Nope, simple utility rules. It's not in the interests of the municipality for some of it's citizens to not have telephone service or electricial service just because the telephone company or power company can't make as much of a profit in those areas as it'd like. Similarly, the municipality has decided that it's not in the public interest for cable television to be limited to only the most affluent neighborhoods just because the cable company finds that most profitable. This is why regulation exists, because the interests of a company aren't the only interests and without regulation the company has no reason to serve any interests but it's own.
Actually it applies not just to all businesses but to all entities that have been sued. Even individuals. Once you are sued or are aware you will be sued, you must retain all relevant material and turn it over during discovery. This isn't new, this has been the rule for the last century or so. What's new is things like e-mail and instant messaging, and companies going "Oh, that was done in IM, we don't keep records of that.". The e-discovery rules are merely the courts going "You knew you were being sued, you knew those exchanges were relevant to the suit, it's possible to retain a record of them without being an undue burden, you don't get a pass just because it's bits instead of bits of paper.".
There's another aspect, though. One thing localities are worried about is cherry-picking. Most of the local franchise agreements have a clause in them requiring the company to provide service to everyone in the area served. This prevents companies from wiring up only the most profitable areas and leaving less-desirable portions of the city (eg. poor neighborhoods or outlying areas with low density) without any service at all. The state-wide franchise agreement doesn't contain any such clause. This would allow TW to come into a city served by another cable company and aim at taking customers away from the incumbent only in the most profitable areas, leaving the incumbent with only the unprofitable parts. Since the city can't level the playing field by requiring TW to serve the entire city, not just hand-picked neighborhoods, it can only make things fair by freeing the incumbent of the obligation to serve the whole city. End result: large portions of the city wind up with no cable service. This is... an undesirable outcome for everyone except the cable companies.
Yes, you'll send a Content-type indicating "text/html" if what you're sending is HTML. However, bear in mind that that HTML may not be a human-viewed Web page. It may be, for example, a basic 2-column HTML table intended for output on a dedicated device. If you modify that HTML to be other than what was sent, you may (probably will, in this case) break the device. Note that the device and the server have not violated any standards, they've complied with the standards. Not all things that request HTML are browsers, nor are all HTML pages displayed to humans.
Port 80 is for the HTTP protocol. The Web is not the HTTP protocol. The Web in general uses the HTTP protocol as the primary transport, but HTTP isn't the only protocol it uses nor is the Web the only thing that uses HTTP as a transport protocol. In addition, HTML content isn't the only thing transferred over HTTP (the Content-type header exists for the sole purpose of insuring HTTP is not limited to HTML).
In short, if you assume port 80 to only be used by browsers to show HTML content to humans, you are making an assumption nowhere stated in the RFCs. If people violate your assumption, the fault is yours (RFC 2119 makes clear what assumptions may and may not be made based on the language used in the RFC in question).
Hence why "beyond fair use". Google's header on the cached pages indicates that this is not the original copy and provides a link to the original copy. This is basic attribution, and attribution is not just allowed but required when presenting someone else's material. The highlighting of search terms would, IMO, fall within fair use. Rogers, by contrast, is including a header that has nothing to do with attribution and isn't in any way related to why the user requested the page in the first place, plus they're doing it for commercial purposes (unlike Google's highlighting).
That said, the cached versions are IMO on the shakiest ground of all of Google's services. And I suspect Google would be willing to give up presenting the cached copies if that's what it takes to insure ISPs can't alter the advertising it presents on it's search-results pages.
What comes from Google that isn't either a) copyrighted by Google or b) fair use? Google returns a list of links to pages (the existence of a page at a URL is a fact, not copyrightable expression), a brief excerpt from the page (fair use considering the context, given that the excerpt is almost always no more than a single sentence) and a bunch of advertisements (copyrighted to Google or to the people who created and placed the ads). Google's image thumbnails on their image search page have been ruled in court to be fair use. Unless you want to claim that a site has a copyright on their URLs, and that's like claiming copyright on your phone number.
Except that Google (in this case) hasn't agreed to those Terms of Service and isn't bound by them. It'd be interesting to see the response to a statement like this from Google: "We grant an implicit license to ISPs to make unmodified copies of our pages on their cache servers and distribute them. We do not grant any license, implicit or explicit, to create derivative works by modifying our pages beyond the boundaries of fair use. We remind ISPs that making and distributing copies of a copyrighted work, or making and distributing a derivative work based on a copyrighted work, without a license from the copyright holder constitutes copyright infringement. We also remind them of the consequences if the PRO-IP Act currently under consideration in Congress passes.".
SCO can't appeal until the trial is completed and the final rulings made, regardless of what openings they've spotted. They did ask for an opportunity for an interim appeal, and Judge Kimball said essentially "No, the trial's in a couple of weeks and it's only going to take a week or two. You won't get an interim appeal heard before then, so let's just finish this mess and you can appeal the whole thing at once.".
Except that the CEO isn't the ultimate authority. The Board of Directors is. The CEO works for them. And Novell introduced a nice bit of evidence, the official minutes of the Board of Directors meeting where the contract was reviewed, the issue of transferring the copyrights brought up and the Board voted that Novell would not transfer the copyrights. And the final contract embodied the decision of the Board.
Recalling just what part Yoda played in the first 3 episodes, I'd say he's already running IBM's consulting. That's why small businesses don't get any attention.
One problem there is that the judge, contrary to what Parloff claims, did not strike that testimony. To quote the entire paragraph Parloff refers to (pages 19 and 20 of the ruling):
Ed Chatlos, Novell's Senior Director for UNIX Strategic Partnerships and Business Development, was a primary negotiator for Novell during the business negotiation of the deal. Chatlos' Declaration states that he left Novell voluntarily in 1996, but it does not indicate his current employment. Decl. Mark James Ex. 12 ("Chatlos Decl.") at 4. He did disclose in his deposition, however, that his wife has been employed by SCO since the time of the APA in 1995. Decl. Mark James Ex. 13 ("Chatlos Dep.") at 49. During the business negotiations of the APA, Chatlos recalled disputes over the price because SCO could not pay the full purchase price as contemplated by Novell. Id. at 36. He testified that the royalty payments were used as a resolution to bridge the gap. Id. Chatlos also testified that there was no discussion about excluding or including copyrights because he believes it was implicit in the deal that the copyrights would be transferred. Id. at 122-24. He testified that he was not involved in any discussions with Novell's negotiation team regarding concerns of a potential bankruptcy by Santa Cruz. However, he also testified that he believes that the APA reflects the intent of the agreement. Id. at 130. Although he continued to review drafts of the agreement, his deposition testimony reflects that he had little recollection of the work done by Novell's legal team. Id. at 105. He could not recollect David Bradford's role in the deal or the names of the attorneys at Wilson Sonsini who worked on the APA. Id. at 37, 80.
The bolded sentence is what Parloff is basing his claim that the judge struck the testimony on. But if you read the ruling it says nothing about striking the testimony, and the sentence Parloff uses isn't from the judge's opinion at all, it's simply stating what the witness said in his sworn deposition.
Judge Kimball says on page 52 of the ruling that all the witness testimony is irrelevant because the wording of the contract is clear and unambiguous. So even if he had an opinion on the credibility of the witnesses, he doesn't need to consider their credibility at all.
And a judge is allowed to rule on the evidence (matters of fact) in summary judgement. He's simply limited in how he can do so. A jury can weight the evidence and decide which is more credible. A judge can only rule if he can find that the evidence is so lop-sided that no reasonable jury could come to any other conclusion. But if he can find that, he's allowed to rule even though normally it'd be a matter for a jury.
Yes, but you fail to understand the other side of that: you are not free to find someone's identity just because they're speaking. Before you can do that you must (or at least should) show that what they said is in fact untrue or a threat to someone's career or the like.
This isn't new. In law the first thing a plaintiff has to do is state a claim: say exactly how they were damaged and which law the damaging acts broke. The first defense a defendant has is failure to state a claim, that is to show that however much the plaintiff might want to sue the defendant the plaintiff hasn't stated how defendant damaged them or why defendant wasn't entitle to take that action. Note that simply being damaged isn't in itself sufficient. For instance if I'm loaning you my second car I can seriously mess with your life, put you out of a job and force you into bankruptcy merely by taking the car back, and despite the damage I did to you you couldn't sue me over it because, absent some agreement between us where I said I wouldn't take back the car, I'm legally entitled to take back my car any time I want.
Actually in the most common case an IP address does tie to a person. It ties to the owner of the Internet access account, who's most commonly the head of the household with legally-recognized ties to the other members of the household, especially minor children. This is a very different situation from, say, a college dorm where the people sharing a room and Internet access through a router have no legal relationship with each other. It may be the kid downloading the material rather than the parent whose name is on the account, but the parent's legally responsible for the majority of the kid's actions so liability would fall on their head either way. And no, you can't get a discovery motion against an IP address, but you can get a discovery motion against the owner of that IP address once you've proved that that owner has done something legally actionable and then use the court's authority to determine the identity of that owner.
Note that this isn't anything particularly new. If someone makes a harrassing phone call to you, all you may have is their phone number. No court in the country will bat an eyelash at you if you come in with proof that calls from that number did constitute harassment and ask to find the identity of the person who owns that phone number so they can be brought into court, and no court is going to say that just because all you know is their phone number that you don't have a right to have them brought into court.
Fact: someone who's been wronged has a right to pursue the person responsible. No argument there. The fact that the person responsible is attempting to hide his identity doesn't change that. The problem with the RIAA's tactics is that they want the identity before proving they've been wronged. In this case the councilmen did the right thing: went into court, convinced a judge that the words as written did in fact qualify as something legally actionable, then asked for the identity of the responsible party. It might be technically more correct to wait until a final ruling, but I doubt the final ruling would be significantly different from the preliminary one. Judges don't just fire from the hip when making a preliminary ruling, it's more like "This will be how I rule, unless someone fairly quickly comes up with something that hasn't been even hinted at yet that's major enough to counter everything I've seen so far.".
Sorry, guys, but contrary to popular belief the right to remain anonymous is not a shield against being held responsible for your statements and actions. It just means that the other party should have to prove that your statements or actions were in fact legally actionable before stripping you of your anonymity.
Go and read the BSA's criteria again. What you say is reasonable, but it's not the criteria the BSA apply. They want essentially a) proof that the installed copy is genuine (COA or hologram sticker with the key on it) and b) proof that the person claiming to own that copy (ie. you) actually paid for that copy. That receipt for the whole system will stand up in court just fine, but that implies you've gotten into court. Which means even if you win you've spent more than settling with the BSA and paying their danegeld would've cost you. Which is what the BSA is counting on to convince businesses to settle rather than fight.
Probably not. What they want to see is an item showing the amount you paid for your Windows license, to prove you really did pay for it. If you didn't pay for it, or can't show where you paid for it, you didn't pay for it in their eyes. You may be able to argue, but you'll probably have to do the arguing in court and at that point the cost means you've lost even if you win.
That hologram sticker means absolutely nothing in the context of paying for the license. It's necessary in that it's proof that that particular copy is genuine and not a counterfeit or illegally-produced copy, but on it's own it's not sufficient to prove you've a legal right to that copy. And the receipt is necessary but not sufficient: it proves you paid for a license but doesn't prove the copy you're running is a legal copy. You need both of them together, proof that your copy is genuine and legal and proof that you paid for your license to run it.
So how is it piracy to buy a computer with Windows included from a major vendor like Dell or HP and not have a receipt with Windows broken out as a seperate line-item? How is it piracy to cut a check so the IT guy can run down and buy an emergency replacement PC in a hurry and have the receipt have his name on the top and not the company's? Both of those are piracy by the BSA's definition (the company can't produce a receipt in their name showing payment for Windows).
The problem is, many of these companies aren't pirates. They've bought more licenses than they have running copies of the software. They just can't meet the BSA's technical requirements (which, BTW, go beyond what the law requires). Can you cough up the receipt for every copy of Windows you run? Not the COA, the actual physical receipt that lists Windows as a line item and has your name at the top. And no, a receipt for hardware that came with Windows isn't good enough, not unless it has a separate line on it listing what was paid for Windows. Nor is it any good if the name on the receipt doesn't match the name of the person or company running Windows, which happens especially in small-to-medium companies when a needed machine gets bought by someone in IT using a company credit card in their name or using their own credit card after getting a check cut for it. In all of those cases you're a pirate by the BSA's rules, even though you've paid for your copy of Windows and the law would consider you clear if you wanted to spend the time and money fighting it in court.
Exactly. And I'd point to two of the more famous forks (or potential forks): the GCC/EGCS split, and the threatened XFree86 split resulting from the X11 license change. Both were the result of the project owners not doing what users wanted or needed, and both in the end resulted in changes on the part of the project owners that benefited the users.
One of the selling points of open source is, I'm afraid, precisely that the creator doesn't have final control over it. This is what gives users assurance that they'll be able to maintain the software even when the creator's interests diverge from theirs. If adding a particular feature or fixing a particular bug wouldn't be of any benefit to the creator, or worse might actually go counter to the creator's plans for the software, but would be of major benefit to me as a user it's a good thing for me when the creator can't assert control and prevent me from adding that feature or fixing that bug.
Well, part of it is the approach. With a book the author's rights to control what you do with it are limited to copying and distributing to others. You can make copies of pages, or favorite passages, to tack up on your wall. That's not infringement. You can show your book to others. You can loan your book to others. You can sell your book to a used-book store. None of those are infringement, and the author's got no right to tell you you can't. But with digital formats, the authors (or in this case the RIAA) have taken the position that since they can control those things technically they ought to have the right to do so. They're the ones who've taken the position that it's all or nothing: either we-the-customers give up all the rights we have with analog media, or (so the RIAA claims) the authors have to give up all rights. The position a lot of people have taken is "Well, if they insist it be all or nothing, then let them have nothing.".
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Nope, simple utility rules. It's not in the interests of the municipality for some of it's citizens to not have telephone service or electricial service just because the telephone company or power company can't make as much of a profit in those areas as it'd like. Similarly, the municipality has decided that it's not in the public interest for cable television to be limited to only the most affluent neighborhoods just because the cable company finds that most profitable. This is why regulation exists, because the interests of a company aren't the only interests and without regulation the company has no reason to serve any interests but it's own.
Actually it applies not just to all businesses but to all entities that have been sued. Even individuals. Once you are sued or are aware you will be sued, you must retain all relevant material and turn it over during discovery. This isn't new, this has been the rule for the last century or so. What's new is things like e-mail and instant messaging, and companies going "Oh, that was done in IM, we don't keep records of that.". The e-discovery rules are merely the courts going "You knew you were being sued, you knew those exchanges were relevant to the suit, it's possible to retain a record of them without being an undue burden, you don't get a pass just because it's bits instead of bits of paper.".
There's another aspect, though. One thing localities are worried about is cherry-picking. Most of the local franchise agreements have a clause in them requiring the company to provide service to everyone in the area served. This prevents companies from wiring up only the most profitable areas and leaving less-desirable portions of the city (eg. poor neighborhoods or outlying areas with low density) without any service at all. The state-wide franchise agreement doesn't contain any such clause. This would allow TW to come into a city served by another cable company and aim at taking customers away from the incumbent only in the most profitable areas, leaving the incumbent with only the unprofitable parts. Since the city can't level the playing field by requiring TW to serve the entire city, not just hand-picked neighborhoods, it can only make things fair by freeing the incumbent of the obligation to serve the whole city. End result: large portions of the city wind up with no cable service. This is... an undesirable outcome for everyone except the cable companies.
Yes, you'll send a Content-type indicating "text/html" if what you're sending is HTML. However, bear in mind that that HTML may not be a human-viewed Web page. It may be, for example, a basic 2-column HTML table intended for output on a dedicated device. If you modify that HTML to be other than what was sent, you may (probably will, in this case) break the device. Note that the device and the server have not violated any standards, they've complied with the standards. Not all things that request HTML are browsers, nor are all HTML pages displayed to humans.
Port 80 is for the HTTP protocol. The Web is not the HTTP protocol. The Web in general uses the HTTP protocol as the primary transport, but HTTP isn't the only protocol it uses nor is the Web the only thing that uses HTTP as a transport protocol. In addition, HTML content isn't the only thing transferred over HTTP (the Content-type header exists for the sole purpose of insuring HTTP is not limited to HTML).
In short, if you assume port 80 to only be used by browsers to show HTML content to humans, you are making an assumption nowhere stated in the RFCs. If people violate your assumption, the fault is yours (RFC 2119 makes clear what assumptions may and may not be made based on the language used in the RFC in question).
All the ads on Google's pages are served by Google and placed there by Google's ad-service customers. Copyright wouldn't be a problem there.
Hence why "beyond fair use". Google's header on the cached pages indicates that this is not the original copy and provides a link to the original copy. This is basic attribution, and attribution is not just allowed but required when presenting someone else's material. The highlighting of search terms would, IMO, fall within fair use. Rogers, by contrast, is including a header that has nothing to do with attribution and isn't in any way related to why the user requested the page in the first place, plus they're doing it for commercial purposes (unlike Google's highlighting).
That said, the cached versions are IMO on the shakiest ground of all of Google's services. And I suspect Google would be willing to give up presenting the cached copies if that's what it takes to insure ISPs can't alter the advertising it presents on it's search-results pages.
What comes from Google that isn't either a) copyrighted by Google or b) fair use? Google returns a list of links to pages (the existence of a page at a URL is a fact, not copyrightable expression), a brief excerpt from the page (fair use considering the context, given that the excerpt is almost always no more than a single sentence) and a bunch of advertisements (copyrighted to Google or to the people who created and placed the ads). Google's image thumbnails on their image search page have been ruled in court to be fair use. Unless you want to claim that a site has a copyright on their URLs, and that's like claiming copyright on your phone number.
Except that Google (in this case) hasn't agreed to those Terms of Service and isn't bound by them. It'd be interesting to see the response to a statement like this from Google: "We grant an implicit license to ISPs to make unmodified copies of our pages on their cache servers and distribute them. We do not grant any license, implicit or explicit, to create derivative works by modifying our pages beyond the boundaries of fair use. We remind ISPs that making and distributing copies of a copyrighted work, or making and distributing a derivative work based on a copyrighted work, without a license from the copyright holder constitutes copyright infringement. We also remind them of the consequences if the PRO-IP Act currently under consideration in Congress passes.".
SCO can't appeal until the trial is completed and the final rulings made, regardless of what openings they've spotted. They did ask for an opportunity for an interim appeal, and Judge Kimball said essentially "No, the trial's in a couple of weeks and it's only going to take a week or two. You won't get an interim appeal heard before then, so let's just finish this mess and you can appeal the whole thing at once.".
Except that the CEO isn't the ultimate authority. The Board of Directors is. The CEO works for them. And Novell introduced a nice bit of evidence, the official minutes of the Board of Directors meeting where the contract was reviewed, the issue of transferring the copyrights brought up and the Board voted that Novell would not transfer the copyrights. And the final contract embodied the decision of the Board.
Recalling just what part Yoda played in the first 3 episodes, I'd say he's already running IBM's consulting. That's why small businesses don't get any attention.
One problem there is that the judge, contrary to what Parloff claims, did not strike that testimony. To quote the entire paragraph Parloff refers to (pages 19 and 20 of the ruling):
Ed Chatlos, Novell's Senior Director for UNIX Strategic Partnerships and Business Development, was a primary negotiator for Novell during the business negotiation of the deal. Chatlos' Declaration states that he left Novell voluntarily in 1996, but it does not indicate his current employment. Decl. Mark James Ex. 12 ("Chatlos Decl.") at 4. He did disclose in his deposition, however, that his wife has been employed by SCO since the time of the APA in 1995. Decl. Mark James Ex. 13 ("Chatlos Dep.") at 49. During the business negotiations of the APA, Chatlos recalled disputes over the price because SCO could not pay the full purchase price as contemplated by Novell. Id. at 36. He testified that the royalty payments were used as a resolution to bridge the gap. Id. Chatlos also testified that there was no discussion about excluding or including copyrights because he believes it was implicit in the deal that the copyrights would be transferred. Id. at 122-24. He testified that he was not involved in any discussions with Novell's negotiation team regarding concerns of a potential bankruptcy by Santa Cruz. However, he also testified that he believes that the APA reflects the intent of the agreement. Id. at 130. Although he continued to review drafts of the agreement, his deposition testimony reflects that he had little recollection of the work done by Novell's legal team. Id. at 105. He could not recollect David Bradford's role in the deal or the names of the attorneys at Wilson Sonsini who worked on the APA. Id. at 37, 80.
The bolded sentence is what Parloff is basing his claim that the judge struck the testimony on. But if you read the ruling it says nothing about striking the testimony, and the sentence Parloff uses isn't from the judge's opinion at all, it's simply stating what the witness said in his sworn deposition.
Judge Kimball says on page 52 of the ruling that all the witness testimony is irrelevant because the wording of the contract is clear and unambiguous. So even if he had an opinion on the credibility of the witnesses, he doesn't need to consider their credibility at all.
And a judge is allowed to rule on the evidence (matters of fact) in summary judgement. He's simply limited in how he can do so. A jury can weight the evidence and decide which is more credible. A judge can only rule if he can find that the evidence is so lop-sided that no reasonable jury could come to any other conclusion. But if he can find that, he's allowed to rule even though normally it'd be a matter for a jury.
You might want to talk to Cory Doctorow about abuses.
Yes, but you fail to understand the other side of that: you are not free to find someone's identity just because they're speaking. Before you can do that you must (or at least should) show that what they said is in fact untrue or a threat to someone's career or the like.
This isn't new. In law the first thing a plaintiff has to do is state a claim: say exactly how they were damaged and which law the damaging acts broke. The first defense a defendant has is failure to state a claim, that is to show that however much the plaintiff might want to sue the defendant the plaintiff hasn't stated how defendant damaged them or why defendant wasn't entitle to take that action. Note that simply being damaged isn't in itself sufficient. For instance if I'm loaning you my second car I can seriously mess with your life, put you out of a job and force you into bankruptcy merely by taking the car back, and despite the damage I did to you you couldn't sue me over it because, absent some agreement between us where I said I wouldn't take back the car, I'm legally entitled to take back my car any time I want.
Actually in the most common case an IP address does tie to a person. It ties to the owner of the Internet access account, who's most commonly the head of the household with legally-recognized ties to the other members of the household, especially minor children. This is a very different situation from, say, a college dorm where the people sharing a room and Internet access through a router have no legal relationship with each other. It may be the kid downloading the material rather than the parent whose name is on the account, but the parent's legally responsible for the majority of the kid's actions so liability would fall on their head either way. And no, you can't get a discovery motion against an IP address, but you can get a discovery motion against the owner of that IP address once you've proved that that owner has done something legally actionable and then use the court's authority to determine the identity of that owner.
Note that this isn't anything particularly new. If someone makes a harrassing phone call to you, all you may have is their phone number. No court in the country will bat an eyelash at you if you come in with proof that calls from that number did constitute harassment and ask to find the identity of the person who owns that phone number so they can be brought into court, and no court is going to say that just because all you know is their phone number that you don't have a right to have them brought into court.
Fact: someone who's been wronged has a right to pursue the person responsible. No argument there. The fact that the person responsible is attempting to hide his identity doesn't change that. The problem with the RIAA's tactics is that they want the identity before proving they've been wronged. In this case the councilmen did the right thing: went into court, convinced a judge that the words as written did in fact qualify as something legally actionable, then asked for the identity of the responsible party. It might be technically more correct to wait until a final ruling, but I doubt the final ruling would be significantly different from the preliminary one. Judges don't just fire from the hip when making a preliminary ruling, it's more like "This will be how I rule, unless someone fairly quickly comes up with something that hasn't been even hinted at yet that's major enough to counter everything I've seen so far.".
Sorry, guys, but contrary to popular belief the right to remain anonymous is not a shield against being held responsible for your statements and actions. It just means that the other party should have to prove that your statements or actions were in fact legally actionable before stripping you of your anonymity.
Go and read the BSA's criteria again. What you say is reasonable, but it's not the criteria the BSA apply. They want essentially a) proof that the installed copy is genuine (COA or hologram sticker with the key on it) and b) proof that the person claiming to own that copy (ie. you) actually paid for that copy. That receipt for the whole system will stand up in court just fine, but that implies you've gotten into court. Which means even if you win you've spent more than settling with the BSA and paying their danegeld would've cost you. Which is what the BSA is counting on to convince businesses to settle rather than fight.
Probably not. What they want to see is an item showing the amount you paid for your Windows license, to prove you really did pay for it. If you didn't pay for it, or can't show where you paid for it, you didn't pay for it in their eyes. You may be able to argue, but you'll probably have to do the arguing in court and at that point the cost means you've lost even if you win.
That hologram sticker means absolutely nothing in the context of paying for the license. It's necessary in that it's proof that that particular copy is genuine and not a counterfeit or illegally-produced copy, but on it's own it's not sufficient to prove you've a legal right to that copy. And the receipt is necessary but not sufficient: it proves you paid for a license but doesn't prove the copy you're running is a legal copy. You need both of them together, proof that your copy is genuine and legal and proof that you paid for your license to run it.
So how is it piracy to buy a computer with Windows included from a major vendor like Dell or HP and not have a receipt with Windows broken out as a seperate line-item? How is it piracy to cut a check so the IT guy can run down and buy an emergency replacement PC in a hurry and have the receipt have his name on the top and not the company's? Both of those are piracy by the BSA's definition (the company can't produce a receipt in their name showing payment for Windows).
The problem is, many of these companies aren't pirates. They've bought more licenses than they have running copies of the software. They just can't meet the BSA's technical requirements (which, BTW, go beyond what the law requires). Can you cough up the receipt for every copy of Windows you run? Not the COA, the actual physical receipt that lists Windows as a line item and has your name at the top. And no, a receipt for hardware that came with Windows isn't good enough, not unless it has a separate line on it listing what was paid for Windows. Nor is it any good if the name on the receipt doesn't match the name of the person or company running Windows, which happens especially in small-to-medium companies when a needed machine gets bought by someone in IT using a company credit card in their name or using their own credit card after getting a check cut for it. In all of those cases you're a pirate by the BSA's rules, even though you've paid for your copy of Windows and the law would consider you clear if you wanted to spend the time and money fighting it in court.
Exactly. And I'd point to two of the more famous forks (or potential forks): the GCC/EGCS split, and the threatened XFree86 split resulting from the X11 license change. Both were the result of the project owners not doing what users wanted or needed, and both in the end resulted in changes on the part of the project owners that benefited the users.
One of the selling points of open source is, I'm afraid, precisely that the creator doesn't have final control over it. This is what gives users assurance that they'll be able to maintain the software even when the creator's interests diverge from theirs. If adding a particular feature or fixing a particular bug wouldn't be of any benefit to the creator, or worse might actually go counter to the creator's plans for the software, but would be of major benefit to me as a user it's a good thing for me when the creator can't assert control and prevent me from adding that feature or fixing that bug.
Well, part of it is the approach. With a book the author's rights to control what you do with it are limited to copying and distributing to others. You can make copies of pages, or favorite passages, to tack up on your wall. That's not infringement. You can show your book to others. You can loan your book to others. You can sell your book to a used-book store. None of those are infringement, and the author's got no right to tell you you can't. But with digital formats, the authors (or in this case the RIAA) have taken the position that since they can control those things technically they ought to have the right to do so. They're the ones who've taken the position that it's all or nothing: either we-the-customers give up all the rights we have with analog media, or (so the RIAA claims) the authors have to give up all rights. The position a lot of people have taken is "Well, if they insist it be all or nothing, then let them have nothing.".