The only thing we have yet to figure out is how to effectively make systems under attack "shoot back". The most they can do at the moment is call in an airstrike (i.e. alert the admins). Any return-fire capability would only be as good as the intermediate links let it be. It might not even be a good idea, as it would increase network traffic and make the attack that much more severe.
Since most attacks are staged through innocent 3rd parties, auto-reprisals are likely to make the damage worse. And if someone effectively spoofs the reprisal software, they could use *your* defenses to stage an attack on someone else. Can you say "liability lawsuit"? I knew you could...
I'm glad/. is still responsive enough to change it's mind and human enough to admit a potential mistake. Good intentions are wonderful things, but there's a very true cliche about them and the road to hell... While I had thought the proposed book was falling in the legal grey area of copyright issues not well clarified by the courts, I personally felt the usage of other's writings was (just) over the line. Doing the hard work of "opt-in" is clearly the right choice. Good for/.
And this is part of a larger and longer struggle to re-establish the priority of "public good" on a par with "individual rights" and "economic development", the fight against the notion that everything of value of should be owned/exploited by some person or corporation. It seems as though grown-ups need to be re-taught how to share. This struggle is most obviously being played out in the Internet development battles, but also in the fight between "environmentalism" and the "property rights" movement. Some people seem to think that the solution to the "Tragedy of the Commons" is the dissolution of the commons, while others think it's better stewardship thereof.
Also, if one post quotes the post that it's replying to, or some other previous post, where do one poster's rights begin and another one's end?
An awful lot of thought and argument went on in Usenet news about this issue, particularly in misc.legal and misc.int-property. The general consensus (IMHO, I was a minor participant with decided opinions) was that the act posting to Usenet news granted eveyone involved "implicit license" to do the usual Usenet things - copy it around to all the NNTP servers, make copies for readers, archiving it, etc. Quoting activity was arguably either allowed by this implicit license ('cause it's what everbody was already doing and posters knew that before they posted) or allowed by the "Fair Use" clause of the Copyright Act. Personally, I think both are true. However, there was almost universal agreement that posting to Usenet didn't place the work in the public domain or grant license to "non-Usenet" use beyond "Fair Use". While a lot of the participants in the discussion were lawyers or law students, we have never got the opinion that matters - a ruling of a Federal judge (in the U.S. - YMMV in other jurisdictions).
In the web cases to date, it looks like the courts are upholding copyrights of web site authors in general, so there's no particular reason to think the rules are any different in the new media than in the old. That being so, contributers/poster have "Fair Use" rights to quote each other and the "nature of the work" probably makes those "Fair Use" rights very broad - more so than quoting for commercial publication.
From http://www.etext.org/Politics/Conspiracy/AJTeel/US C/17usc.txt
A. J. Teel has, shall we say, very non-standard legal ideas. He once posted to Usenet the letter that he sent to the state of Indiana demanding that they revoke his birth certificate. I wouldn't exactly consider his writings reliable source material on the law. (He also appears to be one of the first political spammers, see this)
However, that quote actually almost matches the law as I know it, the quibble being: a publishing company could reprint a contribution from one issue in a later issue of its magazine This is not right. For purposes of this clause, different issues of a magazine are different collective works. This clause lets a publisher print the same article in both the New England and Midwest editions of one particular issue, despite minor differences in the 2 editions, but doesn't grant re-use in a subsequent issue. Other than that, it's right.
It's "hard to understand" because it's contrary to the law and totally untrue.
You post to a PUBLIC FORUM. it *IS* by all definitions a PUBLIC FORUM.
This is true.
Comments posted to a PUBLIC FORUM are in the PUBLIC DOMAIN.
This is not true.
As others have noted, any expressive writing that has been recorded for later reading is copyrighted automatically by its author at the moment it is recorded. The "public domain" is a term that means than no one owns a copyright on the work. The ONLY way for any work to be placed in the public domain before the copyright naturally expires is for the copyright owner to explicitly do so - you can't do it "accidentally" or be tricked into it. Posting into a public forum implicitly grants participants in that forum certain rights to your work, not least of which is the right to create copies necessary to read it and to save a personal copy, and it clearly also gives the maintainers of the forum the right make copies as part of the usual operation of the forum. Posting does not put the work in the public domain, no more than broadcasting on radio does.
DO YOU UNDERSTAND?
Yes, I do, but you don't have a clue.
Here's an example of what the courts have decided: In the late 60's, the Rev. Martin Luther King gave a very famous speech, the "I Have a Dream" speech, in front of a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the mall in Washington, D.C. This speech was broadcast live across the country, was transcribed and printed in newspapers and was re-played later on news shows. Dr. King also gave copies of his speech to reporters in advance of giving the speech live. Afterwards, several companies tried to sell recordings of the speech and Dr. King or his heirs sued and won. To this day, that speech is owned by Dr. King's heirs and you have to get a license from them if you're going to do more than a fair use quotation from the speech.
"It is harder for a rich man to enter the gates of Heaven than to pass a camel through the eye of a needle."
Actually, 'camel' was probably a mistranslation from the Aramaic. The word 'gamla', with a minute difference of diacritical markings, means both 'camel' and 'rope'. Some folks maintain that Jesus' point was that, just as a rope must be pared down to fit it through a needle, so a rich man must give up a little wealth before entering heaven. In other words, it's not impossible for the rich to go to heaven, they just need "slim down" a bit. Of course, we don't know what Jesus thought of as "rich".
The question is is this a coincidence or did Travolta take the part because of his connection?
Travolta has been trying to get this movie made for about 10 years, because of his connection. At first, he wanted to play the role of the hero, Johnnie Goodbye Tyler, but now he's playing the villan, Terl.
The folks on alt.religion.scientology have been tracking Battlefield Earth for a while now and this Deja search appears to bring up links to the best bits. a.r.s is generally dominated by anti-Scientologists, 'cuz good Scientologists use special censorware that prevents them from reading that newsgroup (and a hell of a lot of the rest of the 'net) - most scientologists posting to it have either been assigned to do so or are growing sceptical and are likely to end up in trouble.
I used to spend time in a.r.s myself (enough so that I and my ISP are on the banned list), having been pulled in by the COS's forged cancel message of that newsgroup. I've found better things to do now, but just couldn't pass up the chance to spread the word a little further.
There's a reasonably weel-balanced CNN article on this.
Points:
A reasonable lucid discussion of the GPL/Mattel/cphack issue.
"Skala said he settled the dispute with Mattel in good faith and that the topic of GNU never came up."
"The two collaborated on the cphack essay, but each created separate cphack decoding programs, Skala said.
Article ends with "Computer activists say that the software filters many non-objectionable sites, including those of its critics."
I've seen postings that indicate Skala referenced GPL in a comment string, but does anyone know about the other cphack? Did it even get distributed? If so, was it GPL'ed?
Sounds like this is bad news for the programmers. Basically, they avoided any further legal problems by giving Mattel all of the rights to cphack. But now that Mattel has learned about the GPL, the deal with the programmers may be considered invalid since the programmers had promised that they were the only ones with rights to the software.
The only source I've found for what the programmers agreed to is the Wired article which says 'that Jansson and Skala attest they "are the sole proprietors of all rights" involved with cphack and have "not assigned" them to anyone else.' It's not immediately clear to me whether this is merely legal verbage asserting that Jansson and Skala, and only Jansson and Skala, had the right to assign the copyright to cphack, which was true, or a claim that no one else had any rights at all in cphack, which was false, but which is always false whenver published works are transferred. Publication always grants the general public some irrevocable rights, most particularly "fair use" rights.
Furthermore, Mattel knew that cphack had been published on the web and widely distributed, and had the chance to examine the cphack source for themselves before they bought it, making it tough for Mattell to convincingly argue deception or fraud - the GPL statement, while not prominent, was also not hidden. To prove fraud, Mattel would not only have to show that *they* didn't know about the GPL, but also that a mythical "reasonable purchaser" would also not have discovered the GPL even though the source was available.
Finally, if Mattel sues Jansson and Skala for fraud, what can they try to get? Their money back? What financial damage has Mattel incurred? It's not like they've lost potential revenue from being able to sell cphack, since they didn't purchase it to sell it, but to lock it up...How has Mattel, in a legal way that they can sue for, been hurt?
Anyone have any ideas how to prevent this from happening again in the future?
Jansson and Skala would be in a lot better position if the web pages that linked to cphack had explicitly mentioned the GPL near the link, and if they had included the GPL text in the distro, then Mattel wouldn't have any room at all to argue fraud.
However, for people in similar situations in the future, GPL is probably the wrong tool. GPL is great for releasing code that you want others to build on when you don't want them to lock up their improvements. For fighting with large corporations on social/political issues (as opposed to technical/mindshare issues), release to the public domain might be more appropriate, since what you're trying to accomplish is to keep the original from being locked up, period. This can probably be accomplished by including "This work is hereby explicitly dedicated to the public domain by its lawful author(s)", sprinkled prominently throughout the source. Then (a) the program could be released anonymously and used by the general public (b) nobody could claim to be confused about who owns what. Of course, if it's in the public domain anybody can do anything with it, including modify and sell it, and a corporation can't back down without losing face by "buying" your GPL'd work.
Sounds like this is bad news for the programmers. Basically, they avoided any further legal problems by giving Mattel all of the rights to cphack. But now that Mattel has learned about the GPL, the deal with the programmers may be considered invalid since the programmers had promised that they were the only ones with rights to the software.
The only source I've found for what the programmers agreed to is the Wired article which says 'that Jansson and Skala attest they "are the sole proprietors of all rights" involved with cphack and have "not assigned" them to anyone else.' It's not immediately clear to me whether this is merely legal verbage asserting that Jansson and Skala, and only Jansson and Skala, had the right to assign the copyright to cphack, which was true, or a claim that no one else had any rights at all in cphack, which was false, but which is always false whenver published works are transferred. Publication always grants the general public some irrevocable rights, most particularly "fair use" rights.
Furthermore, Mattel knew that cphack had been published on the web and widely distributed, and had the chance to examine the cphack source for themselves before they bought it, making it tough for Mattell to convincingly argue deception or fraud - the GPL statement, while not prominent, was also not hidden.
Anyone have any ideas how to prevent this from happening again in the future?
Perhaps someone can clear this up for me and the rest of the/. community. I was under the perception that copyrights protect only the implementation of an idea, not the idea (or method) itself.
Close, and the difference favors re-implementaion.
Copyright only covers "creative expression" and specifically does not cover functional ideas. The 9th Circuit Court, in Sony v. Connectix, said: Copyright protection does not extend to any "idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery" embodied in the copyrighted work. This case is also pretty relevant to the whole Mattel snafu; in a nutshell, Connectix reverse-engineered a Sony Playstation, built and sold an emulator and Sony sued on copyright infringement grounds for the reverse-engineering - Sony massively lost the most recent round, their only chance to stop the emulator is to take it to the Supreme Court, and that's a mighty slim chance...
But back to your question, the difference is is that you can pretty much re-write functional components using the original as a blue print (reverse-engineering CPHACK), provided you're clever enough to only copy functional elements and avoid copying "creative expression". However, the threshhold for something to be a "creative expression" is amazingly low, so from the standpoint of being safe, it would be better to do as you suggest and re-implement from the text description of the method. IANAL and this is not legal advice.
Excuse me IANAL but if I understand copyright correctly once a particular verison of something has been released under a particular copyright then the copyright continues to be valid as long as the user abides by the terms the original author had stated.
You (and others) are confusing a copyright with a license to use a copyrighted work.
When a work is copyrighted (which occurs as soon as the work is somehow recorded, including paper, photograph, "permanent" digital records such as files on a hard drive, etc.), the "authors" get ownership of the copyright and can either license other people to do things with the work (such as sell it, use it, distribute it, print it, etc.) or sell (or "assign") their ownership of the copyright and let someone else license it (or not). Or they can do BOTH, first granting licenses then assigning copyright to someone else. Copyright is the bundle of rights granted by the government to the copyright owner of the work and a license is whatever is contractually agreed to between the copyright owner and any third party.
However, as you note, the transfer of the copyright doesn't revoke the previous grant of the license; the grant of a license contractually binds both parties and a new owner can't revoke a license granted by a previous owner (though the new owner might sue the old owner for fraud or somesuch if the old owner misrepresented whatever licenses had already been granted). If this program was really GPL'ed, and that can be proved in a court of law then people can continue to do whatever the GPL allows them to do...if it was legal to put the work under GPL in the first place, which is something I don't know much about. (If the reverse engineering is legal, it should be legal to GPL the product, IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
Since most attacks are staged through innocent 3rd parties, auto-reprisals are likely to make the damage worse. And if someone effectively spoofs the reprisal software, they could use *your* defenses to stage an attack on someone else. Can you say "liability lawsuit"? I knew you could...
I'm glad /. is still responsive enough to change it's mind and human enough to admit a potential mistake. Good intentions are wonderful things, but there's a very true cliche about them and the road to hell... While I had thought the proposed book was falling in the legal grey area of copyright issues not well clarified by the courts, I personally felt the usage of other's writings was (just) over the line. Doing the hard work of "opt-in" is clearly the right choice. Good for /.
And this is part of a larger and longer struggle to re-establish the priority of "public good" on a par with "individual rights" and "economic development", the fight against the notion that everything of value of should be owned/exploited by some person or corporation. It seems as though grown-ups need to be re-taught how to share. This struggle is most obviously being played out in the Internet development battles, but also in the fight between "environmentalism" and the "property rights" movement. Some people seem to think that the solution to the "Tragedy of the Commons" is the dissolution of the commons, while others think it's better stewardship thereof.
An awful lot of thought and argument went on in Usenet news about this issue, particularly in misc.legal and misc.int-property. The general consensus (IMHO, I was a minor participant with decided opinions) was that the act posting to Usenet news granted eveyone involved "implicit license" to do the usual Usenet things - copy it around to all the NNTP servers, make copies for readers, archiving it, etc. Quoting activity was arguably either allowed by this implicit license ('cause it's what everbody was already doing and posters knew that before they posted) or allowed by the "Fair Use" clause of the Copyright Act. Personally, I think both are true. However, there was almost universal agreement that posting to Usenet didn't place the work in the public domain or grant license to "non-Usenet" use beyond "Fair Use". While a lot of the participants in the discussion were lawyers or law students, we have never got the opinion that matters - a ruling of a Federal judge (in the U.S. - YMMV in other jurisdictions).
In the web cases to date, it looks like the courts are upholding copyrights of web site authors in general, so there's no particular reason to think the rules are any different in the new media than in the old. That being so, contributers/poster have "Fair Use" rights to quote each other and the "nature of the work" probably makes those "Fair Use" rights very broad - more so than quoting for commercial publication.
A. J. Teel has, shall we say, very non-standard legal ideas. He once posted to Usenet the letter that he sent to the state of Indiana demanding that they revoke his birth certificate. I wouldn't exactly consider his writings reliable source material on the law. (He also appears to be one of the first political spammers, see this)
However, that quote actually almost matches the law as I know it, the quibble being:
a publishing company could reprint a contribution from one issue in a later issue of its magazine
This is not right. For purposes of this clause, different issues of a magazine are different collective works. This clause lets a publisher print the same article in both the New England and Midwest editions of one particular issue, despite minor differences in the 2 editions, but doesn't grant re-use in a subsequent issue.
Other than that, it's right.
It's "hard to understand" because it's contrary to the law and totally untrue.
You post to a PUBLIC FORUM. it *IS* by all definitions a PUBLIC FORUM.
This is true.
Comments posted to a PUBLIC FORUM are in the PUBLIC DOMAIN.
This is not true.
As others have noted, any expressive writing that has been recorded for later reading is copyrighted automatically by its author at the moment it is recorded. The "public domain" is a term that means than no one owns a copyright on the work. The ONLY way for any work to be placed in the public domain before the copyright naturally expires is for the copyright owner to explicitly do so - you can't do it "accidentally" or be tricked into it. Posting into a public forum implicitly grants participants in that forum certain rights to your work, not least of which is the right to create copies necessary to read it and to save a personal copy, and it clearly also gives the maintainers of the forum the right make copies as part of the usual operation of the forum. Posting does not put the work in the public domain, no more than broadcasting on radio does.
DO YOU UNDERSTAND?
Yes, I do, but you don't have a clue.
Here's an example of what the courts have decided:
In the late 60's, the Rev. Martin Luther King gave a very famous speech, the "I Have a Dream" speech, in front of a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the mall in Washington, D.C. This speech was broadcast live across the country, was transcribed and printed in newspapers and was re-played later on news shows. Dr. King also gave copies of his speech to reporters in advance of giving the speech live. Afterwards, several companies tried to sell recordings of the speech and Dr. King or his heirs sued and won. To this day, that speech is owned by Dr. King's heirs and you have to get a license from them if you're going to do more than a fair use quotation from the speech.
Actually, 'camel' was probably a mistranslation from the Aramaic. The word 'gamla', with a minute difference of diacritical markings, means both 'camel' and 'rope'. Some folks maintain that Jesus' point was that, just as a rope must be pared down to fit it through a needle, so a rich man must give up a little wealth before entering heaven. In other words, it's not impossible for the rich to go to heaven, they just need "slim down" a bit. Of course, we don't know what Jesus thought of as "rich".
Travolta has been trying to get this movie made for about 10 years, because of his connection. At first, he wanted to play the role of the hero, Johnnie Goodbye Tyler, but now he's playing the villan, Terl.
According to the Internet Movie Database, Travolta was a producer on the movie.
The folks on alt.religion.scientology have been tracking Battlefield Earth for a while now and this Deja search appears to bring up links to the best bits. a.r.s is generally dominated by anti-Scientologists, 'cuz good Scientologists use special censorware that prevents them from reading that newsgroup (and a hell of a lot of the rest of the 'net) - most scientologists posting to it have either been assigned to do so or are growing sceptical and are likely to end up in trouble.
I used to spend time in a.r.s myself (enough so that I and my ISP are on the banned list), having been pulled in by the COS's forged cancel message of that newsgroup. I've found better things to do now, but just couldn't pass up the chance to spread the word a little further.
- Points:
- A reasonable lucid discussion of the GPL/Mattel/cphack issue.
- "Skala said he settled the dispute with Mattel in good faith and that the topic of GNU never came up."
- "The two collaborated on the cphack essay, but each created separate cphack decoding programs, Skala said.
- Article ends with "Computer activists say that the software filters many non-objectionable sites, including those of its critics."
I've seen postings that indicate Skala referenced GPL in a comment string, but does anyone know about the other cphack? Did it even get distributed? If so, was it GPL'ed?Sounds like this is bad news for the programmers. Basically, they avoided any further legal problems by giving Mattel all of the rights to cphack. But now that Mattel has learned about the GPL, the deal with the programmers may be considered invalid since the programmers had promised that they were the only ones with rights to the software.
The only source I've found for what the programmers agreed to is the Wired article which says 'that Jansson and Skala attest they "are the sole proprietors of all rights" involved with cphack and have "not assigned" them to anyone else.' It's not immediately clear to me whether this is merely legal verbage asserting that Jansson and Skala, and only Jansson and Skala, had the right to assign the copyright to cphack, which was true, or a claim that no one else had any rights at all in cphack, which was false, but which is always false whenver published works are transferred. Publication always grants the general public some irrevocable rights, most particularly "fair use" rights.
Furthermore, Mattel knew that cphack had been published on the web and widely distributed, and had the chance to examine the cphack source for themselves before they bought it, making it tough for Mattell to convincingly argue deception or fraud - the GPL statement, while not prominent, was also not hidden. To prove fraud, Mattel would not only have to show that *they* didn't know about the GPL, but also that a mythical "reasonable purchaser" would also not have discovered the GPL even though the source was available.
Finally, if Mattel sues Jansson and Skala for fraud, what can they try to get? Their money back? What financial damage has Mattel incurred? It's not like they've lost potential revenue from being able to sell cphack, since they didn't purchase it to sell it, but to lock it up...How has Mattel, in a legal way that they can sue for, been hurt?
Anyone have any ideas how to prevent this from happening again in the future?
Jansson and Skala would be in a lot better position if the web pages that linked to cphack had explicitly mentioned the GPL near the link, and if they had included the GPL text in the distro, then Mattel wouldn't have any room at all to argue fraud.
However, for people in similar situations in the future, GPL is probably the wrong tool. GPL is great for releasing code that you want others to build on when you don't want them to lock up their improvements. For fighting with large corporations on social/political issues (as opposed to technical/mindshare issues), release to the public domain might be more appropriate, since what you're trying to accomplish is to keep the original from being locked up, period. This can probably be accomplished by including "This work is hereby explicitly dedicated to the public domain by its lawful author(s)", sprinkled prominently throughout the source. Then (a) the program could be released anonymously and used by the general public (b) nobody could claim to be confused about who owns what. Of course, if it's in the public domain anybody can do anything with it, including modify and sell it, and a corporation can't back down without losing face by "buying" your GPL'd work.
The only source I've found for what the programmers agreed to is the Wired article which says 'that Jansson and Skala attest they "are the sole proprietors of all rights" involved with cphack and have "not assigned" them to anyone else.' It's not immediately clear to me whether this is merely legal verbage asserting that Jansson and Skala, and only Jansson and Skala, had the right to assign the copyright to cphack, which was true, or a claim that no one else had any rights at all in cphack, which was false, but which is always false whenver published works are transferred. Publication always grants the general public some irrevocable rights, most particularly "fair use" rights.
Furthermore, Mattel knew that cphack had been published on the web and widely distributed, and had the chance to examine the cphack source for themselves before they bought it, making it tough for Mattell to convincingly argue deception or fraud - the GPL statement, while not prominent, was also not hidden.
Anyone have any ideas how to prevent this from happening again in the future?
Close, and the difference favors re-implementaion.
Copyright only covers "creative expression" and specifically does not cover functional ideas. The 9th Circuit Court, in Sony v. Connectix, said:
Copyright protection does not extend to any "idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery" embodied in the copyrighted work.
This case is also pretty relevant to the whole Mattel snafu; in a nutshell, Connectix reverse-engineered a Sony Playstation, built and sold an emulator and Sony sued on copyright infringement grounds for the reverse-engineering - Sony massively lost the most recent round, their only chance to stop the emulator is to take it to the Supreme Court, and that's a mighty slim chance...
But back to your question, the difference is is that you can pretty much re-write functional components using the original as a blue print (reverse-engineering CPHACK), provided you're clever enough to only copy functional elements and avoid copying "creative expression". However, the threshhold for something to be a "creative expression" is amazingly low, so from the standpoint of being safe, it would be better to do as you suggest and re-implement from the text description of the method.
IANAL and this is not legal advice.
You (and others) are confusing a copyright with a license to use a copyrighted work.
When a work is copyrighted (which occurs as soon as the work is somehow recorded, including paper, photograph, "permanent" digital records such as files on a hard drive, etc.), the "authors" get ownership of the copyright and can either license other people to do things with the work (such as sell it, use it, distribute it, print it, etc.) or sell (or "assign") their ownership of the copyright and let someone else license it (or not). Or they can do BOTH, first granting licenses then assigning copyright to someone else. Copyright is the bundle of rights granted by the government to the copyright owner of the work and a license is whatever is contractually agreed to between the copyright owner and any third party.
However, as you note, the transfer of the copyright doesn't revoke the previous grant of the license; the grant of a license contractually binds both parties and a new owner can't revoke a license granted by a previous owner (though the new owner might sue the old owner for fraud or somesuch if the old owner misrepresented whatever licenses had already been granted). If this program was really GPL'ed, and that can be proved in a court of law then people can continue to do whatever the GPL allows them to do...if it was legal to put the work under GPL in the first place, which is something I don't know much about. (If the reverse engineering is legal, it should be legal to GPL the product, IMHO.
Of course, IANAL and this is not legal advice