You seem to think the GPL can force somebody to reveal their source code
After posting 20 messages saying that I don't think that an I am trying to correct people who think it can, I am at a loss to see why you posted the above!
And it's true as far as it goes. There is nothing to test about the GPL when it comes to being able to stop somebody from redistributing GPLd code.
The untested thing is this. Say I write a program. I use a GPLd library (not LGPL) in it. I distribute the program, my code bound in with the library. Without source, not under the GPL.
The owner of the library, be it FSF or otherwise, sees this. They do, without question, have the power to tell me to stop distributing that library. They can even try to get damages for the copies I distributed.
The unanswered question is, can they force me to now release my program under the GPL, with source available and all the other provisions.
I suspect not, but as I say, it's unanswered, and Eben doesn't answer it in his essay either.
Yes, as I have said, this is correct. You can't distributed GPLd software. What is untested is whether you can be compelled to now publish your own additions to the code under the GPL or not.
Copyright law only says you can stop other people from copying your stuff, and if they do, you can sue them to stop them and to get damages. It doesn't explicitly say you can, because they copied your stuff, claim they agreed to the contract that came with it saying so.
To make it clear with the above analogy, if the licence said you had to pay 1 billion to use it, then indeed, anybody using it without paying the billion would be infringing on the copyright.
However, and this is a very important however, they would NOT owe you a billion dollars. The court would not command that. The court would command them to stop distributing it, and to pay you the real and/or statutory damages for the infrignement.
The billion number would only come into play if other people had paid you a billion, so you could show a fair market value and that you really lost a billion when they used it without permission. Otherwise, it's just a number from a hat.
Alas, damages in copyright cases are monetary, so as far as I know this would not apply to demands other than for money. There are "moral rights" claims but I doubt they could enforce the GPL.
The issue is whether these implicit licence contracts can be enforced, and how much. It's certainly possible to use GPLd code without even reading the licence, for example. One could easily insert a GPLd (not LGPLd) library into a program without reading the licence with only a little laziness.
This is a hard legal question. How much can you be bound to a contract by action rather than explicit agreement? Right now there's even debate about how much you can be bound to a contract when you actually click "I agree" on the contract! For example, there is quite a bit of debate over whether various clauses in those clickwrap agreements can be enforced, such as terms that forbid reverse engineering.
The same debate has gone on (though it's gotten more settled) on shrinkwrap licence agreements and torn-sticker contracts etc.
But any time you try to claim somebody agreed to a contract other than by doing the usual forms of explicit agreement, it's a legal gray area. The law settles them one way some times, other ways other times.
Copyright law is clear that copyright lets you control how people copy your work. Nothing in the statute provides the ability to say "copying of this work implies agreement with the contract bundled with it." The GPL is a new principle that needs to be tested in court to see if it can do this.
Copyright law does not include a clause saying that you get to dictate what people do with their own changes. It does include precedents that actual derivative works can be controlled by the original copyright holder, so those might apply to things like patches. Whether they would apply to a program that uses a GPLd (not LGPLd) library is again an unanswered question. You can certainly stop people from including the library in what they distribute. But what you can command them to do with their code is not yet ruled, as far as I know, in a court of law.
The GPL sets out how the user of the GPL would like the infringer to be treated, but until we have a court case where a court has ordered such compliance, we don't know. I welcome citations people may have.
Replying to this post indicates agreement with the following terms. All source code you have ever written (whether it includes this post or not) must be assigned to me.
No, alas, it's not. A commercial licence is done as a contract, which is signed or agreed to by both parties explicitly. The GPL is attempting an "implicit" licence, where you are alleged to have agreed to a contract by simply doing something, like running software or copying code, rather than the traditional means of agreeing to a contract. (Signature, handshake etc.)
My point is, as you can see from another reply somebody wrote, many people believe that the way the GPL and other licences are written, they can command people who use modified GPLd code in a modified program they distribute to place their modifications under the GPL and to publish the source.
This is untested and probably not true. They can get a court to command you to stop distributing the software with the GPLd code. They can get a court to command you to pay damages for the copies you did distribute. They might get a court to declare criminal infringement but I really doubt it due to the monetary requirement there.
As for damages, you had better have a registered coypright, because that lets you have statutory damages. If you don't have that you get actual damages which are monetary and they are probably zero since the author didn't lose any money.
But the point I am making is, in spite of the claims that some make, I don't think you can command them to release the source to their program. You might be able to do this in practice by saying, "If you release your changes under the GPL, I will drop my infringement lawsuit" but that has a subtle difference in how it works.
My point was that people think they could use the GPL to force this, but nobody has actually done it yet as far as I know.
All copyright law says is that if you copy without permission, you have infringed a copyright, and it specifies the penalties for that.
It doesn't say about how you get permission, or an implied contract to do things (like publish your changes under GPL). Implied contracts and whether you agree to them is a contentious issue.
Do you really think that if software says "Use of this software implies agreement with this contract which says you will do what we tell you to do" is or should be enforceable?
These licences all say, "the only terms under which you can copy this work is if you agree to this licence."
But that's misleading. If you copy a copyrighted work without permission from the copyright holder (ie. without agreeing to the terms set out) then you have made a copyright violation. That's it. You have not made yourself bound to the terms, which you may not even have been aware of. You can be sued for a copyright violation, and in some cases charged with criminal copyright infringement, but I don't think you can be bound to any mystical licence terms. Possibly if they have proof you knew of the terms and deliberately ignored them, but maybe not even then.
Think about it. What if the GPL said "You may not use this software unless you give the FSF 1 billion dollars. Re-copying of this software implies acceptance of this price."
Everybody would agree that's ridiculous. So why do they think you can write a term like that dictating what licence you will put on your changes?
I think if you violate a viral licence like the GPL or this one, they can sue you to stop publishing the original code or the derivative work. They can ask for damages. But they can't command you -- other than in negotiation to drop the lawsuit -- to follow other terms.
I believe that many people who know perfectly well what the FSF has done say "Linux" because they know it annoys Richard.
For better or worse, Richard has taken a stance of a very specific ideological purity and style of interaction that he must know will annoy people. That is his choice. But he should accept the consequence, that people will be tempted to do the opposite of what he asks. Spiteful? Sure. But that doesn't do away with it.
To make money, as everybody is telling you. And I think you could be. Some people would whine, but frankly, let them whine. It's free ISP. If you don't want it, don't connect.
For example, all for-pay wireless hubs are set up so unknown cards have all web traffic diverted to a signup page where people can pay. They agree to pay and they are put in the pool of people who can get out.
You could use this technique not to collect money (though you could collect money) but to do a very direct, quid-pro-quo advertising campaign. One they can't ignore, such as read a page about an advertiser, then answer a question about the advertiser, and you're on for an hour.
And yes, you have to limit the time because do it one-time and people with offices in the area might use you as a permanent ISP and use up all the bandwidth and spectrum.
Again, if people don't want it, they don't use it and that doesn't tie up any resources or cost anything.
An even better plan with more direct cash, and much easier to sell to merchants would be to have the page say, "Here is a list of local merchants that support this access. Go buy something from any of these merchants. When you buy, ask for a wireless access card."
You give the merchants the cards, which are like prepaid phone cards with an ID# good for an amount of access to your network. People buy a small item like a coffee and they get a card good for a few hours or an afternoon. Buy a big item and get a card good for a month or whatever.
You could sell these cards to merchants, or better to give them free and bill them for the ones that get used.
Or customers could just buy the cards from you directly, of course.
Copyright allows a creator to create a work and sell it to 100 different people for $20 each to make $2,000. Without copyright, work for hire means she has to charge the $2,000 for her labour to earn the same money.
And in a competitive market, which photography is, in the end the wedding photog wants the money, not the rights. The rights are a path to that money.
So the benefit for the public in copyright is that it spreads the cost among all the people who want photos. If some can get them for free, then others have to pay more.
So you want the photographer to give you the negatives or the hi-res scans. Then expect to pay what the photographer hoped to make from sales to all the family and wedding guests that now won't be made. And the sales years later when images are destroyed, etc.
This applies everywhere. For example, with movies in cinematic release, I can see a $100M movie for $9. Why? Because they can make sure everybody who sees it pays. Later, when it's on video, I ahve to pay $25 to buy a DVD that is much lower quality than the one in the cinema, and I'm going to watch it only once, but they can't know that, so it costs more. Or I can rent it for less but with lots of hassle. The protection they have (in this case not copyright but rather the ticket taker guarding the door) lets the cost be spread among all who want to see the film, so we all get to see it cheap.
People seem to ignore this central public good in the copyright debate. When it comes to a business, the copyright owner would like to make as much money as possible. One way they would like to do that is to charge for every possible use of their work. Every use they can't charge for means they must charge more for the uses they can charge for in order to get the same money. Thus everything they can't charge for is subsidised by what they can.
In society, we make the decision to have that subsidy, because we don't want the draconian level of control it would require for them to charge for every possible use. And with good reason -- such a level of control would be ridiculous. But each time we decide that, we should remember it comes with a cost, something else will increase in price to make a subsidy for the thing that isn't charged for, at least in a reasonably competitive market.
How about the first use of "flame on"/"flame off"
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The First Smiley :-)
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· Score: 4, Interesting
But one thing I would like to find that I dimly remember is the first use (on Arpanet mailing lists
in the late 70s) of the Johnny Storm "Flame On!" when getting angry in a posting.
In those days it was always followed with "Flame Off", though this has sadly gone by the wayside.
Re:Installation not so hard -- and not so importan
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Libranet 2.7 Released
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Ok, I agree that you would temper this for anybody exposed on the network (which you can detect without asking of course) or for those who want to set a security level. So you don't install everything, but nor do you ask people about things they don't even know about.
Re:Installation not so hard -- and not so importan
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Libranet 2.7 Released
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· Score: 2
Similar example. I installed Debian and it provided a number of network card modules. I had no idea what network card was in the machine. Why should I?
So I installed with a guess, and it was wrong, so the install was screwed and I had to do lots to fix it. Not at all pleasant.
In addition, today disk space is so cheap that, if you are installing from CD, you should just install everything that doesn't conflict and let people remove later. Don't give them a lot of questions to answer. Even an experienced user (now hitting my 25th year of use of Unix or something like it) gets tired of having to answer a lot of questions that in the end just don't matter.
And the inexperienced user is even more blessed if they don't have to answer those questions. If you can undo, if you can fix it later if you need to, then DON'T ASK. Or ask once if you the user wants to answer more detailed questions or wants a simple install.
Now since Debian network installs, I can see how you want to limit the load on servers, that is a point.
Plug and play is the way to go. If you can ever make it so the user can just plug it in, and it works, do it. Even if it's a bit slower. Does the user want DHCP or static IP? Don't ask the user, ask the DHCP server! Let them undo it later to static IP if they need it.
Host name, time zone, user name and partition style. That's about all that needs to be asked at install time.
My point is that a copyright infringement only lets you get the damages that copyright law allows -- statutory damages for registered copyrights, and actual damages if greater, or actual damages only if unregistered.
Copyright infringement is not grounds to force people to do other things like putting their own source code under GPL. There are some interesting unexplored questions on ownership of derivative works which could produce possible results here, but this would not apply if somebody uses a GPL (not LGPL) library in a code base.
To be compelled to obey a contract you must agree to it. To use GPLed code in a closed source project is to infringe the copyright on the GPLed code. It is a bigger leap to say it is an implicit agreement to a contract.
Of course not. But the GPL says, "If you take this GPLd code, and compile it and sell it, you must agree/are agreeing to licence the larger package containing the code under the GPL."
The difference is between "must licence under GPL" and "agree to licence under GPL"
You can indeed say that the price of using the code is to licence the package containing it under GPL, ie. publish source etc.
That's the price. The question is, can it be a compulsion, that no other remedy is allowed.
If it said, "If you use this code in your software and publish your software, you owe me 1 trillion dollars" do you think the courts would enforce that?
No, when you use somebody's code without permission it's a copyright infringement, and they tend to just look at what the penalty for that should be.
No, that strict interpretation would make Sigma liable for having distributed code they had no right to distribute in the past. Simply stopping shipping the code would not make the terms right.
That's the danger here. For example, we all click on clickwrap contracts every day, installing software. Including the GPL contract. But the law is not going to allow those contracts to bind you to anything at all. It's going to limit what those contracts can do.
And it will limit even more implicit contracts. It's not going to rule, I predict, that if Microsoft integrated some GPL code into Windows, that it is now bound to GPL all its code, even though that's what the GPL says.
It is more likely they would soften it as you say, just telling them to remove it, or pay some monetary damages.
Did the authors register their copyright? They need to do that to get statutory damages. If they did, the statutory damages could be extremely high, and so you would have a case for Sigma to fear.
If not, they should register it right away, while Sigma is still distributing the alleged infringement.
If not registered, you can only get actual damages. And it's easy to see a court saying that actual damages -- which are financial, not personal -- are zero in a case like this. How much money did the team lose? You might do better arguing how much Sigma made from the infringing code but they would of course make the argument that the money came from their proprietary additions, not the GPLd code which of course anybody can get for free.
To compel them to comply with GPL, you will have to get the court to agree with the implied licence. That's harder, though if they really have documents from Sigma admitting that they were aware of the GPL terms you might have a shot.
Otherwise, I don't think anybody has had a court rule that you would be bound by the GPL contract if you used GPLd code. They would rule you violated copyright, but will they rule more?
Think about it. If I put a licence in my code saying "Use this code without my permission and you must give me your whole corporation" no court would consider that enforceable.
Will they consider it enforceable if the licence says "use this code without my permission and you must give away all the source code to everything you bundled with it"? Also in doubt.
Disgusting thought, but you could also make a diamond from any carbon source after incineration. For example, blood, or for those not easily disgusted, fecal matter.
Yes, for the one you love, give the gift of yourself in an engagement ring.
Well, this special status is after my time, so I don't know the reasons for it, but I doubt it would simply be that the students give better interviews, as the book chapter implied. That would work at first, but surely after hiring a lot of UW grads if they didn't do a good job you would notice the steak didn't match the sizzle.
I think microsoft would notice, they put a lot of effort into their hiring.
You didn't to be a software developer. You could learn to be a software developer over in E.E. or at many other schools, but because you went to the C.S. department in the Math faculty, they had the idea they should teach you some math before giving you a degree that says Bachelor of Mathematics.
Now this view is obviously fading a bit with the School of Computer Science, but it was hardly a secret.
How many people are as famous as Dijkstra or Stallman? (Not that my mother would know either of their names!)
And how many famous poeple do you know the alma mater of?
A lot of guys from my time at U of Waterloo have done stuff to get noticed. People like Mark Tilden get written about. Ever heard of RIM? Built almost entirely by UW people, and I know their names and went to school with many of 'em, so you might not.
Some for the people who founded Mortis Kern, who were also the people who wrote Coherent, pretty well known in Unix circles.
Know Tom Duff and Bill Reeves? They're pretty famous in computer graphics circles. You see their names on the credits or a lot of movies from ILM and PIXAR. Late 70s waterloo folks again.
Walter Banks, one of the founders of Byte magazine? Scott Vanstone, pioneer in eliptic curve cryptography. (he taught me crypto.) And as the article suggests, though MS doesn't make its programmers into stars, a ton of Microsoft's code is from UW grads.
And you know, I'm not as famous as Stallman but I'm not that unknown myself in the online world.
And this is just the guys from my time around 1980. Lots of other folks after us went on to great things, but I don't necessarily know what school they went to.
Of course, UW is a young school, just coming up on 45 years of age. It got famous for WATFOR when it was only 10 years old. It takes a lot of time and reputation to get to the level of those other schools.
Is it the best school in the world? Who knows, but I know when I started hiring people years later, few I found from various U.S. schools were as good as the friends I had who were the best from Waterloo.
One of the often asked questions about Cryonics is why only about 600 people are signed up.
Many have said here that they oppose it. I am curious about the reasons in particular you are not signed up.
Many who are signed up don't think reanimation is particularly likely. They see all the risks, all the undeveloped technology. They might feel that their estimation of the chances of it working are one in a thousand or less.
Yet they are signed up because, simply put, the odds of success if you don't do it are absolutely and surely zero, barring religious faith in a non-material immortal soul.
If you don't do it, you're food for worms and permanently dead. If you do it, you may also be permanently dead, but it's hard to argue that you can be really sure there is no chance.
We simply don't know enough to say that it will work, but we also don't know enough to say that it won't work. Predictions that it will surely work as as doubtful as other famous early scientific speculation, but predictions that it surely won't work are as valid as the similar negative predictions that "experts" have made over the years. Most were right (so far) but many were also wrong.
We do know that when you take frozen brains and examine them under the electron microscope that all the structures that modern science believes to be important are still discernable. The information about the connections is all there. The connections are damaged of course. Many cell walls are ruptured, many dendrites are sliced, but it's still clear what they were connected to.
If I cut a PC-board in half, the circuit would be ruined, but I can certainly re-solder it, or build a new PC board and put the old chips on it. The information is still there, and so it is with frozen tissue. This is a matter of fact, not speculation, so to say it's impossible to repair this seems nonsensical. Hard? Certainly. Expensive? Quite possibly, though if it's all nanotech and software it's only expensive to do it the first time. But impossible? That's an extraordinary claim.
You might speculate there is more to the brain then the position of all the neurons and how they are interconnected and all their receptors. But that would be pure speculation. Science doesn't yet know enough about it at all, not enough to say what can or can't be done.
So given that, why take the alternative of certain death over any chance, no matter how slim? Is it the money? Is it that people are grossed out?
Of course there are many things that could go wrong. The company holding you could fail. (Though storing you is remarkably cheap. All it takes is a liquid nitrogen truck once a week to top up the tanks.) The world could change so that your descendents, friends or curious people have no desire to revive you. The world could change to a place you are incapable of living. Could. None of these are certain either. That being cremated is final -- that seems pretty certain.
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You seem to think the GPL can force somebody to reveal their source code
After posting 20 messages saying that I don't think that an I am trying to correct people who think it can, I am at a loss to see why you posted the above!
And it's true as far as it goes. There is nothing to test about the GPL when it comes to being able to stop somebody from redistributing GPLd code.
The untested thing is this. Say I write a program. I use a GPLd library (not LGPL) in it. I distribute the program, my code bound in with the library. Without source, not under the GPL.
The owner of the library, be it FSF or otherwise, sees this. They do, without question, have the power to tell me to stop distributing that library. They can even try to get damages for the copies I distributed.
The unanswered question is, can they force me to now release my program under the GPL, with source available and all the other provisions.
I suspect not, but as I say, it's unanswered, and Eben doesn't answer it in his essay either.
Yes, as I have said, this is correct. You can't distributed GPLd software. What is untested is whether you can be compelled to now publish your own additions to the code under the GPL or not.
Copyright law only says you can stop other people from copying your stuff, and if they do, you can sue them to stop them and to get damages. It doesn't explicitly say you can, because they copied your stuff, claim they agreed to the contract that came with it saying so.
To make it clear with the above analogy, if the licence said you had to pay 1 billion to use it, then indeed, anybody using it without paying the billion would be infringing on the copyright.
However, and this is a very important however, they would NOT owe you a billion dollars. The court would not command that. The court would command them to stop distributing it, and to pay you the real and/or statutory damages for the infrignement.
The billion number would only come into play if other people had paid you a billion, so you could show a fair market value and that you really lost a billion when they used it without permission. Otherwise, it's just a number from a hat.
Alas, damages in copyright cases are monetary, so as far as I know this would not apply to demands other than for money. There are "moral rights" claims but I doubt they could enforce the GPL.
The issue is whether these implicit licence contracts can be enforced, and how much. It's certainly possible to use GPLd code without even reading the licence, for example. One could easily insert a GPLd (not LGPLd) library into a program without reading the licence with only a little laziness.
This is a hard legal question. How much can you be bound to a contract by action rather than explicit agreement? Right now there's even debate about how much you can be bound to a contract when you actually click "I agree" on the contract! For example, there is quite a bit of debate over whether various clauses in those clickwrap agreements can be enforced, such as terms that forbid reverse engineering.
The same debate has gone on (though it's gotten more settled) on shrinkwrap licence agreements and torn-sticker contracts etc.
But any time you try to claim somebody agreed to a contract other than by doing the usual forms of explicit agreement, it's a legal gray area. The law settles them one way some times, other ways other times.
Copyright law is clear that copyright lets you control how people copy your work. Nothing in the statute provides the ability to say "copying of this work implies agreement with the contract bundled with it." The GPL is a new principle that needs to be tested in court to see if it can do this.
Copyright law does not include a clause saying that you get to dictate what people do with their own changes. It does include precedents that actual derivative works can be controlled by the original copyright holder, so those might apply to things like patches. Whether they would apply to a program that uses a GPLd (not LGPLd) library is again an unanswered question. You can certainly stop people from including the library in what they distribute. But what you can command them to do with their code is not yet ruled, as far as I know, in a court of law.
The GPL sets out how the user of the GPL would like the infringer to be treated, but until we have a court case where a court has ordered such compliance, we don't know. I welcome citations people may have.
Replying to this post indicates agreement with the following terms. All source code you have ever written (whether it includes this post or not) must be assigned to me.
No, alas, it's not. A commercial licence is done as a contract, which is signed or agreed to by both parties explicitly. The GPL is attempting an "implicit" licence, where you are alleged to have agreed to a contract by simply doing something, like running software or copying code, rather than the traditional means of agreeing to a contract. (Signature, handshake etc.)
My point is, as you can see from another reply somebody wrote, many people believe that the way the GPL and other licences are written, they can command people who use modified GPLd code in a modified program they distribute to place their modifications under the GPL and to publish the source.
This is untested and probably not true. They can get a court to command you to stop distributing the software with the GPLd code. They can get a court to command you to pay damages for the copies you did distribute. They might get a court to declare criminal infringement but I really doubt it due to the monetary requirement there.
As for damages, you had better have a registered coypright, because that lets you have statutory damages. If you don't have that you get actual damages which are monetary and they are probably zero since the author didn't lose any money.
But the point I am making is, in spite of the claims that some make, I don't think you can command them to release the source to their program. You might be able to do this in practice by saying, "If you release your changes under the GPL, I will drop my infringement lawsuit" but that has a subtle difference in how it works.
My point was that people think they could use the GPL to force this, but nobody has actually done it yet as far as I know.
All copyright law says is that if you copy without permission, you have infringed a copyright, and it specifies the penalties for that.
It doesn't say about how you get permission, or an implied contract to do things (like publish your changes under GPL). Implied contracts and whether you agree to them is a contentious issue.
Do you really think that if software says "Use of this software implies agreement with this contract which says you will do what we tell you to do" is or should be enforceable?
These licences all say, "the only terms under which you can copy this work is if you agree to this licence."
But that's misleading. If you copy a copyrighted work without permission from the copyright holder (ie. without agreeing to the terms set out) then you have made a copyright violation. That's it. You have not made yourself bound to the terms, which you may not even have been aware of. You can be sued for a copyright violation, and in some cases charged with criminal copyright infringement, but I don't think you can be bound to any mystical licence terms. Possibly if they have proof you knew of the terms and deliberately ignored them, but maybe not even then.
Think about it. What if the GPL said "You may not use this software unless you give the FSF 1 billion dollars. Re-copying of this software implies acceptance of this price."
Everybody would agree that's ridiculous. So why do they think you can write a term like that dictating what licence you will put on your changes?
I think if you violate a viral licence like the GPL or this one, they can sue you to stop publishing the original code or the derivative work. They can ask for damages. But they can't command you -- other than in negotiation to drop the lawsuit -- to follow other terms.
I believe that many people who know perfectly well what the FSF has done say "Linux" because they know it annoys Richard.
For better or worse, Richard has taken a stance of a very specific ideological purity and style of interaction that he must know will annoy people. That is his choice. But he should accept the consequence, that people will be tempted to do the opposite of what he asks. Spiteful? Sure. But that doesn't do away with it.
To make money, as everybody is telling you. And I think you could be. Some people would whine, but frankly, let them whine. It's free ISP. If you don't want it, don't connect.
For example, all for-pay wireless hubs are set up so unknown cards have all web traffic diverted to a signup page where people can pay. They agree to pay and they are put in the pool of people who can get out.
You could use this technique not to collect money (though you could collect money) but to do a very direct, quid-pro-quo advertising campaign. One they can't ignore, such as read a page about an advertiser, then answer a question about the advertiser, and you're on for an hour.
And yes, you have to limit the time because do it one-time and people with offices in the area might use you as a permanent ISP and use up all the bandwidth and spectrum.
Again, if people don't want it, they don't use it and that doesn't tie up any resources or cost anything.
An even better plan with more direct cash, and much easier to sell to merchants would be to have the page say, "Here is a list of local merchants that support this access. Go buy something from any of these merchants. When you buy, ask for a wireless access card."
You give the merchants the cards, which are like prepaid phone cards with an ID# good for an amount of access to your network. People buy a small item like a coffee and they get a card good for a few hours or an afternoon. Buy a big item and get a card good for a month or whatever.
You could sell these cards to merchants, or better to give them free and bill them for the ones that get used.
Or customers could just buy the cards from you directly, of course.
Copyright allows a creator to create a work and sell it to 100 different people for $20 each to make $2,000. Without copyright, work for hire means she has to charge the $2,000 for her labour to earn the same money.
And in a competitive market, which photography is, in the end the wedding photog wants the money, not the rights. The rights are a path to that money.
So the benefit for the public in copyright is that it spreads the cost among all the people who want photos. If some can get them for free, then others have to pay more.
So you want the photographer to give you the negatives or the hi-res scans. Then expect to pay what the photographer hoped to make from sales to all the family and wedding guests that now won't be made. And the sales years later when images are destroyed, etc.
This applies everywhere. For example, with movies in cinematic release, I can see a $100M movie for $9. Why? Because they can make sure everybody who sees it pays. Later, when it's on video, I ahve to pay $25 to buy a DVD that is much lower quality than the one in the cinema, and I'm going to watch it only once, but they can't know that, so it costs more. Or I can rent it for less but with lots of hassle. The protection they have (in this case not copyright but rather the ticket taker guarding the door) lets the cost be spread among all who want to see the film, so we all get to see it cheap.
People seem to ignore this central public good in the copyright debate. When it comes to a business, the copyright owner would like to make as much money as possible. One way they would like to do that is to charge for every possible use of their work. Every use they can't charge for means they must charge more for the uses they can charge for in order to get the same money. Thus everything they can't charge for is subsidised by what they can.
In society, we make the decision to have that subsidy, because we don't want the draconian level of control it would require for them to charge for every possible use. And with good reason -- such a level of control would be ridiculous. But each time we decide that, we should remember it comes with a cost, something else will increase in price to make a subsidy for the thing that isn't charged for, at least in a reasonably competitive market.
But one thing I would like to find that I dimly remember is the first use (on Arpanet mailing lists in the late 70s) of the Johnny Storm "Flame On!" when getting angry in a posting.
In those days it was always followed with "Flame Off", though this has sadly gone by the wayside.
Ok, I agree that you would temper this for anybody exposed on the network (which you can detect without asking of course) or for those who want to set a security level. So you don't install everything, but nor do you ask people about things they don't even know about.
Similar example. I installed Debian and it provided a number of network card modules. I had no idea what network card was in the machine. Why should I?
So I installed with a guess, and it was wrong, so the install was screwed and I had to do lots to fix it. Not at all pleasant.
In addition, today disk space is so cheap that, if you are installing from CD, you should just install everything that doesn't conflict and let people remove later. Don't give them a lot of questions to answer. Even an experienced user (now hitting my 25th year of use of Unix or something like it) gets tired of having to answer a lot of questions that in the end just don't matter.
And the inexperienced user is even more blessed if they don't have to answer those questions. If you can undo, if you can fix it later if you need to, then DON'T ASK. Or ask once if you the user wants to answer more detailed questions or wants a simple install.
Now since Debian network installs, I can see how you want to limit the load on servers, that is a point.
Plug and play is the way to go. If you can ever make it so the user can just plug it in, and it works, do it. Even if it's a bit slower. Does the user want DHCP or static IP? Don't ask the user, ask the DHCP server! Let them undo it later to static IP if they need it.
Host name, time zone, user name and partition style. That's about all that needs to be asked at install time.
My point is that a copyright infringement only lets you get the damages that copyright law allows -- statutory damages for registered copyrights, and actual damages if greater, or actual damages only if unregistered.
Copyright infringement is not grounds to force people to do other things like putting their own source code under GPL. There are some interesting unexplored questions on ownership of derivative works which could produce possible results here, but this would not apply if somebody uses a GPL (not LGPL) library in a code base.
To be compelled to obey a contract you must agree to it. To use GPLed code in a closed source project is to infringe the copyright on the GPLed code. It is a bigger leap to say it is an implicit agreement to a contract.
Of course not. But the GPL says, "If you take this GPLd code, and compile it and sell it, you must agree/are agreeing to licence the larger package containing the code under the GPL."
The difference is between "must licence under GPL" and "agree to licence under GPL"
You can indeed say that the price of using the code is to licence the package containing it under GPL, ie. publish source etc.
That's the price. The question is, can it be a compulsion, that no other remedy is allowed.
If it said, "If you use this code in your software and publish your software, you owe me 1 trillion dollars" do you think the courts would enforce that?
No, when you use somebody's code without permission it's a copyright infringement, and they tend to just look at what the penalty for that should be.
No, that strict interpretation would make Sigma liable for having distributed code they had no right to distribute in the past. Simply stopping shipping the code would not make the terms right.
That's the danger here. For example, we all click on clickwrap contracts every day, installing software. Including the GPL contract. But the law is not going to allow those contracts to bind you to anything at all. It's going to limit what those contracts can do.
And it will limit even more implicit contracts. It's not going to rule, I predict, that if Microsoft integrated some GPL code into Windows, that it is now bound to GPL all its code, even though that's what the GPL says.
It is more likely they would soften it as you say, just telling them to remove it, or pay some monetary damages.
Did the authors register their copyright? They need to do that to get statutory damages. If they did, the statutory damages could be extremely high, and so you would have a case for Sigma to fear.
If not, they should register it right away, while Sigma is still distributing the alleged infringement.
If not registered, you can only get actual damages. And it's easy to see a court saying that actual damages -- which are financial, not personal -- are zero in a case like this. How much money did the team lose? You might do better arguing how much Sigma made from the infringing code but they would of course make the argument that the money came from their proprietary additions, not the GPLd code which of course anybody can get for free.
To compel them to comply with GPL, you will have to get the court to agree with the implied licence. That's harder, though if they really have documents from Sigma admitting that they were aware of the GPL terms you might have a shot.
Otherwise, I don't think anybody has had a court rule that you would be bound by the GPL contract if you used GPLd code. They would rule you violated copyright, but will they rule more?
Think about it. If I put a licence in my code saying "Use this code without my permission and you must give me your whole corporation" no court would consider that enforceable.
Will they consider it enforceable if the licence says "use this code without my permission and you must give away all the source code to everything you bundled with it"? Also in doubt.
Could be. Could not be.
Disgusting thought, but you could also make a diamond from any carbon source after incineration. For example, blood, or for those not easily disgusted, fecal matter.
Yes, for the one you love, give the gift of yourself in an engagement ring.
Well, this special status is after my time, so I don't know the reasons for it, but I doubt it would simply be that the students give better interviews, as the book chapter implied. That would work at first, but surely after hiring a lot of UW grads if they didn't do a good job you would notice the steak didn't match the sizzle.
I think microsoft would notice, they put a lot of effort into their hiring.
You didn't to be a software developer. You could learn to be a software developer over in E.E. or at many other schools, but because you went to the C.S. department in the Math faculty, they had the idea they should teach you some math before giving you a degree that says Bachelor of Mathematics.
Now this view is obviously fading a bit with the School of Computer Science, but it was hardly a secret.
How many people are as famous as Dijkstra or Stallman? (Not that my mother would know either of their names!)
And how many famous poeple do you know the alma mater of?
A lot of guys from my time at U of Waterloo have done stuff to get noticed. People like Mark Tilden get written about. Ever heard of RIM? Built almost entirely by UW people, and I know their names and went to school with many of 'em, so you might not.
Some for the people who founded Mortis Kern, who were also the people who wrote Coherent, pretty well known in Unix circles.
Know Tom Duff and Bill Reeves? They're pretty famous in computer graphics circles. You see their names on the credits or a lot of movies from ILM and PIXAR. Late 70s waterloo folks again.
Walter Banks, one of the founders of Byte magazine? Scott Vanstone, pioneer in eliptic curve cryptography. (he taught me crypto.) And as the article suggests, though MS doesn't make its programmers into stars, a ton of Microsoft's code is from UW grads.
And you know, I'm not as famous as Stallman but I'm not that unknown myself in the online world.
And this is just the guys from my time around 1980. Lots of other folks after us went on to great things, but I don't necessarily know what school they went to.
Of course, UW is a young school, just coming up on 45 years of age. It got famous for WATFOR when it was only 10 years old. It takes a lot of time and reputation to get to the level of those other schools.
Is it the best school in the world? Who knows, but I know when I started hiring people years later, few I found from various U.S. schools were as good as the friends I had who were the best from Waterloo.
One of the often asked questions about Cryonics is why only about
600 people are signed up.
Many have said here that they oppose it. I am curious about the
reasons in particular you are not signed up.
Many who are signed up don't think reanimation is particularly
likely. They see all the risks, all the undeveloped technology.
They might feel that their estimation of the chances of it working
are one in a thousand or less.
Yet they are signed up because, simply put, the odds of success
if you don't do it are absolutely and surely zero, barring
religious faith in a non-material immortal soul.
If you don't do it, you're food for worms and permanently dead.
If you do it, you may also be permanently dead, but it's hard
to argue that you can be really sure there is no chance.
We simply don't know enough to say that it will work, but we
also don't know enough to say that it won't work. Predictions
that it will surely work as as doubtful as other famous early
scientific speculation, but predictions that it surely won't work
are as valid as the similar negative predictions that "experts"
have made over the years. Most were right (so far) but many were
also wrong.
We do know that when you take frozen brains and examine them
under the electron microscope that all the structures that modern
science believes to be important are still discernable. The
information about the connections is all there. The connections
are damaged of course. Many cell walls are ruptured, many dendrites
are sliced, but it's still clear what they were connected to.
If I cut a PC-board in half, the circuit would be ruined, but I
can certainly re-solder it, or build a new PC board and put the old
chips on it. The information is still there, and so it is with
frozen tissue. This is a matter of fact, not speculation, so to
say it's impossible to repair this seems nonsensical. Hard?
Certainly. Expensive? Quite possibly, though if it's all nanotech
and software it's only expensive to do it the first time. But
impossible? That's an extraordinary claim.
You might speculate there is more to the brain then the position of
all the neurons and how they are interconnected and all their receptors.
But that would be pure speculation. Science doesn't yet know enough about it
at all, not enough to say what can or can't be done.
So given that, why take the alternative of certain death over any chance,
no matter how slim? Is it the money? Is it that people are grossed
out?
Of course there are many things that could go wrong. The company holding
you could fail. (Though storing you is remarkably cheap. All it takes
is a liquid nitrogen truck once a week to top up the tanks.) The world
could change so that your descendents, friends or curious people have
no desire to revive you. The world could change to a place you are
incapable of living. Could. None of these are certain either. That
being cremated is final -- that seems pretty certain.
So what's your reason?
Unfortantely trademark space is not a simple hierarchy that can be easily codified. That was my first idea, but it doesn't work.
Please note this is a 2 day old slashdot thread, and nobody reads those so I will not comment further