IAALBTINLA (I am a lawyer but this is *not* legal advice)
1. The original write owns the copyright to the code. 2. By posting it to the BB, he might have agreed to license it under whatever terms by which the board operates. This might mean you have some license to use it (either implied or actual). 3. The code copied by the developer might not be enough of the work as a whole to considered infringement. 4. One test for determining whether computer code infringes copyright, in the USA at least, is the classic, yet ambiguous "abstraction, filtration, comparison" test. (If the copying was complete with comments, then that's not so good for the copier, but if the code accomplishes a trivial function, then not so much.) 5. Speaking generally, it's important to be on the lookout for situations like this. For instance, if code is copied from an open-source project, then significant consequences can follow (c.f. the Asus story below this one.) 6. If you are concerned, talk with your company's legal counsel.
You'd never pay a surveyor by the sheer number of lines he draws. You pay him to draw accurate lines. That's what a patent examiner is: a surveyor of property boundaries of a most complex nature. Trouble is, incentivizing correct boundary-line drawing is rather hard.; you'd have to predicate it on lack of future litigation.
Law has always moved slowly. At least in the US, either a court has to fashion a new interpretation of existing law, one that, according to some august commentators, ought to confine itself to the interstitial space between existing laws, or the federal legislature has to pass, and the president sign, a new law.
The slowness and expense of both of these methods, and more specifically, the lack of technological anticipation in the current copyright (and patent) regimes, make for some interesting times, given the perfect granularity with which digital technology can reproduce most copyrighted works.
Both of the above factors ought to (and in some corners have) given rise to a wholesale re-examination of the purposes and methods of copyright protection in the US. Having worked in one house of the US Federal legislature, I can tell you that is not really one 'corner' where the re-examination has either been thorough, thoughtful, or disconnected from moneyed (or copyrighted, if you will), interests.
In the end though, I hold out hope that our laws can and will accomodate our practices. It makes no sense to make an outlaw of most citizens if (and this is a substantial and debatable 'if') there is negligible harm in their current practices.
It should be obvious that I feel the submittor's question presents a false choice.
...getting the compound/pill/elixer to everyone with AIDS.
This is both a problem of physical distribution and of law. Africa (where the greatest number of cases have been recorded) is not the easiest place in which to widely distribute medicine, especially given the stigma AIDS has gained in certain countries there. Not to mention, there is a thicket of IP law to navigate. While I believe the scientists behind this discovery should be amply rewarded, IP law shouldn't hold millions of people hostage.
IAAL. The dispute was brought to the right venue, the National Arbitration Forum (which is one of the domain name dispute fora available to alleged victims of cybersqatting--this keeps most stuff like this out of US courts and keeps taxpayer dollars from being spent on it). According to the decision, the arbitrators took statements and evidence, and, wonder of wonders, the initial registrant of HillaryClinton.com didn't even bother to respond to the complaint. In that case, all they have to go on is the statements of the complainant, which is what they used to make their findings. Finally, the arbitrators used the correct criteria to make the decision. Cut and dry and correct.
As a political consultant/PAC founder who bootstrapped the entire enterprise from hand-rolled code and open source projects, The best I've seen so far is the CivicSpace initiative started by the techies from the Dean campaign. It's still at 0.8.0.3, and so there will still be bugs, but they fix patches quickly and the team is quite responsive. In addition, if you combine a CivicSpace installation with some intelligently placed hooks into the great stuff at Democracy In Action, you will be able to communicate and co-ordinate with your grass roots (and collect money from them), all at an extremely low cost.
I've actually met Ben in a professional capacity at the Berkman Center. He is one of the smartest people I've come across; he has a rare depth of understanding of both the technical and legal sides of the internet (and is able to do it through the fairly objective filter of microeconomics).
Most importantly, he has been an expert witness is several important software cases (see here, last paragraph). Take my subjective opinions above for what they're worth, but people with much at stake trust his opinions. What he thinks matters: judges and lawyers hear his views, not slashdot's.
If you look at the formula I posted above, you could see that if the idea was valuable enough, the inventor would be willing to litigate.
I think your question betrays a misunderstanding of the patent system. If you invent something and get a patent, you get the right to stop other people from doing your invention (and the concurrent right to contract not to sue them for doing your invention in exchange for money, i.e. a license). If you invent something, practice your invention publicly, and don't patent it, someone can come along and patent it later, and their patent would be valid if issued, until someone challenges it. Our non-patenting prior inventor (or anyone who can prove the patent should not have issued) can challenge, and if he wins, the patent is invalid, but the prior inventor can't get a patent because he failed to patent his invention when he invented it.
Again, if the idea is valuable enough (taking into account possible litigation expenses), a rational inventor will patent it, enforce his rights, and when challenged, defend the patent.
First of all, the most important factors relating to whether a patent can be overturned or not are the actual claims in the patent. No statistic can save a facially invalid patent.
Next, there are procedural and statutory hurdles that do need to be overcome, but the statistics in the CNN article is misleading. This is because while 7M patents might 'exist,' a smal small percentage of them are actually maintained. The percentage of patents that generate net positive revenue, either through licensing or direct sales of products is miniscule.
Finally, valuable patents do get litigated, but they are a small percentage of the above net profitable patents ("at most only about two percent of all patents are ever litigated, and less than two-tenths of one percent of all issued patents actually go to court." [emphasis mine; quote from linked SSRN paper.])
Rational firms/inventors will be willing to spend P(n-$0.01) in the cost of defending a patent, where n is the net revenues derived from the patent and P is the probablility of successfully defending the patent. (Note that P is affected by not only the substantive validity of the patent, but also procedural issues, such as the financing of the patent's challenger and the cost of litigation to them).
Bottom line: crappy patents will fall quickly if they are crappy enough, barring unclean hands on the part of the challenger.
Now if you could all focus some positive energy my way so I can pass the bar exam that I will take in less than 2 weeks. I promise not to patent the process of harvesting said energy.
This summer I had the opportunity to work for BlackDuckSoftware.com. Black Duck has built software to help developers (from individuals to large corporations) manage their use of open source software. Essentially, the software enables firms to track the usage of open source code, determine conflicts (if any) and suggest methods of compliance. It takes into account methods of combining code, whether the code is for internal use or public distribution, any number of other considerations that involve open source license compliance. It is able to deal with code licensed under *all* of the certified open source licenses as well as many other proprietary licenses.
While it is not insurance, and does not provide any kind of indemnification, it is a damn good management tool. Its goal is to allow companies to make use of open source code in such a way that full compliance is facilitated, and to avoid any uh-oh moments that happen after code is commerically released.
I worked on the development of the license interpretation module. It involved reading (and re-reading) 50+ licenses and parsing their terms such that compatibility determinations and compliance requirements could be generated for every possible combination of license, code, distribution, concatenation, link, modularization, etc. of a software product. It was exhausting (and sometimes tedious) work, and it certainly made it easy to tell which licenses were written by lawyers, which by coders, and which were written with input from both. It gave me new understanding of why unenlightened legal departments sometimes shy away from open source. Nonetheless, the reality is these licenses exist, are in use today, and are all valid until some court says otherwise. Licensors (i.e. coders in the community) have every right to expect their terms to be adhered to.
Being a geek myself, and a law student, it was pretty gratifying to see that a company wanted to build a product that helped managers to understand and not fear the open source phenomenon. Further, I think the product will really help firms stay fully compliant when they decide to use open source code. And that, in the end, is all our community can ask for.
"David Hart, chairman of Texas-based Hart InterCivic, which manufactured Orange County's voting system, said it would be impossible to identify which voters cast ballots in the wrong precincts because of steps the company had taken to ensure voter secrecy. For this reason, an exact account of miscast ballots is impossible."
Firstly, I agree that free trade tends to work out well, in that it gets us closer to a perfect market, which theoretically will optimize allocatins of assets. If you think such an allocation is just (a big if), then free trade is good.
One way to reduce the pain that comes from the shifting of resources that accompanies the liberalization of an international trading regime is to to work at reducing frictional unemployment. The best way to do this is to subsidize education and other forms of training. More money always flows to innovators: those who engage in think-work as opposed to do-work or make-work (for lack of a more nuanced set of expressions). Subsidizing education increases our ability to create think-workers who will be more able to adapt to changing market conditions and shorten their stay in the frictional unemployment column.
In regards to the situation experienced by factory workers, and now lower-level programmers, we see yet another manifestation of ever-growing trend towards commodification. Widely available education will help move workers away from the commoditized industries and closer to more valuable forms of employment.
Thanks to the wayback machine: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.webmonkey. com has, for the most part, working links to a great deal of content, not to mention a nice view of the evolution of the graphic design proclivities.
Hopefully the terralycos lawyers won't ask the wayback to pull the content.
As an aside, I wonder, but am doubtful, about whether alternate licensing could be arranged for the content, perhaps some form of the Creative Commons License??
I think you misunderstand. The siuation I am describing does not involve the creators of the licenses, but rather coders licensing their programs under the licenses. Thus, while the license creators might not agree that the licenses are compatible, the code creators--the ones who control the copyrights--can still legally come to an agreement regarding license compatibility.
If some third party has combined code in a way that violates the terms of one of the licenses of the combined code, you have nothing to worry about. Obviously, you run into problems with the GPL when you go and both *modify* and *redistribute* such combinations of doubtful code, but the initial issue of compatibility would need to get resolved by the copyright owners of the original code before the disposition of the legality your actions can occur.
I agree that parties can change their mind and that this can cause serious problems. However, if you get them to agree upon a particular interpretation of their license, and agree not to sue you over it, then you are pretty well protected. Granted, this is a lot to ask, but with legal stuff, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
...than that of either the FSF or the ASF: the opinion of the copyright holder of the software. Granted, the copyrights to alot of important softwore have been deeded to the FSF, and thus, their opinion matters with regard to that software.
however, the key to all of this is that only the copyright holder to a piece of software can decide to bring a lawsuit. Thus, if the copyright holder thinks the licenses are compatible, then they damn well are (in that case only).
Bottom line: contact whoever owns the copyright to the software you want to use if you have any questions about your rights under the ASL or GPL.
...unless you really want to become a lawyer. This means that you really know what lawyers do, like doing it, and like doing it for 60+ hours per week.
Look up some IP lawyers at the larger firms in your area and give them a call. Ask questions about the quantity and quality of their day-to-day workload. And I'm not talking partners, I'm talking associates--'cause that's what you'll start off as.
IP law is interesting, and I am enjoying learning it, partly because so much of it is wrong;) The problem is that few associates get to work on anything so interesting.
There are other options besides becoming a lawyer once you graduate of course, but they are few and far between. Oh, and don't forget about the crushing debt!
YMMV of course, and IANALY (y = yet), but most associates I know would counsel against becoming a lawyer.
This phenomenon strikes at the heart of the issue underlying all of copyright: who controls? Copyright has always been an attempt at striking the balance between artist and consumer. It is artificially constructed because copyrightable works are easily copyable; it is an acknowledgement of the problem that rampant copying will bankrupt the artist.
This MUDDA is an attempt to shift some control back to artists, particularly in the album vs. single arena. I understand the motivation, but I question the implementation. If artists really want that kind of control, let them either produce albums that are good enough induce consumers to purchase and consume them as whole ablums, or let them distribute a whole ablum as a single mp3 file, and let me decide whether or not to purchase it as such.
CDs (and LPs) have track segmentation and track listing to facilitate track-based consumption. A shift away from that consumer empowerment is nothing more than ceding power to artists. I am agnostic on whether this is overall good or bad, as certain albums are much better when consumed as such and not as discrete singles. I am reluctant however, to allow the artist to make that determination ex-ante. I'd rather do it myself.
The professor under whom I am writing my certification paper at law school wrote a seminal paper on fair use which was cited by the court in the sony opinion.
She made an economic argument in favor of fair use, basically outlining a test to determine, in general terms, where an economic perspective would favor (and disfavor) findings of 'fair use.'
As the 'law and economics' movement was just catching on amongst judges at the time, the paper gained a lot of notice and was cited by the court, and by many many other lower courts as well when issuing opinions dealing with fair use.
A problem arose from all this citation however, because judges lost sight of other, perfectly valid justifications for 'fair use.' An exclusively economic approach to these determinations is a perspective that largely works to the detriment of artists, writers and other creative types who make valid fair use of other copyrighted works because the conditions for permitting fair use in this analysis are few and far between. (A look at Professor Gordon's work will show that she is not at all happy with the current state of copyright.)
Nonetheless, the Sony Betamax case is an important one, one that was decided correctly by a court that at the time actually viewed copyright (properly I might add) as a constitutionally mandated balancing between the progress of arts and sciences and remuneration for authors for that progress.
I checked around the mirra.com site, and could find no place to download the source code.
If this box is running some linux variant, they need to at least offer the source code to all who have a mirra box in order to be in compliance with the GPL. (of course, it would be better for them to to offer the source via anonymous ftp, but the GPL doesn't require that...)
The article talks about how nice it would be if companies offered to do additional programming on the OS software they use. This is nice, but is not required, assuming the software in question is GPL'ed. All that is required it that the licensee make an offer to provide source code if they distribute binaries outside their organization. If these companies are in compliance, there is no issue here and the article is just wishful thinking.
The Busybox Hall of Shame is a different animal altogether. These corporations are (supposedly/probably) not in compliance with the Busybox license. These are the *real* corporate bad guys, and the OS community should work to bring them into compliance, just like we did with Linksys et al.
Bottom line: if you want users of your software to do more than just make source code available, create a new license with contribution requirements. Its highly likely that such a license won't be truly open source and that no-one will want to use your software under such terms.
I could quite easily open an account with the cheapest wISP I could find (say the caniadian one so I can save because of the exchange rate) then use a local wISP for access.
In this case the local WISP would surcharge you and your cheap WISP would pass the surcharge right along to you, perhaps with a handling fee to boot.
This not only prevents the scenario you speak about, but also allows the installation costs of a hot spot to be borne more by those who use that hotspot. If it's hard to get wireless into a particular area for whatever reason, trust me, whatever ISP installs a hotspot will cover that cost or they won't let you on.
Slashdot Mirror
is piping drush into awk to create drush commands you can pipe to sh:
drush pml --no-core --status=enabled --pipe|grep content_type_|awk '{print "drush fu " $1}'|sh
IAALBTINLA (I am a lawyer but this is *not* legal advice)
1. The original write owns the copyright to the code.
2. By posting it to the BB, he might have agreed to license it under whatever terms by which the board operates. This might mean you have some license to use it (either implied or actual).
3. The code copied by the developer might not be enough of the work as a whole to considered infringement.
4. One test for determining whether computer code infringes copyright, in the USA at least, is the classic, yet ambiguous "abstraction, filtration, comparison" test. (If the copying was complete with comments, then that's not so good for the copier, but if the code accomplishes a trivial function, then not so much.)
5. Speaking generally, it's important to be on the lookout for situations like this. For instance, if code is copied from an open-source project, then significant consequences can follow (c.f. the Asus story below this one.)
6. If you are concerned, talk with your company's legal counsel.
You'd never pay a surveyor by the sheer number of lines he draws. You pay him to draw accurate lines. That's what a patent examiner is: a surveyor of property boundaries of a most complex nature. Trouble is, incentivizing correct boundary-line drawing is rather hard.; you'd have to predicate it on lack of future litigation.
Law has always moved slowly. At least in the US, either a court has to fashion a new interpretation of existing law, one that, according to some august commentators, ought to confine itself to the interstitial space between existing laws, or the federal legislature has to pass, and the president sign, a new law.
The slowness and expense of both of these methods, and more specifically, the lack of technological anticipation in the current copyright (and patent) regimes, make for some interesting times, given the perfect granularity with which digital technology can reproduce most copyrighted works.
Both of the above factors ought to (and in some corners have) given rise to a wholesale re-examination of the purposes and methods of copyright protection in the US. Having worked in one house of the US Federal legislature, I can tell you that is not really one 'corner' where the re-examination has either been thorough, thoughtful, or disconnected from moneyed (or copyrighted, if you will), interests.
In the end though, I hold out hope that our laws can and will accomodate our practices. It makes no sense to make an outlaw of most citizens if (and this is a substantial and debatable 'if') there is negligible harm in their current practices.
It should be obvious that I feel the submittor's question presents a false choice.
cleetus
...because actions speak louder than your words.
(oh? perhaps the actions are talking too loudly?)
...getting the compound/pill/elixer to everyone with AIDS.
This is both a problem of physical distribution and of law. Africa (where the greatest number of cases have been recorded) is not the easiest place in which to widely distribute medicine, especially given the stigma AIDS has gained in certain countries there. Not to mention, there is a thicket of IP law to navigate. While I believe the scientists behind this discovery should be amply rewarded, IP law shouldn't hold millions of people hostage.
Tough problems, but perhaps some hope.
cleetus
IAAL. The dispute was brought to the right venue, the National Arbitration Forum (which is one of the domain name dispute fora available to alleged victims of cybersqatting--this keeps most stuff like this out of US courts and keeps taxpayer dollars from being spent on it). According to the decision, the arbitrators took statements and evidence, and, wonder of wonders, the initial registrant of HillaryClinton.com didn't even bother to respond to the complaint. In that case, all they have to go on is the statements of the complainant, which is what they used to make their findings. Finally, the arbitrators used the correct criteria to make the decision. Cut and dry and correct.
Anyone need a lawyer?
As a political consultant/PAC founder who bootstrapped the entire enterprise from hand-rolled code and open source projects, The best I've seen so far is the CivicSpace initiative started by the techies from the Dean campaign. It's still at 0.8.0.3, and so there will still be bugs, but they fix patches quickly and the team is quite responsive. In addition, if you combine a CivicSpace installation with some intelligently placed hooks into the great stuff at Democracy In Action, you will be able to communicate and co-ordinate with your grass roots (and collect money from them), all at an extremely low cost.
Tim
I've actually met Ben in a professional capacity at the Berkman Center. He is one of the smartest people I've come across; he has a rare depth of understanding of both the technical and legal sides of the internet (and is able to do it through the fairly objective filter of microeconomics).
Most importantly, he has been an expert witness is several important software cases (see here, last paragraph). Take my subjective opinions above for what they're worth, but people with much at stake trust his opinions. What he thinks matters: judges and lawyers hear his views, not slashdot's.
cleetus
If you look at the formula I posted above, you could see that if the idea was valuable enough, the inventor would be willing to litigate.
I think your question betrays a misunderstanding of the patent system. If you invent something and get a patent, you get the right to stop other people from doing your invention (and the concurrent right to contract not to sue them for doing your invention in exchange for money, i.e. a license). If you invent something, practice your invention publicly, and don't patent it, someone can come along and patent it later, and their patent would be valid if issued, until someone challenges it. Our non-patenting prior inventor (or anyone who can prove the patent should not have issued) can challenge, and if he wins, the patent is invalid, but the prior inventor can't get a patent because he failed to patent his invention when he invented it.
Again, if the idea is valuable enough (taking into account possible litigation expenses), a rational inventor will patent it, enforce his rights, and when challenged, defend the patent.
cleetus
First of all, the most important factors relating to whether a patent can be overturned or not are the actual claims in the patent. No statistic can save a facially invalid patent.
Next, there are procedural and statutory hurdles that do need to be overcome, but the statistics in the CNN article is misleading. This is because while 7M patents might 'exist,' a smal small percentage of them are actually maintained. The percentage of patents that generate net positive revenue, either through licensing or direct sales of products is miniscule.
Finally, valuable patents do get litigated, but they are a small percentage of the above net profitable patents ("at most only about two percent of all patents are ever litigated, and less than two-tenths of one percent of all issued patents actually go to court." [emphasis mine; quote from linked SSRN paper.])
Rational firms/inventors will be willing to spend P(n-$0.01) in the cost of defending a patent, where n is the net revenues derived from the patent and P is the probablility of successfully defending the patent. (Note that P is affected by not only the substantive validity of the patent, but also procedural issues, such as the financing of the patent's challenger and the cost of litigation to them).
Bottom line: crappy patents will fall quickly if they are crappy enough, barring unclean hands on the part of the challenger.
Now if you could all focus some positive energy my way so I can pass the bar exam that I will take in less than 2 weeks. I promise not to patent the process of harvesting said energy.
cleetus
This summer I had the opportunity to work for BlackDuckSoftware.com. Black Duck has built software to help developers (from individuals to large corporations) manage their use of open source software. Essentially, the software enables firms to track the usage of open source code, determine conflicts (if any) and suggest methods of compliance. It takes into account methods of combining code, whether the code is for internal use or public distribution, any number of other considerations that involve open source license compliance. It is able to deal with code licensed under *all* of the certified open source licenses as well as many other proprietary licenses.
While it is not insurance, and does not provide any kind of indemnification, it is a damn good management tool. Its goal is to allow companies to make use of open source code in such a way that full compliance is facilitated, and to avoid any uh-oh moments that happen after code is commerically released.
I worked on the development of the license interpretation module. It involved reading (and re-reading) 50+ licenses and parsing their terms such that compatibility determinations and compliance requirements could be generated for every possible combination of license, code, distribution, concatenation, link, modularization, etc. of a software product. It was exhausting (and sometimes tedious) work, and it certainly made it easy to tell which licenses were written by lawyers, which by coders, and which were written with input from both. It gave me new understanding of why unenlightened legal departments sometimes shy away from open source. Nonetheless, the reality is these licenses exist, are in use today, and are all valid until some court says otherwise. Licensors (i.e. coders in the community) have every right to expect their terms to be adhered to.
Being a geek myself, and a law student, it was pretty gratifying to see that a company wanted to build a product that helped managers to understand and not fear the open source phenomenon. Further, I think the product will really help firms stay fully compliant when they decide to use open source code. And that, in the end, is all our community can ask for.
cleetus
for those who prefer not to RFTA
"David Hart, chairman of Texas-based Hart InterCivic, which manufactured Orange County's voting system, said it would be impossible to identify which voters cast ballots in the wrong precincts because of steps the company had taken to ensure voter secrecy. For this reason, an exact account of miscast ballots is impossible."
cleetus
Firstly, I agree that free trade tends to work out well, in that it gets us closer to a perfect market, which theoretically will optimize allocatins of assets. If you think such an allocation is just (a big if), then free trade is good.
One way to reduce the pain that comes from the shifting of resources that accompanies the liberalization of an international trading regime is to to work at reducing frictional unemployment. The best way to do this is to subsidize education and other forms of training. More money always flows to innovators: those who engage in think-work as opposed to do-work or make-work (for lack of a more nuanced set of expressions). Subsidizing education increases our ability to create think-workers who will be more able to adapt to changing market conditions and shorten their stay in the frictional unemployment column.
In regards to the situation experienced by factory workers, and now lower-level programmers, we see yet another manifestation of ever-growing trend towards commodification. Widely available education will help move workers away from the commoditized industries and closer to more valuable forms of employment.
cleetus
Thanks to the wayback machine: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.webmonkey. com has, for the most part, working links to a great deal of content, not to mention a nice view of the evolution of the graphic design proclivities.
Hopefully the terralycos lawyers won't ask the wayback to pull the content.
As an aside, I wonder, but am doubtful, about whether alternate licensing could be arranged for the content, perhaps some form of the Creative Commons License??
cleetus
I think you misunderstand. The siuation I am describing does not involve the creators of the licenses, but rather coders licensing their programs under the licenses. Thus, while the license creators might not agree that the licenses are compatible, the code creators--the ones who control the copyrights--can still legally come to an agreement regarding license compatibility.
cleetus
If some third party has combined code in a way that violates the terms of one of the licenses of the combined code, you have nothing to worry about. Obviously, you run into problems with the GPL when you go and both *modify* and *redistribute* such combinations of doubtful code, but the initial issue of compatibility would need to get resolved by the copyright owners of the original code before the disposition of the legality your actions can occur.
cleetus
I agree that parties can change their mind and that this can cause serious problems. However, if you get them to agree upon a particular interpretation of their license, and agree not to sue you over it, then you are pretty well protected. Granted, this is a lot to ask, but with legal stuff, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
cleetus
...than that of either the FSF or the ASF: the opinion of the copyright holder of the software. Granted, the copyrights to alot of important softwore have been deeded to the FSF, and thus, their opinion matters with regard to that software.
however, the key to all of this is that only the copyright holder to a piece of software can decide to bring a lawsuit. Thus, if the copyright holder thinks the licenses are compatible, then they damn well are (in that case only).
Bottom line: contact whoever owns the copyright to the software you want to use if you have any questions about your rights under the ASL or GPL.
cleetus
(a soon to be lawyer)
...unless you really want to become a lawyer. This means that you really know what lawyers do, like doing it, and like doing it for 60+ hours per week .
;) The problem is that few associates get to work on anything so interesting.
Look up some IP lawyers at the larger firms in your area and give them a call. Ask questions about the quantity and quality of their day-to-day workload. And I'm not talking partners, I'm talking associates--'cause that's what you'll start off as.
IP law is interesting, and I am enjoying learning it, partly because so much of it is wrong
There are other options besides becoming a lawyer once you graduate of course, but they are few and far between. Oh, and don't forget about the crushing debt!
YMMV of course, and IANALY (y = yet), but most associates I know would counsel against becoming a lawyer.
cleetus
This phenomenon strikes at the heart of the issue underlying all of copyright: who controls? Copyright has always been an attempt at striking the balance between artist and consumer. It is artificially constructed because copyrightable works are easily copyable; it is an acknowledgement of the problem that rampant copying will bankrupt the artist.
This MUDDA is an attempt to shift some control back to artists, particularly in the album vs. single arena. I understand the motivation, but I question the implementation. If artists really want that kind of control, let them either produce albums that are good enough induce consumers to purchase and consume them as whole ablums, or let them distribute a whole ablum as a single mp3 file, and let me decide whether or not to purchase it as such.
CDs (and LPs) have track segmentation and track listing to facilitate track-based consumption. A shift away from that consumer empowerment is nothing more than ceding power to artists. I am agnostic on whether this is overall good or bad, as certain albums are much better when consumed as such and not as discrete singles. I am reluctant however, to allow the artist to make that determination ex-ante. I'd rather do it myself.
The professor under whom I am writing my certification paper at law school wrote a seminal paper on fair use which was cited by the court in the sony opinion.
She made an economic argument in favor of fair use, basically outlining a test to determine, in general terms, where an economic perspective would favor (and disfavor) findings of 'fair use.'
As the 'law and economics' movement was just catching on amongst judges at the time, the paper gained a lot of notice and was cited by the court, and by many many other lower courts as well when issuing opinions dealing with fair use.
A problem arose from all this citation however, because judges lost sight of other, perfectly valid justifications for 'fair use.' An exclusively economic approach to these determinations is a perspective that largely works to the detriment of artists, writers and other creative types who make valid fair use of other copyrighted works because the conditions for permitting fair use in this analysis are few and far between. (A look at Professor Gordon's work will show that she is not at all happy with the current state of copyright.)
Nonetheless, the Sony Betamax case is an important one, one that was decided correctly by a court that at the time actually viewed copyright (properly I might add) as a constitutionally mandated balancing between the progress of arts and sciences and remuneration for authors for that progress.
On that note, support the EFF and VOTE!
cleetus
I checked around the mirra.com site, and could find no place to download the source code.
If this box is running some linux variant, they need to at least offer the source code to all who have a mirra box in order to be in compliance with the GPL. (of course, it would be better for them to to offer the source via anonymous ftp, but the GPL doesn't require that...)
Let's hope Mirra is not another Linsys.
cleetus
The article talks about how nice it would be if companies offered to do additional programming on the OS software they use. This is nice, but is not required, assuming the software in question is GPL'ed. All that is required it that the licensee make an offer to provide source code if they distribute binaries outside their organization. If these companies are in compliance, there is no issue here and the article is just wishful thinking.
The Busybox Hall of Shame is a different animal altogether. These corporations are (supposedly/probably) not in compliance with the Busybox license. These are the *real* corporate bad guys, and the OS community should work to bring them into compliance, just like we did with Linksys et al.
Bottom line: if you want users of your software to do more than just make source code available, create a new license with contribution requirements. Its highly likely that such a license won't be truly open source and that no-one will want to use your software under such terms.
I could quite easily open an account with the cheapest wISP I could find (say the caniadian one so I can save because of the exchange rate) then use a local wISP for access.
In this case the local WISP would surcharge you and your cheap WISP would pass the surcharge right along to you, perhaps with a handling fee to boot.
This not only prevents the scenario you speak about, but also allows the installation costs of a hot spot to be borne more by those who use that hotspot. If it's hard to get wireless into a particular area for whatever reason, trust me, whatever ISP installs a hotspot will cover that cost or they won't let you on.
cleetus