On the other hand, with very few years, on average, left to live - what does she really have to lose ? Even if she spent all her savings getting them convicted just to feel good about the victory - so what, why save for a rainy day when you aren't going to live through the sunny day ?
Let's face it, nobody has ever been killed by a drunk downloader crossing the copyright line - but lots of people get killed every day by people running red lights (especially drunk ones) . So yes, there IS a valid safety argument to be made.
Whether that should be allowed to overrule the concept of being able to face your accuser is an entirely different debate.
No. Well, officially it's still on the books -even for state prosecutions - but no, it's not. Somebody tried it a few months ago on a traffic ticket case, and the court ruled that trial by combat is not an option. So there is now court precedent that you can no longer exercise this former right.
Funny -I don't recall seeing any libertardians complain about another freedom lost. The freedom to get your oversized roid-using brother to kick the shit out of the cop who arrested you should be a thing again !
Or just the fact that she is marginally less hated than Trump ? Or maybe she just doesn't believe that stifling people's ability to hate on you is something a presidential candidate ought to do in a land which is built on freedom of expression - particularly around politics ?
I bet a lot of his supporters won't believe he lost on the 9th - after all, he told them to go vote on the 28th and the media always lies so obviously they are lying when they say the election is on the 8th so all the Trump supporters are going to be showing up at polling places on the 28th and complaining about the evil media calling the election 20 days early !
Oh he won't believe you. Even if he saw it himself - he wouldn't believe it if CNN reported it. The media always lies according to Trump supporters and nothing that was reported can possibly be true.
If you aren't making a profit on the deal it makes you either an idiot or a slave. If you are, then you're still an entrepenuer - provided it's a one-time deal for a one-time job. If it's a long-term open-ended contract - then yes, you are an employee.
The kind of libertarianism shown above has no moral problem with indentured servitude, debt slavery, share-cropping or any other form of slavery-by-another-name - because that kind of slavery is apparently freedom to them...
Ignorant? No. If they were ignorant - nobody would bring this case. Desperate ? Yes.
And when you get people to sign a bad deal out of desperation - that's not a free market, that's the very definition of exploitation, and indeed the government SHOULD prevent that. Do you know why ? Because if they don't prevent it for the desperate, then very soon every employer is doing it -and nobody else has a choice anymore. The market has a tendency to settle on the cheapest option - and if exploitation is allowed, then that is the cheapest option - and very soon, the only option. Choices in the market are not a guarantee - they only happen when the market is big enough that you can benefit from offering something more expensive that some people will want.
False, I've been a contractor and have quoted prices - and negotiated them. It gets particularly nice when you are offering a service nobody else can provide (or cannot provide on the same level - like customizations to a program you originally wrote, nobody else could do it better than the person who knows the code inside and out).
If it's a real business, you can provide that service to more than one company.
I'm pretty sure both lyft and uber prohibit people from driving for both.
Even then, you're missing the key definition of entrepeneurship: establishing a business for proft. Uber drivers do not get to keep the profits, those go to Uber, they get a cut - which makes them employees, not owners.
That is NOT the definition of entrepeneurship, hell it's not even the primary benefit - which is 'keeping the profits'. If you don't get to keep the profits - you are an employee not an entrepeneur. It is really that simple.
>Whether the memory space is shared is nothing to do with the legal text of the GPL.
Actually it absolutely IS what matters - which is EXACTLY why THAT is where the GPL draws the line - because it's where the LAW and Court Precedent has drawn the line. Because once the code shares a memory-space, it becomes part of the same greater whole - and THAT is legally a derivate work. If, at no point, do the two pieces of code combine into one thing - then it's not a derivative work - just two programs which coexist and copyright does not apply to that.
No, it's really not. The vast majority of this stuff IS extremely settled by law and precedent. You cite a rare case which MIGHT be problematic (but almost certainly isn't). Plugins is a case where the law really is unclear and the judgement is meant to be on a case-by-case basis. But those are few and far between - and your first example is so far-fetched as to be unlikely to ever happen.
More importantly it undermines the very REASON this claim was made. "The GPL is unclear so no companies take the risk" - except your example is of a company who IS shipping a GPL'd program because they sincerely feel the risk is too small to deprive their customers of the convenience they can thus achieve.
The fact is that your example is ridiculous anyway - ScummVM is just an interpreter, it in no way becomes part of what you run with it, the GPL does not apply to the scenario you are talking about. By that logic you couldn't write a proprietary shell script because bash is GPLd ! The interpreter is not part of the game assets and their copyrights share no relationship. No court would consider that to be how things work - especially since these assets were not even created FOR that interpreter - it just happens to be compatible with the one they were created for.
No, it's NOTHING like "linking" legally speaking since those programs do not in any way become part of yours, they don't execute in the same process space, they don't share memory. A shell script is very clearly NOT a derivative work of the programs it calls. There are things where copyright law is unclear regarding what is, or is not, a derivative work in programming - but this is not one of those times.
A shell script is merely *running* a program, not incorporating that program into itself. Indeed, your compiled program could actually run a GPL'd program and not be considered derivative, you just can't link it.
It's not the GPL's fault (or anything to do with the GPL actually) that some things are uncertain in copyright law and left up to the courts. If you have an issue with that, take it up with your representatives. Is a particular action fair use ? Sorry -the law doesn't say - it species what types of activities are potentially fair use but whether your particular case qualifies is left up to juries. Same with the exact line between derivative work or not - the reason it's unclear is because it's unclear in the law, the GPL has nothing to do with the issue you're so concerned about.
For the record - wordpress has in the past successfully sued people for creating non GPL'd wordpress themes - and the SFLC agreed with them that those are clearly a derivative product. And the people shipping those plugins were not even bundling them with wordpress.
> The creators of AwesomeGPLProject2 might disagree with the SCUMM team's view that assets may be distributed under a different licence None of the assets that we're talking about here is even part of the SCUMM project, nor are they created by or owned by that project. They belong to the original companies that made the game - mostly Sierra I believe. There is nothing in the GPL that allows you to usurp somebody else's copyrights by writing a program that can read their stuff. Now you may have an argument about GOG distributing these proprietary assets and ScummVM together - especially for code Scumm inherrited from a different project, but if there is any problem at all - it's with GOG not ScummVM. And I don't believe there is an issue since GOG is ScummVM and the assets are two completely disparate projects, GOG is merely doing you the favour of shipping ScummVM preconfigured for you - but you would be quite capable of buying the game from them by itself and doing that yourself. Unbundling here would not benefit anybody - and it wouldn't make anymore more free. Anyway, there has never been an ethical demand for game assets to be free - the free software ethics are specific to software (even RMS has repeatedly stated that it's a mistake to think one set of copyright rules could work for all the many kinds of things copyright is applied to and that different types of media should have different copyright rules to suit their specific needs). ID's version of the original doom and quake code are fully free software, regardless of the fact that the game assets are still proprietary and you need to buy them to play the games - it is also perfectly acceptable that openquake built their own replacement assets to allow those engines to be used without buying the game.
>Why not? I produce closed source software with a plugin architecture The GPL specifically states that plugin architectures are a gray area and if this should ever become an issue then a judge will have to determine them on the merits of the case, whether your program qualifies as a 'derivative work' or not will be case specific.
>Loads of people produce third party plugins under different licences That is not a problem.
> I offer my product with all of these included in the download But this potentially IS a problem. If you are redistributing code that links to GPL'd code, even in a plugin, then a plugin author could potentially claim you are violating the license and demand that you GPL the program. You probably should exclude any copylefted plugins from the download. You're unlikely to get sued since your plugin authors know that you bundle the plugins and if they really had an issue with it then they wouldn't be submitting their plugins to you (which would count against them in a lawsuit as the jury may well rule that submitting their plugins knowing this they were intrinsically accepting that it would be bundled with a proprietary code and clearly did not mind). The fact that it's a plugin takes it further since you would generally deem a plugin to be the derivative work rather than other way around and most juries are likely to agree. Either way - it is probably better if you don't bundle GPL plugins with non-GPL programs. Just set up a website where people can download plugins they want.
>That would seem a strange interpretation. It's also, technically, what the license says - whether it *really* applies to your case is something a jury of your peers would determine if ever a plugin author got pissed off at you.
It depends whether they are linked. Basically the same place where 'derivative work' lies in law. If your project has 10 executables, all of which work together, none of which are linked to each other -and only one is linked to a GPL'd library then only that one has to be GPLd.
>Common sense says invoking a linked library doesn't make my application a derivative work, but that's exactly what some people want the GPL to be. No common sense says the exact opposite. Lazy freeloading says what you're hearing. You seem to have them confused.
>My guess is that we will see this type of violation more and more because while it is a violation, its not likely to be significant damages
That would only be a factor if anybody, anywhere has sued for damages. GPL cases never sue for damages -they sue for breach of contract and demand that the other party abide by the terms of the license (which is a legal contract) as they have no other right to distribute the software at all. The only restitution demanded is that they abide. Most people who have been taken to task for this have chosen to abide without going to trial, the few that have chosen to fight the case in the courts have lost. Even mighty CISCO folded.
>. The people behind SCUMM VM seem to be of the opinion that assets and code are separate but I could imagine some authors of included code disagreeing that this is the correct interpretation.
That's entirely up to the licensor. Free engines for proprietary games generally require you to own a legal copy of the original game to get legal access to the assets. Writing a GPL engine that can parse those assets does not negate or alter the copyright and licensing on the assets or the code from the original. Games companies are generally okay with that as well - after all it gets them sales. Bethesda had concerns about OpenMW but after they spoke to the devs they became wholehearted supporters of the project.
>. I can produce a GPL clone of a closed source DLL. If I replace the closed source library with an GPL one, does an application that uses it need to be open source? It depends who is doing the replacing. If the developer of the upstream app does it - then yes, he must. If you do it for yourself, then no - the GPL requirement only kicks in on distribution and you're not allowed to distributed the original app anyway since you don't own copyright. If it is freely redistributable then it depends on the license - if it's a GPL compatible license you can re-license it and distribute both, else you can't distribute them together. But if you write distribute a program that uses a proprietary library, and somebody else writes a free version of that library and a third-party buys your program and uses the free library instead of the original no copyrights were violated anywhere. Indeed, every time anybody runs a game in wine they are doing just that (though wine is lgpld).
>This does seem to lead to a hole. Nope. See above. There is no version where you can distribute a program that is linking (dynamically or statically) to a GPL'd program without having to GPL it yourself. You can run a program that was linked against a proprietary library with a GPL'd one yourself, but you can't give it to anybody else.
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On the other hand, with very few years, on average, left to live - what does she really have to lose ? Even if she spent all her savings getting them convicted just to feel good about the victory - so what, why save for a rainy day when you aren't going to live through the sunny day ?
Let's face it, nobody has ever been killed by a drunk downloader crossing the copyright line - but lots of people get killed every day by people running red lights (especially drunk ones) .
So yes, there IS a valid safety argument to be made.
Whether that should be allowed to overrule the concept of being able to face your accuser is an entirely different debate.
No.
Well, officially it's still on the books -even for state prosecutions - but no, it's not. Somebody tried it a few months ago on a traffic ticket case, and the court ruled that trial by combat is not an option. So there is now court precedent that you can no longer exercise this former right.
Funny -I don't recall seeing any libertardians complain about another freedom lost. The freedom to get your oversized roid-using brother to kick the shit out of the cop who arrested you should be a thing again !
Or just the fact that she is marginally less hated than Trump ?
Or maybe she just doesn't believe that stifling people's ability to hate on you is something a presidential candidate ought to do in a land which is built on freedom of expression - particularly around politics ?
Reagan, for all his fault, did have a key difference from Trump: he was sane.
And, of course, as Rod Reagan has pointed - his dad couldn't possibly be elected in the madhouse that is the republican party today !
I bet a lot of his supporters won't believe he lost on the 9th - after all, he told them to go vote on the 28th and the media always lies so obviously they are lying when they say the election is on the 8th so all the Trump supporters are going to be showing up at polling places on the 28th and complaining about the evil media calling the election 20 days early !
Oh he won't believe you. Even if he saw it himself - he wouldn't believe it if CNN reported it. The media always lies according to Trump supporters and nothing that was reported can possibly be true.
Hi Donald.
Yeah, fine, assuming she consents there is nothing wrong with that sentiment ... UNLESS YOU ARE HER DAD ... how hard is this to understand ?
as Trump supporters accuse Hillary of fraud for not putting nude selfies on hillaryclinton.xxx
If you aren't making a profit on the deal it makes you either an idiot or a slave.
If you are, then you're still an entrepenuer - provided it's a one-time deal for a one-time job. If it's a long-term open-ended contract - then yes, you are an employee.
The kind of libertarianism shown above has no moral problem with indentured servitude, debt slavery, share-cropping or any other form of slavery-by-another-name - because that kind of slavery is apparently freedom to them...
Ignorant? No. If they were ignorant - nobody would bring this case.
Desperate ? Yes.
And when you get people to sign a bad deal out of desperation - that's not a free market, that's the very definition of exploitation, and indeed the government SHOULD prevent that.
Do you know why ? Because if they don't prevent it for the desperate, then very soon every employer is doing it -and nobody else has a choice anymore. The market has a tendency to settle on the cheapest option - and if exploitation is allowed, then that is the cheapest option - and very soon, the only option. Choices in the market are not a guarantee - they only happen when the market is big enough that you can benefit from offering something more expensive that some people will want.
False, I've been a contractor and have quoted prices - and negotiated them. It gets particularly nice when you are offering a service nobody else can provide (or cannot provide on the same level - like customizations to a program you originally wrote, nobody else could do it better than the person who knows the code inside and out).
If it's a real business, you can provide that service to more than one company.
I'm pretty sure both lyft and uber prohibit people from driving for both.
Even then, you're missing the key definition of entrepeneurship: establishing a business for proft. Uber drivers do not get to keep the profits, those go to Uber, they get a cut - which makes them employees, not owners.
That is NOT the definition of entrepeneurship, hell it's not even the primary benefit - which is 'keeping the profits'.
If you don't get to keep the profits - you are an employee not an entrepeneur. It is really that simple.
>Whether the memory space is shared is nothing to do with the legal text of the GPL.
Actually it absolutely IS what matters - which is EXACTLY why THAT is where the GPL draws the line - because it's where the LAW and Court Precedent has drawn the line. Because once the code shares a memory-space, it becomes part of the same greater whole - and THAT is legally a derivate work. If, at no point, do the two pieces of code combine into one thing - then it's not a derivative work - just two programs which coexist and copyright does not apply to that.
No, it's really not. The vast majority of this stuff IS extremely settled by law and precedent. You cite a rare case which MIGHT be problematic (but almost certainly isn't). Plugins is a case where the law really is unclear and the judgement is meant to be on a case-by-case basis. But those are few and far between - and your first example is so far-fetched as to be unlikely to ever happen.
More importantly it undermines the very REASON this claim was made. "The GPL is unclear so no companies take the risk" - except your example is of a company who IS shipping a GPL'd program because they sincerely feel the risk is too small to deprive their customers of the convenience they can thus achieve.
The fact is that your example is ridiculous anyway - ScummVM is just an interpreter, it in no way becomes part of what you run with it, the GPL does not apply to the scenario you are talking about. By that logic you couldn't write a proprietary shell script because bash is GPLd !
The interpreter is not part of the game assets and their copyrights share no relationship. No court would consider that to be how things work - especially since these assets were not even created FOR that interpreter - it just happens to be compatible with the one they were created for.
No, it's NOTHING like "linking" legally speaking since those programs do not in any way become part of yours, they don't execute in the same process space, they don't share memory. A shell script is very clearly NOT a derivative work of the programs it calls. There are things where copyright law is unclear regarding what is, or is not, a derivative work in programming - but this is not one of those times.
A shell script is merely *running* a program, not incorporating that program into itself. Indeed, your compiled program could actually run a GPL'd program and not be considered derivative, you just can't link it.
It's not the GPL's fault (or anything to do with the GPL actually) that some things are uncertain in copyright law and left up to the courts. If you have an issue with that, take it up with your representatives. Is a particular action fair use ? Sorry -the law doesn't say - it species what types of activities are potentially fair use but whether your particular case qualifies is left up to juries.
Same with the exact line between derivative work or not - the reason it's unclear is because it's unclear in the law, the GPL has nothing to do with the issue you're so concerned about.
For the record - wordpress has in the past successfully sued people for creating non GPL'd wordpress themes - and the SFLC agreed with them that those are clearly a derivative product. And the people shipping those plugins were not even bundling them with wordpress.
> The creators of AwesomeGPLProject2 might disagree with the SCUMM team's view that assets may be distributed under a different licence
None of the assets that we're talking about here is even part of the SCUMM project, nor are they created by or owned by that project. They belong to the original companies that made the game - mostly Sierra I believe. There is nothing in the GPL that allows you to usurp somebody else's copyrights by writing a program that can read their stuff.
Now you may have an argument about GOG distributing these proprietary assets and ScummVM together - especially for code Scumm inherrited from a different project, but if there is any problem at all - it's with GOG not ScummVM. And I don't believe there is an issue since GOG is ScummVM and the assets are two completely disparate projects, GOG is merely doing you the favour of shipping ScummVM preconfigured for you - but you would be quite capable of buying the game from them by itself and doing that yourself. Unbundling here would not benefit anybody - and it wouldn't make anymore more free.
Anyway, there has never been an ethical demand for game assets to be free - the free software ethics are specific to software (even RMS has repeatedly stated that it's a mistake to think one set of copyright rules could work for all the many kinds of things copyright is applied to and that different types of media should have different copyright rules to suit their specific needs). ID's version of the original doom and quake code are fully free software, regardless of the fact that the game assets are still proprietary and you need to buy them to play the games - it is also perfectly acceptable that openquake built their own replacement assets to allow those engines to be used without buying the game.
>Why not? I produce closed source software with a plugin architecture
The GPL specifically states that plugin architectures are a gray area and if this should ever become an issue then a judge will have to determine them on the merits of the case, whether your program qualifies as a 'derivative work' or not will be case specific.
>Loads of people produce third party plugins under different licences
That is not a problem.
> I offer my product with all of these included in the download
But this potentially IS a problem. If you are redistributing code that links to GPL'd code, even in a plugin, then a plugin author could potentially claim you are violating the license and demand that you GPL the program. You probably should exclude any copylefted plugins from the download. You're unlikely to get sued since your plugin authors know that you bundle the plugins and if they really had an issue with it then they wouldn't be submitting their plugins to you (which would count against them in a lawsuit as the jury may well rule that submitting their plugins knowing this they were intrinsically accepting that it would be bundled with a proprietary code and clearly did not mind). The fact that it's a plugin takes it further since you would generally deem a plugin to be the derivative work rather than other way around and most juries are likely to agree. Either way - it is probably better if you don't bundle GPL plugins with non-GPL programs. Just set up a website where people can download plugins they want.
>That would seem a strange interpretation.
It's also, technically, what the license says - whether it *really* applies to your case is something a jury of your peers would determine if ever a plugin author got pissed off at you.
It depends whether they are linked. Basically the same place where 'derivative work' lies in law. If your project has 10 executables, all of which work together, none of which are linked to each other -and only one is linked to a GPL'd library then only that one has to be GPLd.
>Common sense says invoking a linked library doesn't make my application a derivative work, but that's exactly what some people want the GPL to be.
No common sense says the exact opposite. Lazy freeloading says what you're hearing. You seem to have them confused.
>My guess is that we will see this type of violation more and more because while it is a violation, its not likely to be significant damages
That would only be a factor if anybody, anywhere has sued for damages. GPL cases never sue for damages -they sue for breach of contract and demand that the other party abide by the terms of the license (which is a legal contract) as they have no other right to distribute the software at all. The only restitution demanded is that they abide.
Most people who have been taken to task for this have chosen to abide without going to trial, the few that have chosen to fight the case in the courts have lost. Even mighty CISCO folded.
>. The people behind SCUMM VM seem to be of the opinion that assets and code are separate but I could imagine some authors of included code disagreeing that this is the correct interpretation.
That's entirely up to the licensor. Free engines for proprietary games generally require you to own a legal copy of the original game to get legal access to the assets. Writing a GPL engine that can parse those assets does not negate or alter the copyright and licensing on the assets or the code from the original. Games companies are generally okay with that as well - after all it gets them sales. Bethesda had concerns about OpenMW but after they spoke to the devs they became wholehearted supporters of the project.
>. I can produce a GPL clone of a closed source DLL. If I replace the closed source library with an GPL one, does an application that uses it need to be open source?
It depends who is doing the replacing. If the developer of the upstream app does it - then yes, he must. If you do it for yourself, then no - the GPL requirement only kicks in on distribution and you're not allowed to distributed the original app anyway since you don't own copyright. If it is freely redistributable then it depends on the license - if it's a GPL compatible license you can re-license it and distribute both, else you can't distribute them together. But if you write distribute a program that uses a proprietary library, and somebody else writes a free version of that library and a third-party buys your program and uses the free library instead of the original no copyrights were violated anywhere. Indeed, every time anybody runs a game in wine they are doing just that (though wine is lgpld).
>This does seem to lead to a hole.
Nope. See above. There is no version where you can distribute a program that is linking (dynamically or statically) to a GPL'd program without having to GPL it yourself. You can run a program that was linked against a proprietary library with a GPL'd one yourself, but you can't give it to anybody else.