The GPL says no such thing about how you can use your software. In fact, one of the basic freedoms of Open Source software is that it can't discriminate. You can't, for example, say your software is licensed under the GPL but cannot be used for purposes of nuclear proliferation. There are NO use restrictions on GPL. The GPL *grants* you additional rights that you would not otherwise have, but only if you agree to additional terms. If you don't accept the additional terms, you don't get the additional rights, and you're stuck with your copy that you can do whatever you want with (short of redistributing).
But you CAN'T put an EULA on a book, sell it to someone, and then say "you don't have the right to read it". The Supreme Court already ruled on that. It is settled case law and was later codifier.
So why is software different? Apple will sell you a physical copy of their software without requiring you to agree to anything before the sale. This is *exactly* like buying a book.
Why are you bringing up a car? We're talking about why copyRIGHT, which is a right granted to creators of creative works, grants a different set of rights to the author of software versus the author of a book.
If I buy a book in a bookstore, I *own* that copy and can do whatever I want. The courts of acts of Congress have already said that including a notice in the book does NOT turn this into a license. It looks like a sale, it feels like a sale, it is a sale and the copyright holder's rights to THAT copy have ended.
If I purchase software from a store, I get a box with the media and the manuals. I don't own other copies and I don't have a right to make additional copies. But I should own that copy.
I'm not asking for special privileges, it's the software companies that are asking for special privileges. I want to do what I want with my copy. I can do what I want with a book or with a DVD. A film distributor can't tell me that I can only play his DVD on a Sony DVD player. Why can a software manufacturer tell me I can only run on their hardware?
You can sell that extra support. If I offer to send errata for a book, does that allow me to ignore first sale?
> Software is hard and expensive to make.
Not always. But anyways, first sale applies to DVDs, too. Movies are hard and expensive to make (or they can be) and are not typically made by one person.
Encyclopedias have teams of people working on them, provide ongoing support, and are expensive to make and update. First sale still applies to them.
I think my point was that such requirements generally require both parties to sign a contract. You can't just stick a notice on the inside cover and sell it and Barnes & Noble and consider your book "licensed" not "sold". Apple sells box sets of their software at retail stores. You are not required to sign any contract. The experience is the same as walking into a book store and buying a book. You hand them money, they hand you a box with the software, manuals, etc.
I'm not arguing that "licenses" don't exist. I'm saying that boxed retail software should be treated the same as a book in a bookstore.
There are clearly cases where software is licensed. One such example is software that will expire after a fixed amount of time. If you and your vendor both sign an agreement, you've probably got a license. But if you walk into a store and buy software on physical media, I can't see how it's different from buying a book.
As applied to the purchase of a book (or anything else) available for the sale in a retail store open to the public, no I've never heard of an NDA in that situation before.
In the 1908 case, Bobbs-Merrill Company sold a book with this license: "The price of this book at retail is $1 net. No dealer is licensed to sell it at a lower price, and a sale at a lower price will be treated as an infringement of the copyright."
Straus bought a copy (several, actually) and resold them. According to you, Straus only had possession under certain terms. According to your logic, Bobbs-Merrill should have retained ownership. The Supreme Court found otherwise. It has been further codified and there is extensive case law on the side of first-sale. Most recently in 2008, Timothy S. Vernor v. Autodesk, Inc, found that first-sale applied to Autodesk software, even though Autodesk claims they only sold a license (although that case has not made it to the Supremes yet).
> You can sell a license to read your book just as easily, or at least try to.
No, you can't. The Supreme Court held in 1908 (and Congress later codified) that you can NOT add a license to a book. You have certain rights under the Copyright law, but you do NOT have unlimited and universal control. When I buy a book, I do not have the right to copy and redistribute it. I do not have the right to make it into a movie or adapt it in other ways. But I absolutely CAN do whatever else I want with my copy. I *own* that copy. I can burn it, I can sell it, I can give it away.
First Sale applies to recordings too. I am allowed to buy a used CD and I can do whatever I want with it. The digital contents of the CD are read into a machine just as software is read into a machine. No one ever said that you were only allowed to look at the bits on a CD. You own your copy and you can do whatever you like (other than copy and redistribute). So why should software be different? Why does the author of a software program get to limit my rights when no other type of copyright holder has such a power?
No, you absolutely can't. First Sale originally became case law because a publisher attempted to do exactly that: include a "license" on that restricted your right to resell the book. In 1908, the Supreme Court (Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus) found that anyone that bought a copy of a book was free to resell it. Copyright grants you a right to sell, but does not grant you the right to limit resale after the fact. Period. It was later codified (Copyright Act of 1976) to include anyone that legally owned a copy (even if they didn't buy it).
What makes software so special and different from books and records? It's true that case law hasn't fully caught up, but give me a reason as to why the author of a software product should have any additional rights that are not granted to other copyright holder?
Why can't I tell people they can't sell my book when they're done with it? Why can't I tell people where they can read my book? Why can't I forbid libraries from buying my books?
Why shouldn't I be able to restrict what you do with my book after you bought it? What about my rights? You don't have to buy my book. You're free to accept or decline, it's a contract. I don't have a monopoly on books.
Please tell me why the First Sale doctrine should apply to books but not to computer software.
I wonder if TSA agents are trained to actually take out and read the packaging/label of all batteries they come across as they rifle through your belongings.
Certainly. They're trained to
take everything battery operated.
They have not had this problem in their first 8 years. Then, 18 months after Microsoft acquires them, they have a critical failure. You think that's all coincidence?
I suppose it's possible for one company to buy another and leave the company alone, but Microsoft certainly didn't do this. They moved most of the developers to Project Pink (and most of them have left MS entirely by now). I think it's pretty clear that the new MS was responsible. They managed the company. The data was stored at Microsoft's data centers.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is trying to sell people on the idea that their data should be hosted at Microsoft data centers. Am I not supposed to be skeptical about this now?
You can use a bluetooth keyboard. You can also use a VNC server on the phone and do your work from a VNC client on the desktop (or just ssh into the device).
Yes, Maemo is pretty much a full Linux distribution. You can ssh into the device and ssh out from the device. On the N810 (with a large enough MicroSD card) you can even install a full Debian distribution. It's still ARM, so don't expect it to be as fast as a Desktop, but everything works (mplayer, pidgin, Open Office, VNC client & server, etc).
Yes, the mac link appears under the google results. However, the other top google results are all about the Windows OS. The bing results has NO results about Windows OS on the first page.
I used to have a LeBaron convertible. When I first got it, I used to always lock it. One day, I discovered that criminals will happily cut into a top to unlock a door. Nothing inside the car was worth more than my deductible (plus the hassle of actually getting the top replaced), so I stopped locking it entirely. Thankfully, no pigs ever bothered to lock it for me.
On the other hand, the criminals still sometimes assumed it was locked and broke a window once to break into my unlocked car.
Heck, I have a KVM won't even work with a wheel mouse. So the KVM swaps the monitor and keyboard, but I have two mice.
I have another USB KVM and that's even worse. It doesn't have any keyboard shortcuts to swap devices, and everytime it swaps I have to wait 10 seconds while the computer re-initializes the USB mouse and keyboard.
Their latest filing claims they have a single java patent, but other than that, no, this was never about patents. SCO doesn't really have any and certainly didn't claim any when they sued IBM, Novell, Chrysler or anyone else.
They sued IBM over the copyrights to Linux, which they claim they own because they claimed they owned the Unix copyrights. Novell said that they never sold the copyrights to SCO, so SCO sued Novell for saying that.
Since SCO was suing IBM for copyright infringement, that whole thing was put on hold while SCO and Novell fought out who really owned the copyrights.
At trial, all of SCO's claims were tossed out in summary judgement and the like. The court agreed with Novell that SCO had no copyrights to Unix (it never even got to the question of whether or not Linux violates Unix copyrights and their mounds of secret evidence has never been presented anywhere). All that was left were the counterclaims that Novell had against SCO. Among those was the claim that all the money SCO had collected from Sun and Microsoft should rightfully belong to Novell. The judge agreed that SCO was guilty of conversion, which means that it was never SCO's money to begin with.
That part is important: it's not a debt owed to Novell, it was always Novell's money. SCO sold something to Microsoft and Sun that it didn't own. SCO had a right to collect royalties, but it was contractually obligated to give that money to Novell and be paid a percentage back. The court agreed and the only question was "Wow much of what SCO sold was Unix and how much was anything else?"
The only thing left for trial was to figure out just how much money SCO stole from Novell. On the eve of that trial, SCO filed for bankruptcy. Under the law, SCO has a certain period of time where they get to be the first to propose a way out of bankruptcy. They missed every deadline. When the courts had all agreed that their unique opportunity to file a plan had expired, other parties began filing motions.
Among those filing plans were the U.S. Trustee appointed to oversee the bankruptcy. He felt that SCO had no chance to move forward as an ongoing concern and moved to convert from Chapter 11 (reorganization) to Chapter 7 (liquidation). Novell and IBM agreed.
SCO's last move wasn't even the eve before this time. They were late to court, and appeared at the last minute (an hour beyond the last minute, actually) with a so-called "plan" to sell the company. The plan basically amounts to selling all the assets to another company and leaving a shell behind to fight Novell, IBM (and Chrylser and other former SCO-unix customers on the basis that Linux violates the copyrights of Unix). Selling the "business" means, essentially, moving all of "SCO's" money to another company and leaving nothing behind for Novell to collect from at final judgment.
SCO, as I said, showed up late and with only one copy of the agreement for the Trustee, Novell and IBM to see. They objected and asked the judge to move forward with the Chapter 7 conversion motions. They pointed out that SCO was past all legal deadlines. The judge said, and I'm not kidding or exaggerating, "What happens if I don't meet that deadline? Will they take me out back and shoot me?" Thus defying the statues, he gave SCO one more chance and agreed that they will meet in the required 15 days to hear about SCO's plans. The judge ruled that July 16th is 15 days from June 15th...
SCO is really holding out for an appeal. But they'll never turn everything back. And without the copyrights (and probably even with them), they don't have much of a case against IBM (and IBM, like Novell, has counterclaims against SCO). Red Hat is also suing SCO, also on hold for Novell/bankruptcy.
This is just a brief overview and I've skimmed over a lot. But no, patents aren't an issue here. If it were, they'd be in Texas, not Utah (or Delaware now for the bankruptcy).
Slashdot Mirror
The GPL says no such thing about how you can use your software. In fact, one of the basic freedoms of Open Source software is that it can't discriminate. You can't, for example, say your software is licensed under the GPL but cannot be used for purposes of nuclear proliferation. There are NO use restrictions on GPL. The GPL *grants* you additional rights that you would not otherwise have, but only if you agree to additional terms. If you don't accept the additional terms, you don't get the additional rights, and you're stuck with your copy that you can do whatever you want with (short of redistributing).
But you CAN'T put an EULA on a book, sell it to someone, and then say "you don't have the right to read it". The Supreme Court already ruled on that. It is settled case law and was later codifier.
So why is software different? Apple will sell you a physical copy of their software without requiring you to agree to anything before the sale. This is *exactly* like buying a book.
Why are you bringing up a car? We're talking about why copyRIGHT, which is a right granted to creators of creative works, grants a different set of rights to the author of software versus the author of a book.
If I buy a book in a bookstore, I *own* that copy and can do whatever I want. The courts of acts of Congress have already said that including a notice in the book does NOT turn this into a license. It looks like a sale, it feels like a sale, it is a sale and the copyright holder's rights to THAT copy have ended.
If I purchase software from a store, I get a box with the media and the manuals. I don't own other copies and I don't have a right to make additional copies. But I should own that copy.
I'm not asking for special privileges, it's the software companies that are asking for special privileges. I want to do what I want with my copy. I can do what I want with a book or with a DVD. A film distributor can't tell me that I can only play his DVD on a Sony DVD player. Why can a software manufacturer tell me I can only run on their hardware?
> Software requires on-going support.
You can sell that extra support. If I offer to send errata for a book, does that allow me to ignore first sale?
> Software is hard and expensive to make.
Not always. But anyways, first sale applies to DVDs, too. Movies are hard and expensive to make (or they can be) and are not typically made by one person.
Encyclopedias have teams of people working on them, provide ongoing support, and are expensive to make and update. First sale still applies to them.
I think my point was that such requirements generally require both parties to sign a contract. You can't just stick a notice on the inside cover and sell it and Barnes & Noble and consider your book "licensed" not "sold". Apple sells box sets of their software at retail stores. You are not required to sign any contract. The experience is the same as walking into a book store and buying a book. You hand them money, they hand you a box with the software, manuals, etc.
I'm not arguing that "licenses" don't exist. I'm saying that boxed retail software should be treated the same as a book in a bookstore.
There are clearly cases where software is licensed. One such example is software that will expire after a fixed amount of time. If you and your vendor both sign an agreement, you've probably got a license. But if you walk into a store and buy software on physical media, I can't see how it's different from buying a book.
> I suppose you've never heard of NDAs before?
As applied to the purchase of a book (or anything else) available for the sale in a retail store open to the public, no I've never heard of an NDA in that situation before.
In the 1908 case, Bobbs-Merrill Company sold a book with this license: "The price of this book at retail is $1 net. No dealer is licensed to sell it at a lower price, and a sale at a lower price will be treated as an infringement of the copyright."
Straus bought a copy (several, actually) and resold them. According to you, Straus only had possession under certain terms. According to your logic, Bobbs-Merrill should have retained ownership. The Supreme Court found otherwise. It has been further codified and there is extensive case law on the side of first-sale. Most recently in 2008, Timothy S. Vernor v. Autodesk, Inc, found that first-sale applied to Autodesk software, even though Autodesk claims they only sold a license (although that case has not made it to the Supremes yet).
> You can sell a license to read your book just as easily, or at least try to.
No, you can't. The Supreme Court held in 1908 (and Congress later codified) that you can NOT add a license to a book. You have certain rights under the Copyright law, but you do NOT have unlimited and universal control. When I buy a book, I do not have the right to copy and redistribute it. I do not have the right to make it into a movie or adapt it in other ways. But I absolutely CAN do whatever else I want with my copy. I *own* that copy. I can burn it, I can sell it, I can give it away.
First Sale applies to recordings too. I am allowed to buy a used CD and I can do whatever I want with it. The digital contents of the CD are read into a machine just as software is read into a machine. No one ever said that you were only allowed to look at the bits on a CD. You own your copy and you can do whatever you like (other than copy and redistribute). So why should software be different? Why does the author of a software program get to limit my rights when no other type of copyright holder has such a power?
> If you want, you can license your book, too.
No, you absolutely can't. First Sale originally became case law because a publisher attempted to do exactly that: include a "license" on that restricted your right to resell the book. In 1908, the Supreme Court (Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus) found that anyone that bought a copy of a book was free to resell it. Copyright grants you a right to sell, but does not grant you the right to limit resale after the fact. Period. It was later codified (Copyright Act of 1976) to include anyone that legally owned a copy (even if they didn't buy it).
What makes software so special and different from books and records? It's true that case law hasn't fully caught up, but give me a reason as to why the author of a software product should have any additional rights that are not granted to other copyright holder?
Why can't I tell people they can't sell my book when they're done with it? Why can't I tell people where they can read my book? Why can't I forbid libraries from buying my books?
Why shouldn't I be able to restrict what you do with my book after you bought it? What about my rights? You don't have to buy my book. You're free to accept or decline, it's a contract. I don't have a monopoly on books.
Please tell me why the First Sale doctrine should apply to books but not to computer software.
Certainly. They're trained to take everything battery operated.
I just assumed they were seizing liquids so that you are forced to overpay for the same thing on the other side of the gate.
They have not had this problem in their first 8 years. Then, 18 months after Microsoft acquires them, they have a critical failure. You think that's all coincidence?
I suppose it's possible for one company to buy another and leave the company alone, but Microsoft certainly didn't do this. They moved most of the developers to Project Pink (and most of them have left MS entirely by now). I think it's pretty clear that the new MS was responsible. They managed the company. The data was stored at Microsoft's data centers.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is trying to sell people on the idea that their data should be hosted at Microsoft data centers. Am I not supposed to be skeptical about this now?
Full out-of-the-box support for bluetooth audio (A2DP/AVRCP) are one of the big fixes in the new version of Maemo.
But beyond that, other sites at least have indicated that the N900 will still have a 3.5mm audio jack.
There are two types of people in the world: people that believe that there are two types, and people who don't.
You can use a bluetooth keyboard. You can also use a VNC server on the phone and do your work from a VNC client on the desktop (or just ssh into the device).
Yes, Maemo is pretty much a full Linux distribution. You can ssh into the device and ssh out from the device. On the N810 (with a large enough MicroSD card) you can even install a full Debian distribution. It's still ARM, so don't expect it to be as fast as a Desktop, but everything works (mplayer, pidgin, Open Office, VNC client & server, etc).
Of course. http://www.netaddictionrecovery.com/
Don't be silly.
Yep. http://twitter.com/GetYourLifeBack
Yep. http://www.netaddictionrecovery.com/social-network/facebook.html
They're probably still working on it...
FOIA requests can charge for the resources needed to comply with them.
Yes, the mac link appears under the google results. However, the other top google results are all about the Windows OS. The bing results has NO results about Windows OS on the first page.
I wonder if John Kricfalusi will audition?
-- Still bitter about Billy West taking over the voice of Ren.
I used to have a LeBaron convertible. When I first got it, I used to always lock it. One day, I discovered that criminals will happily cut into a top to unlock a door. Nothing inside the car was worth more than my deductible (plus the hassle of actually getting the top replaced), so I stopped locking it entirely. Thankfully, no pigs ever bothered to lock it for me.
On the other hand, the criminals still sometimes assumed it was locked and broke a window once to break into my unlocked car.
Locking a car only keeps non-criminals out.
Heck, I have a KVM won't even work with a wheel mouse. So the KVM swaps the monitor and keyboard, but I have two mice.
I have another USB KVM and that's even worse. It doesn't have any keyboard shortcuts to swap devices, and everytime it swaps I have to wait 10 seconds while the computer re-initializes the USB mouse and keyboard.
Their latest filing claims they have a single java patent, but other than that, no, this was never about patents. SCO doesn't really have any and certainly didn't claim any when they sued IBM, Novell, Chrysler or anyone else.
They sued IBM over the copyrights to Linux, which they claim they own because they claimed they owned the Unix copyrights. Novell said that they never sold the copyrights to SCO, so SCO sued Novell for saying that.
Since SCO was suing IBM for copyright infringement, that whole thing was put on hold while SCO and Novell fought out who really owned the copyrights.
At trial, all of SCO's claims were tossed out in summary judgement and the like. The court agreed with Novell that SCO had no copyrights to Unix (it never even got to the question of whether or not Linux violates Unix copyrights and their mounds of secret evidence has never been presented anywhere). All that was left were the counterclaims that Novell had against SCO. Among those was the claim that all the money SCO had collected from Sun and Microsoft should rightfully belong to Novell. The judge agreed that SCO was guilty of conversion, which means that it was never SCO's money to begin with.
That part is important: it's not a debt owed to Novell, it was always Novell's money. SCO sold something to Microsoft and Sun that it didn't own. SCO had a right to collect royalties, but it was contractually obligated to give that money to Novell and be paid a percentage back. The court agreed and the only question was "Wow much of what SCO sold was Unix and how much was anything else?"
The only thing left for trial was to figure out just how much money SCO stole from Novell. On the eve of that trial, SCO filed for bankruptcy. Under the law, SCO has a certain period of time where they get to be the first to propose a way out of bankruptcy. They missed every deadline. When the courts had all agreed that their unique opportunity to file a plan had expired, other parties began filing motions.
Among those filing plans were the U.S. Trustee appointed to oversee the bankruptcy. He felt that SCO had no chance to move forward as an ongoing concern and moved to convert from Chapter 11 (reorganization) to Chapter 7 (liquidation). Novell and IBM agreed.
SCO's last move wasn't even the eve before this time. They were late to court, and appeared at the last minute (an hour beyond the last minute, actually) with a so-called "plan" to sell the company. The plan basically amounts to selling all the assets to another company and leaving a shell behind to fight Novell, IBM (and Chrylser and other former SCO-unix customers on the basis that Linux violates the copyrights of Unix). Selling the "business" means, essentially, moving all of "SCO's" money to another company and leaving nothing behind for Novell to collect from at final judgment.
SCO, as I said, showed up late and with only one copy of the agreement for the Trustee, Novell and IBM to see. They objected and asked the judge to move forward with the Chapter 7 conversion motions. They pointed out that SCO was past all legal deadlines. The judge said, and I'm not kidding or exaggerating, "What happens if I don't meet that deadline? Will they take me out back and shoot me?" Thus defying the statues, he gave SCO one more chance and agreed that they will meet in the required 15 days to hear about SCO's plans. The judge ruled that July 16th is 15 days from June 15th...
SCO is really holding out for an appeal. But they'll never turn everything back. And without the copyrights (and probably even with them), they don't have much of a case against IBM (and IBM, like Novell, has counterclaims against SCO). Red Hat is also suing SCO, also on hold for Novell/bankruptcy.
This is just a brief overview and I've skimmed over a lot. But no, patents aren't an issue here. If it were, they'd be in Texas, not Utah (or Delaware now for the bankruptcy).