The fact is, so many tools are out there that make GIFs, have LZW, and are NOT licensed by Unisys. Apparently what Unisys is persuing is that GIFs made by such programs are therefore illegal, but they offer a blanket license to cover it (starting at $5000 and going up to whatever they think they can get out of you).
I'm most curious how they know a GIF is licensed. I suspect they look for the comment block in the GIF format and if it has the name of a licensed software product, it passes. But then, there are optimizers than never touch the compression, but do strip a GIF of unneeded stuff like the comment blocks. And others might even put forged comment blocks in. And then there are non-compressed GIFs but I wonder if Unisys would know how to recognize that.
No, it does not restrict you to 256 colors. That limit came about back when the best graphical displays were 256 colors and indexed, and happened to match up exactly with the number of colors GIF could encode in a single image block. So the practice came about to use exactly one image block for a whole GIF image. There is nothing preventing you from using multiple image blocks (without the animation extension which isn't part of the official GIF standard). IE 3-5, NS 3-4, Opera, and Mozilla all display things correctly (IE fails to print correctly).
There are plenty of reasons not to use GIF, but a limit of 256 colors is not one of them. Such limits exist only in those programs (the majority, unfortunately) that implemented GIF by reusing tired old code over and over from the 256 color display days (e.g. 1989).
You can see non-compressed and true-color GIFs here and get free GPL non-LZW code to produce your own here.
What do you mean you can't open them again? Why not? I've created many non-compressed GIFs and they work fine in web browsers, and GIMP and Photoshop both import them just fine. Yes, of course they are bigger, but if your goal is a small 4 color icon, it isn't going to be all that much bigger.
Companies exist to maximize profit. That's the nature of the beast. People are motivated to acquire capital gains and other people are motivated to provide it. Without it, very little economy will exist. Unisys board members, chairman, and officers would all be subject to being kicked out by the stock holders (mostly institutional ones like banks, mutual funds, retirement plans, etc.) if they didn't make reasonable attempts to maximize returns. I suspect much heat has already been generated within the company for having failed to gain even better revenues on this in the past (especially for having been so ignorant about even knowing its potential in the 1980's).
The real culprit is a broken patent system. This broken patent system is responsible for every patent holder having to do the things they do, mostly because the opportunity exists. In theory, US patent law is supposed to maximize the public good through an appropriate body of laws. In practice it appears to be a drain on the economic flow, diverting huge funds into efforts, such as law suits, legal threats, and just plain negotiation, for massive numbers of trivial patents that are handed out almost as fast as AOL CDs.
The LZW patent is, perhaps, a poor example. I know how LZW works because I once wrote my own implementation of it from scratch from nothing more than Terry Welch's paper. In hindsight it might seem obvious, but at the time it was issued, I don't think it was all that much obvious.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands or even tens of thousands, of other patents that are at least trivial, and perhaps downright phoney. Those are the patents that need to be used as examples to show that the patent system is currently practiced in a way that contradicts the national good. Patents should be reserved as a reasonable reward and profitable return for those who do put in the effort and investment to bring intellectual wealth to the nation (trade secret being an available mechanism for those who prefer not to divulge their results). There should be a genuine and beneficial gain from that invention that is likely not to have been for some time later than when it was invented. Most of the patents issued today in the US benefit only intellectual property lawyers and allow large and/or monopolistic companies to bully smaller businesses (who, incidentally, are also trying to maximize their own returns on investment no different than any other business).
Focus. This is political. The change that needs to take place is a revision of the patent law. A proper patent law in the US will reduce lawsuits, increase sharing, and make legitimate and genuine patented ideas available to all for a fair and just reward to the inventors.
I choose to release my library code under the LGPL because it is my intent to allow others to integrate my library code (such as my recently released AVLMAP library) into applications that are distributed in binary-only form. When the application is not intended as a resource of code for developers I see no reason that the code has to be found there. I do not see the distribution of an application as a means to get the library source into the hands of developers. This is especially so when the purpose of the library isn't really related to the purpose of the application. My AVLMAP library could be used in just about any kind of application. I'd much rather have the source downloaded from my web site or one of the mirrors, or found on sites like Freshmeat where they can be exposed to the vastness of open source free software of all kinds.
The LGPL was changed from Library to Lesser because, I believe, RMS wanted to promote having more libraries released as just GPL, as opposed to making a different license available for other programs. You can read about that here. I just happen to not totally agree with RMS on this. But there is a difference and you should read both carefully and decide for yourself which you want to use.
A reasonably knowledgeable person can download the latest version of the source for the services you actually do run, and install them, in hours, not weeks.
I'm not trying to demerit OpenBSD, because I believe OpenBSD is a great system, and should be seriously considered, especially for firewall points. But if there is some reason that would weigh in favor of some other operating system, such as familiarity (I am far more familiar with Linux, especially Slackware, than I am of OpenBSD), then you might still choose something other than OpenBSD, and you can still make it be secure with reasonable effort. If you're a business, just hire someone who knows what they are doing, not someone who has to piddle around the newsgroups for the next couple months to learn how to recognize a security clue.
Since the code was a TWO BYTE code, and the browser displayed it as ONE question mark, then the browser knew how to convert UTF-8 encoding into a raw numeric code. It just didn't have a glyph to render it with, so it substituted the question mark.
That may NOT be the standard, but it is also the case that many standards groups are spending (wasting?) too much time with making things like XML more complicated than they need to be, and not keeping all aspects of standards up to date (like officially supporting UTF-8 encoded UNICODE, which is trivial to implement in validators... for those who use such things).
It is already common for standards to be extended and the extensions to be accepted. Netscape added animation to GIF, and while there were some purists crying foul, others just got on with making things better, leaving standards group to eat their dust. I extended GIF to support true-color images and browsers support that, too (Netscape, Explorer, and Opera, that I have tested). People did bitch and whine about it because it wasn't described in the standard for GIF, but it did work, it did not conflict with the literal standard, and it was the only way to get true-color into web pages until PNG came along (which admittedly was slowed due to browser makers dragging their feet).
So I suspect as soon as you have full UNICODE support in X windows and/or the font server, with proper fonts, it will work fine (despite what some useless validator says).
Part of the problem is too many people just installing some packaged software, which they picked for reasons related to how many other clueless people picked it, and they expect it to be rock solid secure as installed without any configuration or tuning. They also expect top notch performance.
If you want security, then you have to understand security, or you have to get something that is guaranteed to be secure right from the box, or hire someone who knows security (and please, no whining about lack of technical people when technical people are still looking for decent jobs where their employers respect their skills). OpenBSD probably is the most secure system available right now, as installed, although even I would not trust it without looking under the hood.
A system/network security expert can make most systems secure (even NT if enough information can be had). Businesses have to commit to the attitude of security and trust a security expert to set it up for them. If you can't trust someone, then you better pull the plug on that internet connection right now (and probably also fire all your employees).
Seeing these characters myself, I extracted the codes and looked them up. The code I get where I expected the ASCII symmetrical apostrophe is actually the UNICODE right apostrophe.
It's sad, but in some ways, Microsoft is actually LEADING technology. In this case it is the adoption of UNICODE international character set. I wish the Unix/BSD/Linux community would get their act together and get these things working.
Part of the problem is the requirement to expend an enourmous resource just to assure to the provider that there is no defamatory content. Is this a requirement imposed by NetBenefit? or by the British Government? And why is it NOT being applied to every web customer?
If it is the fault of NetBenefit, then no one should host there. If it is the fault of stupid British laws, then no one should host anything at any ISP in Britain.
The deep linking ruling allows linking into a deep page in a site against the wishes of the site owner (where presumably, you could bookmark that link yourself). The MPAA argument is that if actually having the content is illegal (which they condend is the case for DeCSS) then having a link to another site with that content anywhere in the world is equivalent to having that content.
The defense 2600 (and the rest of us) will have to make is that the linking (deep or otherwise) is not the same as having the content yourself. The argument may be strengthened if the link is clear that it is another site (as is the case with 2600's links).
This is entirely separate from the argument that having content that reveals already reverse engineered technology that is already in the public domain is not in and of itself illegal, and is also separate from the argument that reverse engineered technology that has a primary purpose of enabling one to access media that they have already obtained legally is not in and of itself illegal. All these things are distinct arguments in this whole issue, and the final legal rulings could be a mix.
One thing we do need to address is the constant false information being spouted by Jack Valenti, CEO of MPAA. He persists in saying that the issue revolves around the copying of DVDs (supposedly to make an unencrypted copy even though copying an encrypted copy is what pirates are already doing) when in fact the truth of the issue (which can be found in MPAA court filings where they would be in legal hot water if they lie there) is that the issue revolves around the fact that DeCSS allows one to bypass the region coding system in CSS. Jack Valenti is lying to the news media in the hopes of gaining public sympathy (which if it were a genuine piracy case, he would get mine).
in addition to the court fights over the many legal issues in question, we also need to pursue the public media fight to combat the false and misleading propoganda generated by the MPAA (as well as RIAA on similar issues).
I see Ticketmaster.com as just a bunch of incompetent whiners. Why? Because they obviously have no clues (at least among those in the company that management actually listens to) about how to make deep hyperlinking useless. Apparently the management of Ticketmaster.com is so out of touch with technology that they were the ones to lump data mining and deep linking together. If I had a data repository of great value and wanted to make sure anyone visited was greeted first by whatever license agreements I wanted them to OK, or whatever ads I wanted to spam them with, it would be easy. And unlike some places which dumbly redirect offsite links to the main page, I could subsequently lead the visitor to the exact page they went for after they agree (and the page can have ads on it just for offsite linking, too). Manipulating how servers deliver content is so utterly easy that I can't see how Tickermaster.com can be anything but incompetent.
The GPL grants a very specific right. It is a narrow right. The fundamental purpose and philosophy ingrained in GPL is to ensure that the right to copy and distribute the source code exists. The GPL is designed to grant a right so specific that your choices (as holder of a copy) are limited to either copying/distributing the source code with a grant of GPL rights, or doing nothing.
The GPL does NOT grant a right to distribute without also distributing attached GPL rights. The GPL does NOT grant a right to distribute a binary only program (however, distribute is sufficiently liberal that a reference to the available source may be sufficient to be in compliance with the rights).
The GPL places no limits on the owner. It's not a case of being limited, but rather, it is a case of the owner giving away the right to deny what the GPL grants. The owner, by taking the action of initial distribution, gave away that right. You compare to placing a work in public domain. Think of the GPL as placing a very narrow and specific right (the one about copying source code with GPL rights) in the public domain. While the GPL is not literally that, it is similar in concept.
I don't know how buggy Mozilla might be (all bugs, not just security bugs). I do know that Netscape Navigator 3.X and 4.X were both buggy as hell, and even at 4.72 many bugs remain. I've been personally tracking one bug that I first reported to Netscape at 4.0b2 which remains in 4.72.
Due to new bugs in the 4.X series which affect my desktop, and the poor performance of 4.X, I am forced to continue using 3.X. 3.X's bugs are mainly in the Java and JavaScript implementations, which I leave disabled. While 4.X appears to be more stable in Java and JavaScript (but not 100% so), it has terrible rendering performance, especially with nested tables.
Will Mozilla be better? I genuinely hope it is. Do I expect it to be? Perhaps. I was unable to get the copy I downloaded to even compile (but I have not tried in a while now).
I hold out hope because I know that one of the things that makes for a horribly buggy program is the reliance on third-party code, especially commercial code. Fixing bugs related to that is a nightmare because the application programmers have to do as much work or more just to prove to the third party that the problem is in the third party code (which it sometimes is, and sometimes is just a matter of confusion about how it is supposed to work, e.g. a documentation bug). To the extent Mozilla does NOT use third party code, it has a chance of being more reliable and more secure.
Hopefully that will also mean more time to address security bugs. But it should not be an excuse to waste time on security bugs.
If a bug is found and is NOT known to those who would exploit it, then I am in favor of those bug reports being kept secret for a finit length of time (30 days at most). There's no reason the authors cannot address those bugs within 30 days. If the bug becomes known to those who would exploit it, I believe I then should be made aware of the bug so I can apply work arounds immediately (which might be to cease using Mozilla altogether of a specific workarounds is not available).
Maybe the authors did have all rights to the code. GPL grants limited rights to those who receive copies. In the scope of those rights granted, the authors then lose rights to modify the rights so granted to the copies. However, they retain all rights to the original code. They can modify that code without the restrictions of GPL and elect to start another tree of distribution under an entirely different license structure, if they wish. Those of us with GPL copies have no such right.
Since I don't have a copy of the agreement between the authors and Mattel, I do not know the wording and cannot say how it will be affected. However, having done agreements like this before, I know how lawyers typically write these. And I've even written a couple of these myself which the other parties (and they were lawyers) agreed to (and IANAL). It could come down to whether they said they have (and assign) full rights to the original code (which they have since GPL applies only to the released copies). or full rights to every copy (which GPL passes away with the copy, so they do not have this).
So if the authors agreed to assign to Mattel all rights to the original code, and if Mattel at the same time agreed to not pursue the case against the authors, this may well be over for the authors. The authors would have no rights to the original code. They could not re-release it under any new terms. If they received a GPL-ed copy, they would gain new rights, and, if they the agreement doesn't require them to hand over future rights, they would now have the GPL rights as non-authors.
Now what will Mattel do with what rights they did have all along in CyberPatrol with respect to those who are distributing the GPL-ed copies of the orignal? I do suspect Mattel has some rights in those countries where the laws on reverse engineering grant them. But I also believe they are hurting their own case by trying to pursue it using untested legal maneuvers such as sending by e-mail copies of court orders to people who are not named in such orders and expecting those people to believe those orders are genuine and apply to them (especially out of the jurisdiction).
As fast as this case was pursued, it's obvious to me that neither side did their legal research.
A clear and unambiguous reference to the GNU General Public License, which we all know as GPL, would be sufficient. Did the authors know that that they were releasing it under the terms of the GPL (it can be argued that they did because they literally put "GPL" on it) and did the recipient believe that what she received was a copy and set of rights as spelled out by the GPL (some did)?
The specifications in the GPL for how to present it are there (IMHO) to help make the points clear and to avoid the confusion of having someone inadvertently violate it. The authors, by leaving out the terms, could be accused of contributing to a misunderstanding, and were it the case that Mattel could itself be liable for violating the GPL (not likely since their role at this point is having taken on whatever rights the authors have, not the rights of a distributor) the authors could be held responsible for that.
Did they misrepresent the rights they had vs. the rights they gave away, to Mattel in their agreement? Perhaps. Maybe it could be argued that under the time pressure of the situation, they didn't have time to evaluate the agreement, which most likely was written entirely by the Mattel lawyers surely entirely in their own (Mattel's) favor.
Mattel's case was weak for a number of reasons, most particularly lack of having pursued it in the proper jurisdictions (e.g. they should have filed their lawsuits in Canada and Sweden). Maybe now they have to start all over? Another way out is to rewrite the terms and re-agree with the authors, and let the authors hand over exact what rights they have.
The usual situation with copyrights is that the author generally retains the rights to copying. Those who hold a copy have no right to make more copies (outside of the rights specified by the law that the holder does have, like making a backup). GPL is different. Under GPL, certain rights to make a copy ride with the copy itself. Specifically, the right to make a copy that includes the source code and all the original rights is that certain right (and the rights to make a copy without the source and/or without the original rights, is not, but that's not the issue here). So the right to make a copy of that copy are held by whoever holds that copy. And further, they have no right to make a copy without also granting all these rights with the copy they make. So even new copies made tomorrow have with them all the rights any other copy has. While intended for other purposes, this is the effect of the GPL. BTW, IANAL, but I think I've been around them too much.
Since under GPL, the right to copy goes with the copy, and does not stay with the original author ( in contrast to things like commercial music, movies, software, where it is usually the case that the right to copy does NOT go with the copy), that instance of the right is not held by the authors any more, and therefore cannot be assigned to Mattel. So Mattel has no right to copy that could have been assigned by the author.
What rights Mattel may have as a result of the fact that they held rights in the reverse engineered work (CPHACK being potentially a derived work), would be rights that the authors did not have, so again, Mattel gains no new rights from settling with the authors, although they may have certain rights all along.
The point is, if Mattel pursues mirrors under copyright law, they will have to establish that they hold all the rights to copying, and I don't see how they can possibly do that.
Then there's the murky areas of jurisdiction, and blanket court orders, and hearings, etc. I for one will consider any order to be bogus unless it names me personally, in the original order, and bears the seal of the court as proof of authenticity.
There was no fight to fight at all. Is this to say that if some court in some other country suddenly has some lawsuit against you, that you have to suddenly address the issue with respect to the civil laws in some other country?
WRT assiging the rights to the program, they didn't have the rights because they had already irrevokably granted those rights to public.
When I go to their secure store site, I get a popup box that says:
The security library has experienced a database error. You will probably be unable to connect to this site securely.
It has no button to allow me to choose to continue anyway. So why do I get this error only on Redhat's web site and not others? I seem to recall this problem in an earlier release. I'm assuming they run their own web server software, which I would not want to buy because I would not want to risk this kind of thing affecting my site visitors.
BTW, I know it is not an expired certificate problem, because I get a different popup for that, and that popup lets me decide to continue.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact is, so many tools are out there that make GIFs, have LZW, and are NOT licensed by Unisys. Apparently what Unisys is persuing is that GIFs made by such programs are therefore illegal, but they offer a blanket license to cover it (starting at $5000 and going up to whatever they think they can get out of you).
I'm most curious how they know a GIF is licensed. I suspect they look for the comment block in the GIF format and if it has the name of a licensed software product, it passes. But then, there are optimizers than never touch the compression, but do strip a GIF of unneeded stuff like the comment blocks. And others might even put forged comment blocks in. And then there are non-compressed GIFs but I wonder if Unisys would know how to recognize that.
No, it does not restrict you to 256 colors. That limit came about back when the best graphical displays were 256 colors and indexed, and happened to match up exactly with the number of colors GIF could encode in a single image block. So the practice came about to use exactly one image block for a whole GIF image. There is nothing preventing you from using multiple image blocks (without the animation extension which isn't part of the official GIF standard). IE 3-5, NS 3-4, Opera, and Mozilla all display things correctly (IE fails to print correctly).
There are plenty of reasons not to use GIF, but a limit of 256 colors is not one of them. Such limits exist only in those programs (the majority, unfortunately) that implemented GIF by reusing tired old code over and over from the 256 color display days (e.g. 1989).
You can see non-compressed and true-color GIFs here and get free GPL non-LZW code to produce your own here.
What do you mean you can't open them again? Why not? I've created many non-compressed GIFs and they work fine in web browsers, and GIMP and Photoshop both import them just fine. Yes, of course they are bigger, but if your goal is a small 4 color icon, it isn't going to be all that much bigger.
Companies exist to maximize profit. That's the nature of the beast. People are motivated to acquire capital gains and other people are motivated to provide it. Without it, very little economy will exist. Unisys board members, chairman, and officers would all be subject to being kicked out by the stock holders (mostly institutional ones like banks, mutual funds, retirement plans, etc.) if they didn't make reasonable attempts to maximize returns. I suspect much heat has already been generated within the company for having failed to gain even better revenues on this in the past (especially for having been so ignorant about even knowing its potential in the 1980's).
The real culprit is a broken patent system. This broken patent system is responsible for every patent holder having to do the things they do, mostly because the opportunity exists. In theory, US patent law is supposed to maximize the public good through an appropriate body of laws. In practice it appears to be a drain on the economic flow, diverting huge funds into efforts, such as law suits, legal threats, and just plain negotiation, for massive numbers of trivial patents that are handed out almost as fast as AOL CDs.
The LZW patent is, perhaps, a poor example. I know how LZW works because I once wrote my own implementation of it from scratch from nothing more than Terry Welch's paper. In hindsight it might seem obvious, but at the time it was issued, I don't think it was all that much obvious.
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands or even tens of thousands, of other patents that are at least trivial, and perhaps downright phoney. Those are the patents that need to be used as examples to show that the patent system is currently practiced in a way that contradicts the national good. Patents should be reserved as a reasonable reward and profitable return for those who do put in the effort and investment to bring intellectual wealth to the nation (trade secret being an available mechanism for those who prefer not to divulge their results). There should be a genuine and beneficial gain from that invention that is likely not to have been for some time later than when it was invented. Most of the patents issued today in the US benefit only intellectual property lawyers and allow large and/or monopolistic companies to bully smaller businesses (who, incidentally, are also trying to maximize their own returns on investment no different than any other business).
Focus. This is political. The change that needs to take place is a revision of the patent law. A proper patent law in the US will reduce lawsuits, increase sharing, and make legitimate and genuine patented ideas available to all for a fair and just reward to the inventors.
IANAL += 1; /* :-) */
I choose to release my library code under the LGPL because it is my intent to allow others to integrate my library code (such as my recently released AVLMAP library) into applications that are distributed in binary-only form. When the application is not intended as a resource of code for developers I see no reason that the code has to be found there. I do not see the distribution of an application as a means to get the library source into the hands of developers. This is especially so when the purpose of the library isn't really related to the purpose of the application. My AVLMAP library could be used in just about any kind of application. I'd much rather have the source downloaded from my web site or one of the mirrors, or found on sites like Freshmeat where they can be exposed to the vastness of open source free software of all kinds.
The LGPL was changed from Library to Lesser because, I believe, RMS wanted to promote having more libraries released as just GPL , as opposed to making a different license available for other programs. You can read about that here . I just happen to not totally agree with RMS on this. But there is a difference and you should read both carefully and decide for yourself which you want to use.
I want to know if it will work on Mountain Dew. Can I run it from my car battery?
I've always wanted to know ... did the people who designed the CMD640 actually lose their jobs as they should have, or was the whole company a loser?
A reasonably knowledgeable person can download the latest version of the source for the services you actually do run, and install them, in hours, not weeks.
I'm not trying to demerit OpenBSD, because I believe OpenBSD is a great system, and should be seriously considered, especially for firewall points. But if there is some reason that would weigh in favor of some other operating system, such as familiarity (I am far more familiar with Linux, especially Slackware, than I am of OpenBSD), then you might still choose something other than OpenBSD, and you can still make it be secure with reasonable effort. If you're a business, just hire someone who knows what they are doing, not someone who has to piddle around the newsgroups for the next couple months to learn how to recognize a security clue.
Since the code was a TWO BYTE code, and the browser displayed it as ONE question mark, then the browser knew how to convert UTF-8 encoding into a raw numeric code. It just didn't have a glyph to render it with, so it substituted the question mark.
That may NOT be the standard, but it is also the case that many standards groups are spending (wasting?) too much time with making things like XML more complicated than they need to be, and not keeping all aspects of standards up to date (like officially supporting UTF-8 encoded UNICODE, which is trivial to implement in validators ... for those who use such things).
It is already common for standards to be extended and the extensions to be accepted. Netscape added animation to GIF, and while there were some purists crying foul, others just got on with making things better, leaving standards group to eat their dust. I extended GIF to support true-color images and browsers support that, too (Netscape, Explorer, and Opera, that I have tested). People did bitch and whine about it because it wasn't described in the standard for GIF, but it did work, it did not conflict with the literal standard, and it was the only way to get true-color into web pages until PNG came along (which admittedly was slowed due to browser makers dragging their feet).
So I suspect as soon as you have full UNICODE support in X windows and/or the font server, with proper fonts, it will work fine (despite what some useless validator says).
Are you good enough to be a security admin?
Part of the problem is too many people just installing some packaged software, which they picked for reasons related to how many other clueless people picked it, and they expect it to be rock solid secure as installed without any configuration or tuning. They also expect top notch performance.
If you want security, then you have to understand security, or you have to get something that is guaranteed to be secure right from the box, or hire someone who knows security (and please, no whining about lack of technical people when technical people are still looking for decent jobs where their employers respect their skills). OpenBSD probably is the most secure system available right now, as installed, although even I would not trust it without looking under the hood.
A system/network security expert can make most systems secure (even NT if enough information can be had). Businesses have to commit to the attitude of security and trust a security expert to set it up for them. If you can't trust someone, then you better pull the plug on that internet connection right now (and probably also fire all your employees).
Seeing these characters myself, I extracted the codes and looked them up. The code I get where I expected the ASCII symmetrical apostrophe is actually the UNICODE right apostrophe.
It's sad, but in some ways, Microsoft is actually LEADING technology. In this case it is the adoption of UNICODE international character set. I wish the Unix/BSD/Linux community would get their act together and get these things working.
Part of the problem is the requirement to expend an enourmous resource just to assure to the provider that there is no defamatory content. Is this a requirement imposed by NetBenefit? or by the British Government? And why is it NOT being applied to every web customer?
If it is the fault of NetBenefit, then no one should host there. If it is the fault of stupid British laws, then no one should host anything at any ISP in Britain.
The deep linking ruling allows linking into a deep page in a site against the wishes of the site owner (where presumably, you could bookmark that link yourself). The MPAA argument is that if actually having the content is illegal (which they condend is the case for DeCSS) then having a link to another site with that content anywhere in the world is equivalent to having that content.
The defense 2600 (and the rest of us) will have to make is that the linking (deep or otherwise) is not the same as having the content yourself. The argument may be strengthened if the link is clear that it is another site (as is the case with 2600's links).
This is entirely separate from the argument that having content that reveals already reverse engineered technology that is already in the public domain is not in and of itself illegal, and is also separate from the argument that reverse engineered technology that has a primary purpose of enabling one to access media that they have already obtained legally is not in and of itself illegal. All these things are distinct arguments in this whole issue, and the final legal rulings could be a mix.
One thing we do need to address is the constant false information being spouted by Jack Valenti, CEO of MPAA. He persists in saying that the issue revolves around the copying of DVDs (supposedly to make an unencrypted copy even though copying an encrypted copy is what pirates are already doing) when in fact the truth of the issue (which can be found in MPAA court filings where they would be in legal hot water if they lie there) is that the issue revolves around the fact that DeCSS allows one to bypass the region coding system in CSS. Jack Valenti is lying to the news media in the hopes of gaining public sympathy (which if it were a genuine piracy case, he would get mine).
in addition to the court fights over the many legal issues in question, we also need to pursue the public media fight to combat the false and misleading propoganda generated by the MPAA (as well as RIAA on similar issues).
I take it then, you would not be fond of boycotting Sony (which I started to do just earlier this week).
I see Ticketmaster.com as just a bunch of incompetent whiners. Why? Because they obviously have no clues (at least among those in the company that management actually listens to) about how to make deep hyperlinking useless. Apparently the management of Ticketmaster.com is so out of touch with technology that they were the ones to lump data mining and deep linking together. If I had a data repository of great value and wanted to make sure anyone visited was greeted first by whatever license agreements I wanted them to OK, or whatever ads I wanted to spam them with, it would be easy. And unlike some places which dumbly redirect offsite links to the main page, I could subsequently lead the visitor to the exact page they went for after they agree (and the page can have ads on it just for offsite linking, too). Manipulating how servers deliver content is so utterly easy that I can't see how Tickermaster.com can be anything but incompetent.
Then do what I do ... don't use XML.
It doesn't work that way.
The GPL grants a very specific right. It is a narrow right. The fundamental purpose and philosophy ingrained in GPL is to ensure that the right to copy and distribute the source code exists. The GPL is designed to grant a right so specific that your choices (as holder of a copy) are limited to either copying/distributing the source code with a grant of GPL rights, or doing nothing.
The GPL does NOT grant a right to distribute without also distributing attached GPL rights. The GPL does NOT grant a right to distribute a binary only program (however, distribute is sufficiently liberal that a reference to the available source may be sufficient to be in compliance with the rights).
The GPL places no limits on the owner. It's not a case of being limited, but rather, it is a case of the owner giving away the right to deny what the GPL grants. The owner, by taking the action of initial distribution, gave away that right. You compare to placing a work in public domain. Think of the GPL as placing a very narrow and specific right (the one about copying source code with GPL rights) in the public domain. While the GPL is not literally that, it is similar in concept.
I don't know how buggy Mozilla might be (all bugs, not just security bugs). I do know that Netscape Navigator 3.X and 4.X were both buggy as hell, and even at 4.72 many bugs remain. I've been personally tracking one bug that I first reported to Netscape at 4.0b2 which remains in 4.72.
Due to new bugs in the 4.X series which affect my desktop, and the poor performance of 4.X, I am forced to continue using 3.X. 3.X's bugs are mainly in the Java and JavaScript implementations, which I leave disabled. While 4.X appears to be more stable in Java and JavaScript (but not 100% so), it has terrible rendering performance, especially with nested tables.
Will Mozilla be better? I genuinely hope it is. Do I expect it to be? Perhaps. I was unable to get the copy I downloaded to even compile (but I have not tried in a while now).
I hold out hope because I know that one of the things that makes for a horribly buggy program is the reliance on third-party code, especially commercial code. Fixing bugs related to that is a nightmare because the application programmers have to do as much work or more just to prove to the third party that the problem is in the third party code (which it sometimes is, and sometimes is just a matter of confusion about how it is supposed to work, e.g. a documentation bug). To the extent Mozilla does NOT use third party code, it has a chance of being more reliable and more secure.
Hopefully that will also mean more time to address security bugs. But it should not be an excuse to waste time on security bugs.
If a bug is found and is NOT known to those who would exploit it, then I am in favor of those bug reports being kept secret for a finit length of time (30 days at most). There's no reason the authors cannot address those bugs within 30 days. If the bug becomes known to those who would exploit it, I believe I then should be made aware of the bug so I can apply work arounds immediately (which might be to cease using Mozilla altogether of a specific workarounds is not available).
Maybe the authors did have all rights to the code. GPL grants limited rights to those who receive copies. In the scope of those rights granted, the authors then lose rights to modify the rights so granted to the copies. However, they retain all rights to the original code. They can modify that code without the restrictions of GPL and elect to start another tree of distribution under an entirely different license structure, if they wish. Those of us with GPL copies have no such right.
Since I don't have a copy of the agreement between the authors and Mattel, I do not know the wording and cannot say how it will be affected. However, having done agreements like this before, I know how lawyers typically write these. And I've even written a couple of these myself which the other parties (and they were lawyers) agreed to (and IANAL). It could come down to whether they said they have (and assign) full rights to the original code (which they have since GPL applies only to the released copies). or full rights to every copy (which GPL passes away with the copy, so they do not have this).
So if the authors agreed to assign to Mattel all rights to the original code, and if Mattel at the same time agreed to not pursue the case against the authors, this may well be over for the authors. The authors would have no rights to the original code. They could not re-release it under any new terms. If they received a GPL-ed copy, they would gain new rights, and, if they the agreement doesn't require them to hand over future rights, they would now have the GPL rights as non-authors.
Now what will Mattel do with what rights they did have all along in CyberPatrol with respect to those who are distributing the GPL-ed copies of the orignal? I do suspect Mattel has some rights in those countries where the laws on reverse engineering grant them. But I also believe they are hurting their own case by trying to pursue it using untested legal maneuvers such as sending by e-mail copies of court orders to people who are not named in such orders and expecting those people to believe those orders are genuine and apply to them (especially out of the jurisdiction).
As fast as this case was pursued, it's obvious to me that neither side did their legal research.
A clear and unambiguous reference to the GNU General Public License, which we all know as GPL, would be sufficient. Did the authors know that that they were releasing it under the terms of the GPL (it can be argued that they did because they literally put "GPL" on it) and did the recipient believe that what she received was a copy and set of rights as spelled out by the GPL (some did)?
The specifications in the GPL for how to present it are there (IMHO) to help make the points clear and to avoid the confusion of having someone inadvertently violate it. The authors, by leaving out the terms, could be accused of contributing to a misunderstanding, and were it the case that Mattel could itself be liable for violating the GPL (not likely since their role at this point is having taken on whatever rights the authors have, not the rights of a distributor) the authors could be held responsible for that.
Did they misrepresent the rights they had vs. the rights they gave away, to Mattel in their agreement? Perhaps. Maybe it could be argued that under the time pressure of the situation, they didn't have time to evaluate the agreement, which most likely was written entirely by the Mattel lawyers surely entirely in their own (Mattel's) favor.
Mattel's case was weak for a number of reasons, most particularly lack of having pursued it in the proper jurisdictions (e.g. they should have filed their lawsuits in Canada and Sweden). Maybe now they have to start all over? Another way out is to rewrite the terms and re-agree with the authors, and let the authors hand over exact what rights they have.
The usual situation with copyrights is that the author generally retains the rights to copying. Those who hold a copy have no right to make more copies (outside of the rights specified by the law that the holder does have, like making a backup). GPL is different. Under GPL, certain rights to make a copy ride with the copy itself. Specifically, the right to make a copy that includes the source code and all the original rights is that certain right (and the rights to make a copy without the source and/or without the original rights, is not, but that's not the issue here). So the right to make a copy of that copy are held by whoever holds that copy. And further, they have no right to make a copy without also granting all these rights with the copy they make. So even new copies made tomorrow have with them all the rights any other copy has. While intended for other purposes, this is the effect of the GPL. BTW, IANAL, but I think I've been around them too much.
Since under GPL, the right to copy goes with the copy, and does not stay with the original author ( in contrast to things like commercial music, movies, software, where it is usually the case that the right to copy does NOT go with the copy), that instance of the right is not held by the authors any more, and therefore cannot be assigned to Mattel. So Mattel has no right to copy that could have been assigned by the author.
What rights Mattel may have as a result of the fact that they held rights in the reverse engineered work (CPHACK being potentially a derived work), would be rights that the authors did not have, so again, Mattel gains no new rights from settling with the authors, although they may have certain rights all along.
The point is, if Mattel pursues mirrors under copyright law, they will have to establish that they hold all the rights to copying, and I don't see how they can possibly do that.
Then there's the murky areas of jurisdiction, and blanket court orders, and hearings, etc. I for one will consider any order to be bogus unless it names me personally, in the original order, and bears the seal of the court as proof of authenticity.
There was no fight to fight at all. Is this to say that if some court in some other country suddenly has some lawsuit against you, that you have to suddenly address the issue with respect to the civil laws in some other country?
WRT assiging the rights to the program, they didn't have the rights because they had already irrevokably granted those rights to public.
My boycott of Mattel continues!
When I go to their secure store site, I get a popup box that says:
It has no button to allow me to choose to continue anyway. So why do I get this error only on Redhat's web site and not others? I seem to recall this problem in an earlier release. I'm assuming they run their own web server software, which I would not want to buy because I would not want to risk this kind of thing affecting my site visitors.
BTW, I know it is not an expired certificate problem, because I get a different popup for that, and that popup lets me decide to continue.
You've been 404'd by Geocities?