If they're not going to enforce the patent, then why get it?... Why not just not patent it in the first place?
Because this way they're protected against another company patenting the same process. If Barnes and Noble had patented one click shopping, but then hadn't enforced it, they'd have avoided the Amazon litigation.
"16-11-2000 Ron King has submitted a handy patch to use Interbase with FREE. See it on our Sourceforge tools"
Yes ! Link the electronic voting system to a database that has a teensy little backdoor...
Afraid Not: Re:Can common law override copyright?
on
Warez and Abandonware
·
· Score: 2
"One of the facets under common law is that if someone doesn't use something for ten years, does not show any significant effort to maintain it, and someone else does these actions instead independant of the owner, the latter person gains the right to use that property as they see fit without the ability for the original onwer to prohibit them from doing so. Typically this is used with tracts of land, but I suspect it could apply to other things."
Nope. This is specific to land [pedantry](and I think it's 12 years rather than 10)[/pedantry]. If you hold a copyright, you maintain that copyright for the full term - in the EU currently life of author plus, IIRC, seventy years.
There may be bars to selective enforcement of copyright, but it can't be taken over by someone else's actions in this way, no matter how well meaning or useful. More's the pity.
The comparison to marking down the expiry times on Usenet groups is interesting - it shows that Freenet is in fact much more exposed than Usenet to hijacking by MP3s and porn. A Usenet administrator can choose to cut expiry times on particular newsgroups/hierarchies - so alt.binaries gets a much lower retention than alt.politics. If I've understood it right, Freenet can't tell the difference - it'll simply look at number of downloads and expire stuff at the bottom of the list. The chance of Freenet being taken over by MP3s etc seems much higher than Usenet.
I tend to assume that the strong First Amendment is an unmitigated "good thing" (TM), but the constant flow of cases like this makes me wonder.
Are the legislators essentially just relying on the courts to strike down bad laws like this ? Surely after the CDA judgement there can't have been much doubt that this was unconstitutional ?
There isn't such strong free speech protection in the UK (though the recently passed Human Rights Act may change that), but the UK doesn't tend to pass such awful acts in the first place - perhaps because they can't rely on the courts to tidy up the bad laws... ?
Out of all the nominees, only one happens to be female. Is ICANN just another "Good ol' Boy" group?
Who is Lawrence Lessig (sp?) and why is he in here?
<sarcasm>
You'd think Al Gore would be nominated; after all, he invented the Internet and all.:)
</sarcasm>
Perhaps you meant to put the sarcasm tag around the second as well ? Lessig is a law professor (formerly Harvard, now Yale), famous for:
being appointed by Judge Jackson as a friend of the court in the Microsoft trial because of his expertise in the legal issues of cyberspace (dumped off again by the appeal court);
The 100k limit will keep out MP3s, but it may also stop the system being usable as a free speech tool. Sure, you can express a lot in a 100k text file, but what about photos and videos ?
Given the power and importance of images (remember the Ethiopian famine, Tiananmen square, the Bosnian prisoner camps ?) a mechanism for distributing materials that's limited to 100k just won't work.
Different liabilities: warranties and use
on
Hacker Crackdown?
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· Score: 3
The Salon article is interesting, but doesn't distinguish clearly enough between two very different things:
• warranty for the product: should the author be liable if the software doesn't behave as it should ? (eg the GPS sending you over a cliff example in the article).
• liability for third party use: eg should the authors of Gnutella or Freenet be liable if their software is used for unlawful behaviour (eg copyright infringement).
Now for the first of these, I'd like to see more liability - at least for commercial software - rather than less. Microsoft's standard licence tries real hard to avoid / limit any liability. Should a commercial vendor really be able to say it's not liable, eg, if the fact that its spreadsheet can't do math leads an individual or a business to lose money ? (The GPL also has a no warranty provision. Dealing with non-commercial open source software shouldn't be a problem: not only is there no commercial benefit to the author, but in theory the user can look at the code themselves to see if it does what the user wants - and even change the code to suit the user's needs.)
The second gives rise to more difficult problems, and this is where Napster is fighting. (Don't forget that Napster though is providing a service - the server - so if Napster loses it won't necessarily mean that the authors of Gnutella or Freenet would lose.) The test for a product (eg a VCR) is whether the product is "capable" of a lawful use. In the Sony case, a VCR was held to be capable of doing perfectly lawful things (eg time-shifting TV viewing).
A network sniffing tool that could be used legitimately to check vulnerabilities (so they can be closed) would seem to be OK even if it could also be used to check vulnerabilities (so they can be exploited). Though if it was developed and published with the stated aim of checking and exploiting, a court may be reluctant to accept later arguments that the author shouldn't be nailed because it could also be used to check and close.
A fair point;) But I was thinking more of presenting the case to a wider audience than "the typical GPL zealot". A commercial company would be saying:
- we didn't write it;
- we didn't pay for it;
- we want to use it in our own commercial products;
- we know the author doesn't want us to use it;
- but the author messed up by using the GPL which (for an obscure reason most people won't understand) we don't believe it's enforceable.
It's not a pleasant line to have to take, assuming the company has intellectual property of its own. The changes of looking, very publicly, like a hypocrite are quite high...
There's a difference between influencing decisions about the future direction of patents, and changing the entire intellectual property system. For the former, I doubt the best person for the job is someone who believes the entire structure is inappropriate.
These aren't black and white issues, and intelligent, thoughtful people can disagree. In my experience, anyway, the best way to persuade someone to change direction is to agree with them as much as possible, and introduce shades of gray into the discussion. Arguing that they're fundamentally wrong tends to be less productive.
It is incredible that the GPL has been around for such a long time and yet has never been tested in court.
For the proponents of the GPL, staying out-of-court means avoiding the risk of the licence being invalidated. The risk (of the whole thing being invalidated) may be small, but the potential damage is very large.
It's less clear (to me, anyway) why opponents of the GPL would want to avoid court. Perhaps it's easier to comply / not use GPL'd code, so few companies care enough to actually spend money to try and invalidate the GPL. There's also the downside of enormous amounts of ill-will being generated by such a case.
The decision is certainly another victory for free speech on the Internet (but possibly a transient one as Seth's comment indicates), but litigation like this is probably going to continue.
The politicians that pass the legislation gain kudos with (parts of) the public in that they can shout loudly about how hard they're trying to protection children from the horrors of the net. They don't have to pay for the inevitable litigation to test the constitutionality of the laws, and can always stand before the cameras claiming that they did their best.
In effect, they can use the constitution and the court system as an excuse for NOT balancing competing interests and NOT making the hard choices.
Slashdot Mirror
Because this way they're protected against another company patenting the same process. If Barnes and Noble had patented one click shopping, but then hadn't enforced it, they'd have avoided the Amazon litigation.
"16-11-2000 Ron King has submitted a handy patch to use Interbase with FREE. See it on our Sourceforge tools"
Yes ! Link the electronic voting system to a database that has a teensy little backdoor...
Nope. This is specific to land [pedantry](and I think it's 12 years rather than 10)[/pedantry]. If you hold a copyright, you maintain that copyright for the full term - in the EU currently life of author plus, IIRC, seventy years.
There may be bars to selective enforcement of copyright, but it can't be taken over by someone else's actions in this way, no matter how well meaning or useful. More's the pity.
Thanks for the correction
Are the legislators essentially just relying on the courts to strike down bad laws like this ? Surely after the CDA judgement there can't have been much doubt that this was unconstitutional ?
There isn't such strong free speech protection in the UK (though the recently passed Human Rights Act may change that), but the UK doesn't tend to pass such awful acts in the first place - perhaps because they can't rely on the courts to tidy up the bad laws... ?
<sarcasm>
</sarcasm>
Perhaps you meant to put the sarcasm tag around the second as well ? Lessig is a law professor (formerly Harvard, now Yale), famous for:
being appointed by Judge Jackson as a friend of the court in the Microsoft trial because of his expertise in the legal issues of cyberspace (dumped off again by the appeal court);
his book "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace" (Sorry about the Amazon link). Well worth a read by ... well everyone really ;)
All round bright guy, and one of the few laywers to have given a lot of thought to internet issues.
"We've discussed this before"
Indeed we have. Same article was posted about four days ago: Hacker Crackdown
The 100k limit will keep out MP3s, but it may also stop the system being usable as a free speech tool. Sure, you can express a lot in a 100k text file, but what about photos and videos ?
Given the power and importance of images (remember the Ethiopian famine, Tiananmen square, the Bosnian prisoner camps ?) a mechanism for distributing materials that's limited to 100k just won't work.
The Salon article is interesting, but doesn't distinguish clearly enough between two very different things:
.
• warranty for the product: should the author be liable if the software doesn't behave as it should ? (eg the GPS sending you over a cliff example in the article).
• liability for third party use: eg should the authors of Gnutella or Freenet be liable if their software is used for unlawful behaviour (eg copyright infringement).
Now for the first of these, I'd like to see more liability - at least for commercial software - rather than less. Microsoft's standard licence tries real hard to avoid / limit any liability. Should a commercial vendor really be able to say it's not liable, eg, if the fact that its spreadsheet can't do math leads an individual or a business to lose money ?
(The GPL also has a no warranty provision. Dealing with non-commercial open source software shouldn't be a problem: not only is there no commercial benefit to the author, but in theory the user can look at the code themselves to see if it does what the user wants - and even change the code to suit the user's needs.)
The second gives rise to more difficult problems, and this is where Napster is fighting. (Don't forget that Napster though is providing a service - the server - so if Napster loses it won't necessarily mean that the authors of Gnutella or Freenet would lose.)
The test for a product (eg a VCR) is whether the product is "capable" of a lawful use. In the Sony case, a VCR was held to be capable of doing perfectly lawful things (eg time-shifting TV viewing).
A network sniffing tool that could be used legitimately to check vulnerabilities (so they can be closed) would seem to be OK even if it could also be used to check vulnerabilities (so they can be exploited). Though if it was developed and published with the stated aim of checking and exploiting, a court may be reluctant to accept later arguments that the author shouldn't be nailed because it could also be used to check and close
- we didn't write it;
- we didn't pay for it;
- we want to use it in our own commercial products;
- we know the author doesn't want us to use it;
- but the author messed up by using the GPL which (for an obscure reason most people won't understand) we don't believe it's enforceable.
It's not a pleasant line to have to take, assuming the company has intellectual property of its own. The changes of looking, very publicly, like a hypocrite are quite high...
These aren't black and white issues, and intelligent, thoughtful people can disagree. In my experience, anyway, the best way to persuade someone to change direction is to agree with them as much as possible, and introduce shades of gray into the discussion. Arguing that they're fundamentally wrong tends to be less productive.
For the proponents of the GPL, staying out-of-court means avoiding the risk of the licence being invalidated. The risk (of the whole thing being invalidated) may be small, but the potential damage is very large.
It's less clear (to me, anyway) why opponents of the GPL would want to avoid court. Perhaps it's easier to comply / not use GPL'd code, so few companies care enough to actually spend money to try and invalidate the GPL. There's also the downside of enormous amounts of ill-will being generated by such a case.
The politicians that pass the legislation gain kudos with (parts of) the public in that they can shout loudly about how hard they're trying to protection children from the horrors of the net. They don't have to pay for the inevitable litigation to test the constitutionality of the laws, and can always stand before the cameras claiming that they did their best.
In effect, they can use the constitution and the court system as an excuse for NOT balancing competing interests and NOT making the hard choices.
And in respect of a document which has been available on MSN for over a week:
Kerberos specification on MSN