Australian law is based on British law (as is most law)
Erm, no. For starters there isn't a British law in the sense that you are talking about. Lets suppose you meant English law. The common law is one of the big world legal families. It basically applies almost everywhere that used to be British. This is not most places.Of the 180+ countries in the world there are 54 Commonwealth countries plus a handful of non-Commonwealth ex-British places (the US and Isreal, for example).
Another big important legal family is the continental civil law tradition which includes most of Europe, many of the former colonies of other European powers and Japan, which based its civil code on the German one a bit over 100 years ago. Islamic law is also practised in a significant number of jurisdictions. Some Asian and African countries have indiginous legal systems or systems with strong indigenous influences, but I really don't know all that much about those.
I'm sorry, but the term "illegal immigrant" in Australia is frequently abused, especially by the Government, and applied to refugees. Under international law, a person is a refugee if they flee their country under a legitimate fear of persecution on one of a list of grounds. Note that they are a refugee as soon as they cross a border*. The vetting processes only work out who is a refugee: the person concerned (if a genuine refugee) was one already. So, whatever Mr Ruddock may have said, Australia is locking up refugees and turning them away before they get to Australia. Note also that countries have an absolute responsibility at international law to provide safe haven to refugees who fall into their hands regardless of how many refugees arrive. The Australian government's policy of turning back ships at sea is designed to make sure refugees cannot end up on Australian territory and hence do not become Australia's responsibility. This is a cynical abuse of the spirit, if not the letter, of international law and it is a cynical abuse which has the potential to cost lives.
And on the subject of number of asylum seekers (ie people claiming to be refugees), the number is utterly tiny in absolute terms and per capita compared to other developed countries and even smaller compared to the refugees in the developing world. The vast majority of refugees flee developing countries to neighbouring developing countries. Take the Afghanistan example: the vast majority of Afghan refugees ended up in Iran and Pakistan. Those are countries who bear significant costs due to refugees. Australia does very little. Similarly, the United Kingdom, which has a population about four times that of Australia, often receives in a month the number of asylum seekers that Australia receives in a year.
Australia's position on asylum seekers is repugnant and is not even supported, as is often claimed and as you implicitly claim by your use of the term "large numbers", by Australia being in a particularly pressing situation with respect to refugees. No such situation exists.
David
*There is a big crack in international law around "internally displaced persons" who are people who flee persecution but don't cross a border. Under international law, no-one has a responsibility to help these people and the UNHCR has no mandate to get involved.
>i'm aware of the US's uniqueness in the fact that we have a freedom of the press,
This is clearly not true in the usual sense of the word "unique". I suggest you study some comparative constitutional law before you start making this sort of statement. For a couple of examples, I'd try reading the Swedish Fundamental Law on Freedom of the Press (the term "fundamental" indicates that it's a part of the constitution). You might also like to check out the German constitution (I think it's article 5) although you'd also need to check the case-law to see the extent of the freedom that this gives the press. In addition, many European countries have hard-coded bills of rights. There is also the European Convention on Human Rights which is binding on essentially all European governments but in this particular matter it doesn't help much since there is a national security exemption which the UK government would be using here.
No, clause 2 of the OSL is a patent licence, not a copyright licence. Note that it is a "license under the Licensed Claims" which is a patent term. The relevant copyright licence is at OSL clause 1.c. which says:
Licensor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual, non-sublicenseable license to do the following:
c. to distribute copies of the Original Work and Derivative Works to the public, with the proviso that copies of Original Work or Derivative Works that You distribute shall be licensed under the Open Software License;
Note "royalty free". So, just like under the GPL, you can't charge for a licence. No mention is made of charging for copies so presumably, just like under the GPL, you can charge for the act of providing a copy.
>If you are using "apt-get" you are using debian and aren't a desktop user.
Sorry? Why does using Debian not make you a desktop use?
Debian is certainly on *my* desktop (and my job is scientific computing, it really is a desktop machine not a server). For that matter our cluster runs Redhat which you presumably would count as a desktop distro. Since Mandrake, Debian, Redhat and all the other mainstream distros include a fairly similar range of software, I can't see what makes any of them more "desktop" than the other.
No, absolutely not. The issue that has been raised about whether distribution within a company is distribution stems from the fact that a company is a single legal entity and is therefore distributing only to itself.
If two companies develop software together then already it is distribution every time they send each other a copy (although in this case the companies would presumably not choose to invoke their GPL right to redistribute). The relationship of a beta tester to the company is at most a contract. The beta tester is a completely separate entity. Hence giving the beta tester a copy of the software is definitely distribution and can only be done under the terms of the GPL.
Sorry, that's not what the ICC is for. Irritating though having the **AA attack your computer might be, it hardly counts as a war crime or a crime against humanity (although some of the crap put out by the media industry possibly should be:-).
The executives concerned would have to be hauled up in front of the local courts somewhere (here in Delft would be nice, I'd go and watch).
> In this case, we are talking about the U.S., since the U.S. is one of the few countries which permits software patents (another is Japan).
As for patents, I agree at the moment (although the European Patent Office appears to have other ideas). The long period of copyrights, on the other hand, is a problem of universal significance.
>> Sorry, wrong again. In legislating, parliament >> (presumably also congress) is not bound by >> previous acts of parliament. > >U.S. Constitution; Article I; Section 9; Paragraph 3: > >"No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
Yes, but a repealing act is not the same as a retrospective act. An act which repealed the copyright act effective tomorrow would not be retrospective. The distinction is between changing rights in the past and changing now rights granted in the past.
Think about property taxes. A property tax is a new burden on old rights. Assuming the tax is only levied into the future, it is not retrospective even though it affects rights which existed before the introduction of the tax.
Re:Your first proposal *can not work*
on
Copyright as Cudgel
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
> Laws are not permitted to be retroactive,
That depends on your jurisdicition. As a bare minimum, the governments of Commonwealth countries have this power.
In addition, an act to shorten copyright would not be retrospective as it would only affect future behaviour. An act which stated, for example, that all works written before 1980 went out of copyright in 2000 would be retrospective but an act stating that all works written before 1983 will go out of copyright in 2003 would not. What might be a problem is seizure of property. I say might because, first, intellectual property is not necessarily a proprietary right - once again this is a legal system question. Second, depending on jurisdiction, seizure of property may or may not be a legal problem. Some constitutions permit legislation allowing this.
> This works because the copyright protection > granted works is made *in trade* for the > disclosure of the copyrighted information.
This is simply wrong. Copyright still applies to non-published works. For example, if I send you a letter, I own the copyright in that letter without me generally disclosing it. Further, even my own diary is copyright even if I don't show it to anyone. For example, if you enter my house (as a guest or as a trespasser) and open it up without my permission, your use of it is still restricted by copyright.
> What it boils down to is that rewriting a >contract without the consent of both parties is >illegal. In the copyright extension act case, the >argument is that it was done without the consent >of the public.
Sorry, wrong again. In legislating, parliament (presumably also congress) is not bound by previous acts of parliament. It might be politically difficult to go back on a leislative deal, you might even feel it's morally wrong but it's not illegal (which is to say beyond power, in this context).
Very funny:-) And I agree, not off-topic. Unfortunately, I'm not a moderator today so I can't put it back up. It shows a certain lack of awareness by the moderator who probably only speaks English and has had so little exposure to other languages that he can't tell the difference between "I don't understand" and "this is junk".
As alledgedly well educated people like the editors should be aware, the UK has a unitary form of government. There is no federal government in the UK and hence no federal representatives!
Actually, for many parallel applications the killer is latency rather than bandwidth. That's why we end up shelling out so many Euros for proprietary networks like Myrinet. I don't know what the latency on 10Gbit is but Gbit ethernet is not really much better than 100Mbit.
On the other hand, and off-topic, I don't know what prevents Bill Gates from paying RMS a few billion to write a "or be used in a proprietary microsoft product" as an exception in the new GPL XP license...
Nothing except the FSFs good nature. This is precisely why software such as the Linux kernel is released under precisely version 2 and not "version 2 or any later version".
Sorry to inform you that this is clearly not true.
I note that you have a UK URL. The UK parliament,
for example, has full power to legislate
retrospectively and has done so (I think some
of the Prevetion of Terrorism Acts have retrospective effect, for example). In the particular case of European countries, retrospective
crimes may fall foul of the ECHR but I wouldn't bank on it.
However, I seem to recall that there is a constitutional problem with retrospective crimes in the US.
Having cast my partially legally trained eye over this treaty, I have to say that on the whole people have got this one wrong. To me this looks like a non-issue treaty. The things that people seem to be going on about are not the result of this treaty. Specifically:
* There is no substantive change in the criminality of IP related activities. - The treaty simply states that states must follow their other international oblgations. The problem is in the IP treaties, not this one.(Article 10)
* The treaty's search and seizure type provisions refer to "competant authorities". In international law there is not distinction between different arms of government so a country can fulfil its obligations under this part by allowing a court to make an order. Courts almost certainly already have this power in all relevant countries.
* The treaty does not enable or require countries to apply legislation extra-territorially. Sklyarov type cases are nothing to do with this treaty. Jurisdiction under this treaty follows the norms at international law (Article 22). That is, states only have jurisdiction over offences committed in their own territory. The extradition rules are pretty much standard international rules. They allow for getting back people who are alledged to have committed a crime in your state and who have fled elsewhere.
* The aiding and betting rules are also not out of the ordinary. If you read the crimes act in your jurisdiction you will probably find similar provisions applying to all crimes, not just computer offences.
* The treaty explicitly does not override the European Convention on Human Rights or any other human rights treaty (Article 15)
* The treaty does not require countries to pass RIP style password surrender legislation.
To haul this post back on topic, however: IMHO (and I'm also a scientific programmer working in Fortran 95) Fortran is a great case of a language which works best in combination with other languages. Yes, fortran is THE language for doing computations fast but I/O, graphics and other peripheral issues are really not it's forte. Fortran glued onto other bits by something interpreted (Python, for example) is a good way of dealing with this.
This is not 100% clear. For example, my last modem in Australia (sorry, I can't remember which brand it was) came with a warning that setting certain options (causing it to automatically redial a number too many times, for example) would cause the device to fail to conform to AusTel standards and therefore make it illegal to connect to the network. So software certainly can make your modem break the rules. I'm not sure whether the software had to be certified, though, or whether it just had to in fact conform to the standard.
I can't see this being easier to use than the dictionary idea employed on Nokia phones (and probably others too). It gets you one push on each key and you can do it with your thumb. The newish Nokia 3330 even has multiple dictionaries so you can SMS in different languages. Admitadly it is a little clumsy when it doesn't know the word you're after, but once you've taught it your friends' names, you don't run into this too often.
As other posters have pointed out, the doctrine of precedent is common across the common law world. If you study comparative law it soon becomes apparent that precedent is an important element in European civil law systems as well. This is even observable in countries like France where officially courts are not supposed to take into account the decisions of other courts and are not in the habit of giving lengthy reasoned judgements as is the practice of common law courts.
Further, the legal systems of civil law countries are not, in general, more or less transparent than common law countries. If you just take a look at the code civiel (sp?) or any of the other European codes, (just look at the size of the book, you don't have to read it) you will realise that they consist mainly of broadly applicable rules which require considerable interpretation to apply to particular cases. Civil law systems have traditionally spread the role of such interpretation between judges and legal experts, often in universities but at the end of the day, the judiciary still have to make the call.
It is unclear from the article which exclusions Mr Knight is referring to but my guess is that the obvious one is the exclusion on warranty. In the case where GPL (or other Free software - it's in all the licences) software is *sold* then I think that Australian consumer law may impose statutory warranty provisions regardless of what's in the licence. I would imagine this is an issue in other countries as well.
Aside from that, the GPL is very clearly American-centric - it's written in American not English:).
Actually in some sense copyright does make you the "owner" of a work. Let me explain. Common law (physical) property is based on the doctrine of estates. An estate is a bundle of rights attached to a thing (a car, an apple, a house etc.). Such rights include the right to posession, the right to modify or destroy, and depending on the nature of the thing, many others. Property rights may be perpetual or they may be limited in time. Different people may own estates in different things. For example, if I lease your house for a year then I own the right to posess (live in) that house for one year and some auxiliary rights, you own a whole load of other rights, including the right to my rent payments and the right to possession after that year. Some property rights arise at common law and some are created by statute.
In the case of "Intellectual Property" rights, they are similarly rights attached (by statute) for a limited time to a thing - in this case, though, the thing is information (for example with patents) or the expression of information (for example copyright). Once again different people can hold rights in the same piece of intellectual property and, due to the nature of property, it is common for very large numbers of people to have rights (even buying a book gets you some rights in it).
Now, intellectual property is always created by statute and hitherto usually for finite time (although successive extensions of copyrigbt have begun to change this). Also, the rights generated are quite a bit different from those involved in physical property. For this reason, they are usually regarded as separate legal fields with similar terminology because of the analogies mentioned above. The problem arrises because these are technical terms often misunderstood by lay people who then leap to the unfortunate conclusions that property and IP are the same thing.
The word he's looking for is NOT 'consideration' or 'quid pro quo'. That's something very different - the idea that all contracts must offer something of value to all parties. It may only be "$1 and other considerations," but there has to be *something*.
That's what consideration is. The doctrine of consideration says that each party to a contract must promise something. It's also known as the "peppercorn" doctrine because the something promised only needs to have nominal value - like a peppercorn, for example.
>When it's compulsory to vote, the constitution makes sure it is easy to vote;
Er, no it doesn't. The reason it's so easy to vote in Australia is
that governments and electoral commissions have decided to make it
so. Of course it would be a little unfair given compulsory voting to
make it hard to vote, but the constitution doesn't have anything to
say on it. (Voting is not made compulsory by the constitution, it
became compusory sometime in the 1920s when they changed the
electoral act because very few people were voting in federal elections).
Some of the main issues, from a legal point of view, surrounding this project are discussed in this paper which I wrote a couple of months back for a course given by the Law Faculty of the Australian National University.
There are some inherant difficulties in maintaining security, transparency and accoutability when moving to electronic voting and the problems in this case are compounded by the fact that the whole thing has been done in a rush. There are only about 11 months between the introduction of enabling legislation and the vote. The successful tenderer was only officially announced in April and polling day is in October. This does not leave much time for comprehensive external software testing.
Now, if the AU government uses GPL-ed code, will they publish their voting software under the GPL so we can use (and improve on) it here too?
Yes. In order to allow parties (and potentially voters) to audit the software it needs to be released. It is therefore available (in current draft form) at evacs.samba.org. (The reason it's on the samba website is that people like Andrew Tridgell are/were involved in the project).
Slashdot Mirror
Erm, no. For starters there isn't a British law in the sense that you are talking about. Lets suppose you meant English law. The common law is one of the big world legal families. It basically applies almost everywhere that used to be British. This is not most places.Of the 180+ countries in the world there are 54 Commonwealth countries plus a handful of non-Commonwealth ex-British places (the US and Isreal, for example).
Another big important legal family is the continental civil law tradition which includes most of Europe, many of the former colonies of other European powers and Japan, which based its civil code on the German one a bit over 100 years ago. Islamic law is also practised in a significant number of jurisdictions. Some Asian and African countries have indiginous legal systems or systems with strong indigenous influences, but I really don't know all that much about those.
I'm sorry, but the term "illegal immigrant" in Australia is frequently abused, especially by the Government, and applied to refugees. Under international law, a person is a refugee if they flee their country under a legitimate fear of persecution on one of a list of grounds. Note that they are a refugee as soon as they cross a border*. The vetting processes only work out who is a refugee: the person concerned (if a genuine refugee) was one already. So, whatever Mr Ruddock may have said, Australia is locking up refugees and turning them away before they get to Australia. Note also that countries have an absolute responsibility at international law to provide safe haven to refugees who fall into their hands regardless of how many refugees arrive. The Australian government's policy of turning back ships at sea is designed to make sure refugees cannot end up on Australian territory and hence do not become Australia's responsibility. This is a cynical abuse of the spirit, if not the letter, of international law and it is a cynical abuse which has the potential to cost lives.
And on the subject of number of asylum seekers (ie people claiming to be refugees), the number is utterly tiny in absolute terms and per capita compared to other developed countries and even smaller compared to the refugees in the developing world. The vast majority of refugees flee developing countries to neighbouring developing countries. Take the Afghanistan example: the vast majority of Afghan refugees ended up in Iran and Pakistan. Those are countries who bear significant costs due to refugees. Australia does very little. Similarly, the United Kingdom, which has a population about four times that of Australia, often receives in a month the number of asylum seekers that Australia receives in a year.
Australia's position on asylum seekers is repugnant and is not even supported, as is often claimed and as you implicitly claim by your use of the term "large numbers", by Australia being in a particularly pressing situation with respect to refugees. No such situation exists.
David
*There is a big crack in international law around "internally displaced persons" who are people who flee persecution but don't cross a border. Under international law, no-one has a responsibility to help these people and the UNHCR has no mandate to get involved.
>i'm aware of the US's uniqueness in the fact that we have a freedom of the press,
This is clearly not true in the usual sense of the word "unique". I suggest you study some comparative constitutional law before you start making this sort of statement. For a couple of examples, I'd try reading the Swedish Fundamental Law on Freedom of the Press (the term "fundamental" indicates that it's a part of the constitution). You might also like to check out the German constitution (I think it's article 5) although you'd also need to check the case-law to see the extent of the freedom that this gives the press. In addition, many European countries have hard-coded bills of rights. There is also the European Convention on Human Rights which is binding on essentially all European governments but in this particular matter it doesn't help much since there is a national security exemption which the UK government would be using here.
No, clause 2 of the OSL is a patent licence, not a copyright licence. Note that it is a "license under the Licensed Claims" which is a patent term. The relevant copyright licence is at OSL clause 1.c. which says:
Note "royalty free". So, just like under the GPL, you can't charge for a licence. No mention is made of charging for copies so presumably, just like under the GPL, you can charge for the act of providing a copy.
Yes, I too am a Law student.
David
>If you are using "apt-get" you are using debian and aren't a desktop user.
Sorry? Why does using Debian not make you a desktop use?
Debian is certainly on *my* desktop (and my job is scientific computing, it really is a desktop machine not a server). For that matter our cluster runs Redhat which you presumably would count as a desktop distro. Since Mandrake, Debian, Redhat and all the other mainstream distros include a fairly similar range of software, I can't see what makes any of them more "desktop" than the other.
No, absolutely not. The issue that has been raised about whether distribution within a company is distribution stems from the fact that a company is a single legal entity and is therefore distributing only to itself.
If two companies develop software together then already it is distribution every time they send each other a copy (although in this case the companies would presumably not choose to invoke their GPL right to redistribute). The relationship of a beta tester to the company is at most a contract. The beta tester is a completely separate entity. Hence giving the beta tester a copy of the software is definitely distribution and can only be done under the terms of the GPL.
Sorry, that's not what the ICC is for. Irritating though having the **AA attack your computer might be, it hardly counts as a war crime or a crime against humanity (although some of the crap put out by the media industry possibly should be :-).
The executives concerned would have to be hauled up in front of the local courts somewhere (here in Delft would be nice, I'd go and watch).
David
> In this case, we are talking about the U.S., since the U.S. is one of the few countries which permits software patents (another is Japan).
As for patents, I agree at the moment (although the European Patent Office appears to have other ideas). The long period of copyrights, on the other hand, is a problem of universal significance.
>> Sorry, wrong again. In legislating, parliament
>> (presumably also congress) is not bound by
>> previous acts of parliament.
>
>U.S. Constitution; Article I; Section 9; Paragraph 3:
>
>"No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
Yes, but a repealing act is not the same as a retrospective act. An act which repealed the copyright act effective tomorrow would not be retrospective. The distinction is between changing rights in the past and changing now rights granted in the past.
Think about property taxes. A property tax is a new burden on old rights. Assuming the tax is only levied into the future, it is not retrospective even though it affects rights which existed before the introduction of the tax.
> Laws are not permitted to be retroactive,
That depends on your jurisdicition. As a bare minimum, the governments of Commonwealth countries have this power.
In addition, an act to shorten copyright would not be retrospective as it would only affect future behaviour. An act which stated, for example, that all works written before 1980 went out of copyright in 2000 would be retrospective but an act stating that all works written before 1983 will go out of copyright in 2003 would not. What might be a problem is seizure of property. I say might because, first, intellectual property is not necessarily a proprietary right - once again this is a legal system question. Second, depending on jurisdiction, seizure of property may or may not be a legal problem. Some constitutions permit legislation allowing this.
> This works because the copyright protection
> granted works is made *in trade* for the
> disclosure of the copyrighted information.
This is simply wrong. Copyright still applies to non-published works. For example, if I send you a letter, I own the copyright in that letter without me generally disclosing it. Further, even my own diary is copyright even if I don't show it to anyone. For example, if you enter my house (as a guest or as a trespasser) and open it up without my permission, your use of it is still restricted by copyright.
> What it boils down to is that rewriting a
>contract without the consent of both parties is
>illegal. In the copyright extension act case, the
>argument is that it was done without the consent
>of the public.
Sorry, wrong again. In legislating, parliament (presumably also congress) is not bound by previous acts of parliament. It might be politically difficult to go back on a leislative deal, you might even feel it's morally wrong but it's not illegal (which is to say beyond power, in this context).
Hej,
Very funny:-) And I agree, not off-topic. Unfortunately, I'm not a moderator today so I can't put it back up. It shows a certain lack of awareness by the moderator who probably only speaks English and has had so little exposure to other languages that he can't tell the difference between "I don't understand" and "this is junk".
Yep, sounds like slashdot.
As alledgedly well educated people like the editors should be aware, the UK has a unitary form of government. There is no federal government in the UK and hence no federal representatives!
Actually, for many parallel applications the killer is latency rather than bandwidth. That's why we end up shelling out so many Euros for proprietary networks like Myrinet. I don't know what the latency on 10Gbit is but Gbit ethernet is not really much better than 100Mbit.
However, I seem to recall that there is a constitutional problem with retrospective crimes in the US.
Having cast my partially legally trained eye over this treaty, I have to say that on the whole people have got this one wrong. To me this looks like a non-issue treaty. The things that people seem to be going on about are not the result of this treaty. Specifically:
* There is no substantive change in the criminality of IP related activities. - The treaty simply states that states must follow their other international oblgations. The problem is in the IP treaties, not this one.(Article 10)
* The treaty's search and seizure type provisions refer to "competant authorities". In international law there is not distinction between different arms of government so a country can fulfil its obligations under this part by allowing a court to make an order. Courts almost certainly already have this power in all relevant countries.
* The treaty does not enable or require countries to apply legislation extra-territorially. Sklyarov type cases are nothing to do with this treaty. Jurisdiction under this treaty follows the norms at international law (Article 22). That is, states only have jurisdiction over offences committed in their own territory. The extradition rules are pretty much standard international rules. They allow for getting back people who are alledged to have committed a crime in your state and who have fled elsewhere.
* The aiding and betting rules are also not out of the ordinary. If you read the crimes act in your jurisdiction you will probably find similar provisions applying to all crimes, not just computer offences.
* The treaty explicitly does not override the European Convention on Human Rights or any other human rights treaty (Article 15)
* The treaty does not require countries to pass RIP style password surrender legislation.
To haul this post back on topic, however: IMHO (and I'm also a scientific programmer working in Fortran 95) Fortran is a great case of a language which works best in combination with other languages. Yes, fortran is THE language for doing computations fast but I/O, graphics and other peripheral issues are really not it's forte. Fortran glued onto other bits by something interpreted (Python, for example) is a good way of dealing with this.
This is not 100% clear. For example, my last modem in Australia (sorry, I can't remember which brand it was) came with a warning that setting certain options (causing it to automatically redial a number too many times, for example) would cause the device to fail to conform to AusTel standards and therefore make it illegal to connect to the network. So software certainly can make your modem break the rules. I'm not sure whether the software had to be certified, though, or whether it just had to in fact conform to the standard.
I can't see this being easier to use than the dictionary idea employed on Nokia phones (and probably others too). It gets you one push on each key and you can do it with your thumb. The newish Nokia 3330 even has multiple dictionaries so you can SMS in different languages. Admitadly it is a little clumsy when it doesn't know the word you're after, but once you've taught it your friends' names, you don't run into this too often.
As other posters have pointed out, the doctrine of precedent is common across the common law world. If you study comparative law it soon becomes apparent that precedent is an important element in European civil law systems as well. This is even observable in countries like France where officially courts are not supposed to take into account the decisions of other courts and are not in the habit of giving lengthy reasoned judgements as is the practice of common law courts.
Further, the legal systems of civil law countries are not, in general, more or less transparent than common law countries. If you just take a look at the code civiel (sp?) or any of the other European codes, (just look at the size of the book, you don't have to read it) you will realise that they consist mainly of broadly applicable rules which require considerable interpretation to apply to particular cases. Civil law systems have traditionally spread the role of such interpretation between judges and legal experts, often in universities but at the end of the day, the judiciary still have to make the call.
It is unclear from the article which exclusions Mr Knight is referring to but my guess is that the obvious one is the exclusion on warranty. In the case where GPL (or other Free software - it's in all the licences) software is *sold* then I think that Australian consumer law may impose statutory warranty provisions regardless of what's in the licence. I would imagine this is an issue in other countries as well.
:).
Aside from that, the GPL is very clearly American-centric - it's written in American not English
Actually in some sense copyright does make you the "owner" of a work. Let me explain. Common law (physical) property is based on the doctrine of estates. An estate is a bundle of rights attached to a thing (a car, an apple, a house etc.). Such rights include the right to posession, the right to modify or destroy, and depending on the nature of the thing, many others. Property rights may be perpetual or they may be limited in time. Different people may own estates in different things. For example, if I lease your house for a year then I own the right to posess (live in) that house for one year and some auxiliary rights, you own a whole load of other rights, including the right to my rent payments and the right to possession after that year. Some property rights arise at common law and some are created by statute.
In the case of "Intellectual Property" rights, they are similarly rights attached (by statute) for a limited time to a thing - in this case, though, the thing is information (for example with patents) or the expression of information (for example copyright). Once again different people can hold rights in the same piece of intellectual property and, due to the nature of property, it is common for very large numbers of people to have rights (even buying a book gets you some rights in it).
Now, intellectual property is always created by statute and hitherto usually for finite time (although successive extensions of copyrigbt have begun to change this). Also, the rights generated are quite a bit different from those involved in physical property. For this reason, they are usually regarded as separate legal fields with similar terminology because of the analogies mentioned above. The problem arrises because these are technical terms often misunderstood by lay people who then leap to the unfortunate conclusions that property and IP are the same thing.
Stupid "copying is theft" messages result.
That's what consideration is. The doctrine of consideration says that each party to a contract must promise something. It's also known as the "peppercorn" doctrine because the something promised only needs to have nominal value - like a peppercorn, for example.
Er, no it doesn't. The reason it's so easy to vote in Australia is that governments and electoral commissions have decided to make it so. Of course it would be a little unfair given compulsory voting to make it hard to vote, but the constitution doesn't have anything to say on it. (Voting is not made compulsory by the constitution, it became compusory sometime in the 1920s when they changed the electoral act because very few people were voting in federal elections).
There are some inherant difficulties in maintaining security, transparency and accoutability when moving to electronic voting and the problems in this case are compounded by the fact that the whole thing has been done in a rush. There are only about 11 months between the introduction of enabling legislation and the vote. The successful tenderer was only officially announced in April and polling day is in October. This does not leave much time for comprehensive external software testing.
Yes. In order to allow parties (and potentially voters) to audit the software it needs to be released. It is therefore available (in current draft form) at evacs.samba.org. (The reason it's on the samba website is that people like Andrew Tridgell are/were involved in the project).