Re:Section 117(a) does allow you resell derivative
on
Psystar Crushed In Court
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The court's logic seems to be that first sale doctrine does not cover copying to an "imaging server", therefore everything Psystar did afterwards was also illegal.
Which might imply Mac cloning could be legal if it was done 'by hand'. However, the court also found that bypassing Apple's lock-out mechanism violated the DMCA, which seems rather dubious to me.
(Also I have to complain. 90% of the discussion here is computards arguing Apple sucks/Apple rules/I like my iPod, and ignoring the issues at hand. Slashdot is really full of knuckledraggers nowdays.)
That is simply not the case. Macs have ALWAYS HAD two button mice, in that you could always use a keyboard modifier to access the context menu even with just one button - you are basically claiming Macs for years had no context menus which was never, ever true.
This is totally untrue. The old MacOS had no support for context menus until long after Windows became popular (System 8 timeframe). Previously they were kludged into a couple applications -- the "bad Windows port" of MS Office in particular -- but they were not really widely used across the board until much later.
If you could show me any evidence of context menus (control-click or otherwise) in 1980s era Mac applications, I'd like to see it.
That was part of it, but Apple also made very broad claims to fundamental GUI concepts such as title bars, menus, and so on.
This was tossed out on principle, but not before Apple had buried GEM Desktop with their legal threats. (And that company did not "steal" or trade code from Apple.)
Common myth, but according to wikipedia, rather than "software patents", the EU has "computer-implemented inventions". (Except for the UK which has its own rules) Which really does not affect the FOSS implications one bit.
The GPL has a patent clause because the intent was to build an ecosystem of patent-free (or freely redistributable) software. Software patents suck, but simply ignoring them just pushes the problem farther down the line.
The result is a bunch of pseudo-free software that can only be legally distributed in some vaguely unspecified countries in "Europe" where software patents aren't enforced. And that causes problems for end users and distros because it's not exactly clear which OSS is intentionally violating someone's patent (beyond the obvious sound/video stuff).
True, but if you've ever been in those 1980s cars, the German ones had 3 inch wide pedals, while the typical wife's GM station wagon had a 10 inch wide brake pedal. Its an understandable user error.
The difference in modern auto ergonomics is no longer that great, and these Toyota models are designed for the US market. Furthermore, many of the Toyota cases happened at highway speeds, versus in the driveway. So while they shouldn't rule out 'user error', the facts are different enough to warrant an investigation and not just dismiss it as Audi-style housewife error.
Servers have a technical function, but they also have a business function. Try asking your boss for a $50K "application client" system and see how that goes.
So while X might be techincally correct, it's nomenclature isn't exactly PHB-friendly.
(Speaking of which, when is the last time anyone's deployed a large-scale distributed X11 application. Has to be 10-15 years.)
How much of the graphical user interface evolution on UNIX has been put back because the varying WMs and toolkits?
For a very long time---and ending not so long ago---state of the art, cross-platform GUI toolkits on UNIX started and ended with Motif. That's horrible.
This has more to do with Unix vendors abandoning the workstation market in the mid-1990s than it does with the technology itself. If X11/Motif had received that 10-15 years of continual improvement, the situation would be far better today.
Interesting way of putting it, and probably correct. As they have become more marginalized, they have increasingly embraced defeatism and conspiracy theories, which of course only increases their marginalization.
Although I sorta miss the infectious optimism of the "world domination" days, when the focus was on the fun technology and not the socio-political ramifications of every damn legal clause. Again, a middle-aged disease.
Apple certainly didn't help by going from OpenFirmware to EFI-32 to EFI-64 with no provision for backward or forward compatibility. Slicing the already tiny Mac workstation market into three smaller parts makes it a lot more difficult to build a profitable product.
The owner of a copy of OS X has the legal right to make copies as needed to use it with a computer. How those copies are made is irrelevant: AFAICT, nowhere in copyright law is there any distinction between copying files via an installer, copying them directly from a CD to a hard drive, or copying them to an intermediate buffer and then to a hard drive. You end up with the same bits no matter what.
Psystar copied OS X files to various duplication servers. Question is if this is an "essential step" to utilizing the software, or if only happened to make life easier for Psystar.
It reminds me of what mp3.com was busted for. They purchased CDs and then sold copies of pre-made MP3s to customers. Turned out their MP3 archive was one big massive copyright law violation.
Actually I've seen enough posts falsely claiming there is a GPL clause covering "linking" to believe that the average slashbot doesn't understand the issue beyond regurgitating the FSF FAQ.
But you are correct that many do, and believe strongly in end-user freedoms.
In general the/. crowd is fairly hostile to most restrictions placed upon derived works whether GPL or commercial licensed.
To some extent, but there are many people here who support an expansive view of copyright law because it allows more conditions on the use of free software. (I'm thinking of Bruce "Score 5 Insightful" Perens in particular, but also folks who follow Groklaw's pro-EULA arguments.)
The two copies here (and the one on psystar's server) are not.
And that's the key point. Psystar admitted to using disk duplication software to install OS X, which is almost assuredly a violation of copyright law. (PC OEMs and corporations need to obtain an special licence from Microsoft to do this.) After that it doesn't really matter how many additional copies were made.
Plus, Apple's legal strategy here is "throw the book at them" -- including traditional copyright, EULAs, derivative works, DMCA, trademarks, and patents. I wouldn't read too much into any particular argument, Apple will find something that sticks.
More likely, you just personally have gotten smarter and wiser.
Slashdot has always been filled with bogosity passing as "insight", it's always had karma-whoring (since moderation started), and it's always had trolls having a nice laugh at everyone's expense. If you were to criticize Slashdot for anything, it's not that it's gotten worse, but that its is going into middle-age without getting any better. It is stuck in that same mid-1990s adolescent "Windows drools, Linux rools, Gimmie warez" state forever and ever.
Although I will agree with you that the moderation system is fundamentally flawed and they just don't care.
Right. I used to get Windows 95 betas directly from Microsoft's sales/consulting people.
However, there's sites that post screenshots of early Windows alpha releases handed out to driver devs. The general internet reaction tends negative because it isn't visually any different than the current version. I can't imagine those sorts of leaks do much for PR.
This was mentioned in the article. They do find it troublesome to measure their Linux user-base due to this.
The impression I got was more "disinterest" rather than "troublesome". It's pretty clear that they are focused on the professional workstation market, primarily via OEMs.
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The court's logic seems to be that first sale doctrine does not cover copying to an "imaging server", therefore everything Psystar did afterwards was also illegal.
Which might imply Mac cloning could be legal if it was done 'by hand'. However, the court also found that bypassing Apple's lock-out mechanism violated the DMCA, which seems rather dubious to me.
(Also I have to complain. 90% of the discussion here is computards arguing Apple sucks/Apple rules/I like my iPod, and ignoring the issues at hand. Slashdot is really full of knuckledraggers nowdays.)
That is simply not the case. Macs have ALWAYS HAD two button mice, in that you could always use a keyboard modifier to access the context menu even with just one button - you are basically claiming Macs for years had no context menus which was never, ever true.
This is totally untrue. The old MacOS had no support for context menus until long after Windows became popular (System 8 timeframe). Previously they were kludged into a couple applications -- the "bad Windows port" of MS Office in particular -- but they were not really widely used across the board until much later.
If you could show me any evidence of context menus (control-click or otherwise) in 1980s era Mac applications, I'd like to see it.
That was part of it, but Apple also made very broad claims to fundamental GUI concepts such as title bars, menus, and so on.
This was tossed out on principle, but not before Apple had buried GEM Desktop with their legal threats. (And that company did not "steal" or trade code from Apple.)
Common myth, but according to wikipedia, rather than "software patents", the EU has "computer-implemented inventions". (Except for the UK which has its own rules) Which really does not affect the FOSS implications one bit.
VGA is nowhere near "dead technology" for business projectors.
Checking Amazon, only some units have HDMI, and that only might accessible in a random conference room (and would require a mini-DP dongle anyway).
"It's OK to violate the GPL because ..."
The GPL has a patent clause because the intent was to build an ecosystem of patent-free (or freely redistributable) software. Software patents suck, but simply ignoring them just pushes the problem farther down the line.
The result is a bunch of pseudo-free software that can only be legally distributed in some vaguely unspecified countries in "Europe" where software patents aren't enforced. And that causes problems for end users and distros because it's not exactly clear which OSS is intentionally violating someone's patent (beyond the obvious sound/video stuff).
Good to know, thanks.
You should consider contacting NHTSA about this.
True, but if you've ever been in those 1980s cars, the German ones had 3 inch wide pedals, while the typical wife's GM station wagon had a 10 inch wide brake pedal. Its an understandable user error.
The difference in modern auto ergonomics is no longer that great, and these Toyota models are designed for the US market. Furthermore, many of the Toyota cases happened at highway speeds, versus in the driveway. So while they shouldn't rule out 'user error', the facts are different enough to warrant an investigation and not just dismiss it as Audi-style housewife error.
Servers have a technical function, but they also have a business function. Try asking your boss for a $50K "application client" system and see how that goes.
So while X might be techincally correct, it's nomenclature isn't exactly PHB-friendly.
(Speaking of which, when is the last time anyone's deployed a large-scale distributed X11 application. Has to be 10-15 years.)
How much of the graphical user interface evolution on UNIX has been put back because the varying WMs and toolkits?
For a very long time---and ending not so long ago---state of the art, cross-platform GUI toolkits on UNIX started and ended with Motif. That's horrible.
This has more to do with Unix vendors abandoning the workstation market in the mid-1990s than it does with the technology itself. If X11/Motif had received that 10-15 years of continual improvement, the situation would be far better today.
Considering IE has already supported 'web fonts' for 10 years, and nobody has ever used it, I don't share your optimism.
> Show me the part where it says that using software for duplication is illegal
106 "the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights ... to reproduce the copyrighted work"
With the section 117 exceptions and fair use rights, of course. Nothing to do with the DMCA.
Oh, I thought we were talking about the Linux wingnuts :)
Interesting way of putting it, and probably correct. As they have become more marginalized, they have increasingly embraced defeatism and conspiracy theories, which of course only increases their marginalization.
Although I sorta miss the infectious optimism of the "world domination" days, when the focus was on the fun technology and not the socio-political ramifications of every damn legal clause. Again, a middle-aged disease.
> Blame ATI and NVIDIA for that
Apple certainly didn't help by going from OpenFirmware to EFI-32 to EFI-64 with no provision for backward or forward compatibility. Slicing the already tiny Mac workstation market into three smaller parts makes it a lot more difficult to build a profitable product.
The owner of a copy of OS X has the legal right to make copies as needed to use it with a computer. How those copies are made is irrelevant: AFAICT, nowhere in copyright law is there any distinction between copying files via an installer, copying them directly from a CD to a hard drive, or copying them to an intermediate buffer and then to a hard drive. You end up with the same bits no matter what.
Psystar copied OS X files to various duplication servers. Question is if this is an "essential step" to utilizing the software, or if only happened to make life easier for Psystar.
It reminds me of what mp3.com was busted for. They purchased CDs and then sold copies of pre-made MP3s to customers. Turned out their MP3 archive was one big massive copyright law violation.
Actually I've seen enough posts falsely claiming there is a GPL clause covering "linking" to believe that the average slashbot doesn't understand the issue beyond regurgitating the FSF FAQ.
But you are correct that many do, and believe strongly in end-user freedoms.
In general the /. crowd is fairly hostile to most restrictions placed upon derived works whether GPL or commercial licensed.
To some extent, but there are many people here who support an expansive view of copyright law because it allows more conditions on the use of free software. (I'm thinking of Bruce "Score 5 Insightful" Perens in particular, but also folks who follow Groklaw's pro-EULA arguments.)
The two copies here (and the one on psystar's server) are not.
And that's the key point. Psystar admitted to using disk duplication software to install OS X, which is almost assuredly a violation of copyright law. (PC OEMs and corporations need to obtain an special licence from Microsoft to do this.) After that it doesn't really matter how many additional copies were made.
Plus, Apple's legal strategy here is "throw the book at them" -- including traditional copyright, EULAs, derivative works, DMCA, trademarks, and patents. I wouldn't read too much into any particular argument, Apple will find something that sticks.
More likely, you just personally have gotten smarter and wiser.
Slashdot has always been filled with bogosity passing as "insight", it's always had karma-whoring (since moderation started), and it's always had trolls having a nice laugh at everyone's expense. If you were to criticize Slashdot for anything, it's not that it's gotten worse, but that its is going into middle-age without getting any better. It is stuck in that same mid-1990s adolescent "Windows drools, Linux rools, Gimmie warez" state forever and ever.
Although I will agree with you that the moderation system is fundamentally flawed and they just don't care.
According to the book "Showstopper", early NT development work was done on an Intel i860 RISC system, not an x86.
http://books.google.com/books?id=ZWakyeSnG7AC&lpg=PA35&ots=ai8BFX45mz&dq=showstopper%20dave%20cutler%20intel&pg=PA67#v=onepage&q=&f=false
Right. I used to get Windows 95 betas directly from Microsoft's sales/consulting people.
However, there's sites that post screenshots of early Windows alpha releases handed out to driver devs. The general internet reaction tends negative because it isn't visually any different than the current version. I can't imagine those sorts of leaks do much for PR.
The computer vendors didn't need to be pushed very hard because IBM was their competitor and therefore probably would not act in their best interests.
This was mentioned in the article. They do find it troublesome to measure their Linux user-base due to this.
The impression I got was more "disinterest" rather than "troublesome". It's pretty clear that they are focused on the professional workstation market, primarily via OEMs.