do business, not just in their own district. Sure, they could try to get a change of venue to a court in California or whatever, but it is unlikely that this would be granted, as holding the case in CA would be a significant hardship for you, but holding the case elsewhere would not be a significant hardship for a large corporation like Facebook.
The same could be true of Islam today. It's not the roots of their religion causing the violence in the Middle East.
You're pretty much spot on. IIRC, you can have contract terms that provide for updates to the terms, but only for changes that do not substantively change the nature of the contract. For example, a company could probably get away with tweaking the terms to clarify rules on reverse engineering, but they would get nailed to the wall if they tried to add a term that banned reverse engineering.
Even better, we need to actually get a group of new people to act out the scene from the movie exactly, then subtitle that. It would be doubly funny because YouTube would have a much harder time pulling the "copyright violation" trump card as an excuse for taking down said criticism, and better, as political speech, it enjoys some of the highest protection the Constitution affords....
Six weeks after the newspaper runs a story accusing you, your employer gives you a pink slip, and the entire town vilifies you....
It's true that it isn't hard, but it is a large, painstaking process that would require changing at least tens of thousands of lines of code. The point was that there are changes that would require at least partially understanding the entire core of the kernel, albeit not necessarily a thorough understanding.
Err.. it has...
Gotta watch the typos. *sigh*