The schools point was that this tranfer was not legimate
It wasn't legitimate. You signed a contract with the university saying what you wrote was theirs. You had no more right transfering copyright to the FSF than you had selling their buildings.
So the GPL licence was not valid in this situation.
Your placing the GPL on your code was not valid. But the GPL attached to any code mixed in is still valid. The school can distribute the software if they abide by the terms of the GPL. If they don't they can't. If they really want to make a successful commercial venture out of your software, then they need to remove the third party code that's under the GPL. It's really very simple.
And shame on you for trying to force your ideology down their throats in this singularly underhanded manner.
yet physical property ownership is just as theoretical as IP ownership
Wrongo! While the concept of physical property might be just as theoretical as IP, it does have one attribute that IP doesn't: you can put material boundaries around it. That's what the wolf is doing by marking his territory. If you can fence it, box it, stick it in your pocket, or lock it, then it's almost certainly property. IP doesn't have any material bounderies, and is as artificial a property as frequencies in the radio spectrum. It takes an act of government to create intellectual property.
In order to make IP a natural property, you need to be able to put real world boundaries upon it. You can, in fact, do this. You can put it on a CD or a harddrive, so that the information becomes property. You can encrypt the information to lock it up. (This is not the same thing as DRM). But in all these cases and others, there is a common attribute: what is being propertized is a particular *copy* of the information. You can't make the information itself property. At least not without an act of government to impose an artificial theoretical concept on the populace.
You are right though, that IP has been around nearly as long as civilization. But it has still always been an artificial creation of government. Guilds had to lobby kings to institute guild laws.
Nobody has been tortured to death recently in Iraq. If you want that you need to go back a few years to the days of Saddam. I know you were making a joke, but do not confuse the US humilation of prisoners with Saddam's actual honest-to-god death-inducing torture.
It's called "crime". You don't need to be a psych major to understand it. It's the use of force or fraud to get what you want. "Normal" people use non-coercive means to get what they want, like money, or persuasion, or begging.
I was talking with a friend this morning about whiners, children who throw screaming tantrums in store to get the candy they want. Most children try it, and if they manage to get away with it, the whining can become a permananent part of their psyche. I've actually seen college kids engage in pouting tantrums.
Chronic riminal behavior is probably similar. As a kid this guy probably stole money from his mom's purse and got away with it. He got caught stealing a pack of gum from the store, but his mom let him get away with it. He probably discovered that his mother would believe him no matter how outrageous his lies. You know his mother, she's the one that always says "my little boy would never do something like that." Thus, he learns that theft and lying are an acceptable means of getting what you want.
Why do you need a tax deduction before you can give to charity? It's like demanding a discount on your giving. "I'm sorry, I won't give you $20 unless I can get some of it back at tax time..."
the users are taken for a ride by the OS companies
Note the use of the plural. This is incorrect. Only Microsoft is demanding the expensive video card upgrade cycle. As demonstrated by the iBook and Mini lines, even eye candy rich Mac OS X can happily get by with a low end video card (it's not the size of your card, son, it's how you use it). And despite the demands of pimply newbies fresh from Microsoft-land, the next releases of KDE and GNOME will only need basic 3D video even with all the new eyecandy turned on.
Dynamic linkage. The FSF's interpretation of the GPL says I may not link a non-GPL program to a GPL library. You can't do it with static linkage, because that's clearly distributing the software, but both dynamic and runtime linkage should be acceptable. Except that the FSF says the GPL won't let you.
You aren't distributing the software with dynamic linkage. And you're not creating a derivative work either, not in the way copyright law defines it. The FSF offers up some excuse about the two separate works running in the same process space create a derivative work, but they're just making it up. But the process space "threshold" isn't in copyright law, so they might just as well say "because we said so".
For more information on this exception, from a real lawyer, see http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6366. Don't respond to my post, respond to Larry Rosen's article.
I see you flunked civics in high school. Congress makes the laws, the president signs them or not, and the supreme court rules on it if there's a disagreement regarding the prior two. In your example case, the president has not made a new law, he has merely stated how he intends to enforce it. If this is out of line with the intent of the law, a case can be brought before the supreme court. In the meantime, congress retains the power to impeach the president.
You act like no president has ever nominated supreme court judges before.
Thanks to copyright law, GPL violators are always in the wrong.
Except in those few cases where the GPL (and/or the FSF's interpretation of it) restricts something that (classic non-DMCA) copyright law does not. They are corner cases to be sure, but a few do exist.
It's a brand new 12" iBook. I guess notebooks have expanded considerably since my day in school. Hmmm, let me measure. Okay, I exaggerated, I only takes *four* notepads to equal the thickness of my laptop. I should have said "legal pad", because I can fit five of them in 1.35 inches.
You are not describing capitalism, you are describing one gross distortion of greed.
Capitalism is not unfettered, as government provides a court system for the adjudication of disputes, and a police force to hinder and deter crime and fraud. Beyond this minimal level of force and a certain amount of infrastructure, government has relatively little involvement in a capitalist economy. Profits are (thankfully) accrued under capitalism, but the idea that profits are paramount is twisted.
Greed does exist in capitalism. But that's because greed exists in all people, regardless of their status as capitalists. Greed alone is rarely dangerous to other), but when combined with the coercive force of government, can become quite a destructive force. That's how plutocracies arise. The problem isn't capitalists, the problem is capitalists with government power. Of course, socialists with government power is just as problematic.
Our current US economy is not an example of free market capitalism. It is instead a bit of capitalism mixed with a heavy dose of government management. This very topic of DRM is an example. Copyright and DRM are not a product of capitalism, but an invention of government. We don't need new laws to protect us from DRM, we need to get rid of the old laws that created it!
So in other words, it's not a law at all, but an event. There was never a law for the Hebrews to kill all first-born Egyptians. This was an act of God, not an act of the legislature.
I believe that's the whole point of "copy-left" type licenses - i.e. they make it ok for you to copy my work, otherwise it would not be ok.
You've defined copyleft wrong. Copyleft refers to a free license that includes a requirement to share. All Free Software licenses, for example, allow one to freely copy the work, but only a subset of them are copyleft. Non-copyleft Free Software licenses are usually called "unencumbered" or "unrestricted".
It's easier to bring along one laptop instead of several binders full of dog-eared papers to take notes.
Have you ever thought of ONE binder instead? Or even NOTEPADS? Five notepads are the same thickness as my laptop, but only weigh half as much. While I would prefer the laptop, simply because I can type faster than I can write, not using a laptop during one class is hardly the oppressive and intolerable burden this thread is making it out to be.
It will stop casual piracy. Technically versatile pirates are extraordinarily rare. Most just share cracking programs and consider themselves l33t for it. A friend of mine couldn't crack a rot13 password if a gun was held to his head, but considers himself the macho swaggering pirate. If he can't find the crack for a program, he will NOT be able to crack it. His only pirating skill is determination. A pirate without his determination is going to give up and buy his own copy of the software.
In economic terms, DRM increases the marginal cost of piracy. For some people, that increased cost (the inconvenience) is enough to tip the balance away from pirating the software. It's enough to increase that "nothing to stop pirates" to "little to stop pirates".
I sometimes read the Iraqi blogs (you know, those written by native Iraqis in Iraq) just for a change of pace from the excessive negativity in the western mainstream media. For the past few weeks the press has been warning us about an imminent civil war in Iraq. This week they've changed their tone, and are now talking as if civil war is in fact occurring. But you read the Iraqi blogs and you realize it is not, nor is ever likely to. The situation there is one of continual improvement by every measure. The road ahead is still rocky and rough, but the sun is still shining upon it.
This is not unreasanoble in light of the adverse legal envyronment and export limitations that security research faces in US.
It used to be the case under the Clinton administration, but it finally removed them in 2000. Even Clinton couldn't hold back the tide of progress.
Re:Use sudo to revoke root from a single user
on
Sudo vs. Root
·
· Score: 1
Does Darwin/OSX use the wheel group? If so, you can lock an admin out of root without having to immediately change the password. RMS considers wheel to be evil incarnate, and thus you don't see this on Linux too much. But it's a damned useful group to have.
p.s. Of course, with multiple admins, you should be changing the password frequently anyway.
Re:MUCH MUCH Much better solution
on
Sudo vs. Root
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Our IT department (of a 70,000 person organization) audited my lab, and discovered that I had used an "insecure" password password. They determined this because they were able to crack it......but it took them 18 hours to crack, and they had to do it within the lab because the system in question was behind two firewalls, and the system itself had no sensitive information on it. It was an internal development system, and the password was made easy (two English words separated by a symbol) so that our sixty developers could remember it. The password itself was written on the whiteboard in the lab, but the auditors didn't mention that.
Slashdot Mirror
The schools point was that this tranfer was not legimate
It wasn't legitimate. You signed a contract with the university saying what you wrote was theirs. You had no more right transfering copyright to the FSF than you had selling their buildings.
So the GPL licence was not valid in this situation.
Your placing the GPL on your code was not valid. But the GPL attached to any code mixed in is still valid. The school can distribute the software if they abide by the terms of the GPL. If they don't they can't. If they really want to make a successful commercial venture out of your software, then they need to remove the third party code that's under the GPL. It's really very simple.
And shame on you for trying to force your ideology down their throats in this singularly underhanded manner.
yet physical property ownership is just as theoretical as IP ownership
Wrongo! While the concept of physical property might be just as theoretical as IP, it does have one attribute that IP doesn't: you can put material boundaries around it. That's what the wolf is doing by marking his territory. If you can fence it, box it, stick it in your pocket, or lock it, then it's almost certainly property. IP doesn't have any material bounderies, and is as artificial a property as frequencies in the radio spectrum. It takes an act of government to create intellectual property.
In order to make IP a natural property, you need to be able to put real world boundaries upon it. You can, in fact, do this. You can put it on a CD or a harddrive, so that the information becomes property. You can encrypt the information to lock it up. (This is not the same thing as DRM). But in all these cases and others, there is a common attribute: what is being propertized is a particular *copy* of the information. You can't make the information itself property. At least not without an act of government to impose an artificial theoretical concept on the populace.
You are right though, that IP has been around nearly as long as civilization. But it has still always been an artificial creation of government. Guilds had to lobby kings to institute guild laws.
Nobody has been tortured to death recently in Iraq. If you want that you need to go back a few years to the days of Saddam. I know you were making a joke, but do not confuse the US humilation of prisoners with Saddam's actual honest-to-god death-inducing torture.
It's called "crime". You don't need to be a psych major to understand it. It's the use of force or fraud to get what you want. "Normal" people use non-coercive means to get what they want, like money, or persuasion, or begging.
I was talking with a friend this morning about whiners, children who throw screaming tantrums in store to get the candy they want. Most children try it, and if they manage to get away with it, the whining can become a permananent part of their psyche. I've actually seen college kids engage in pouting tantrums.
Chronic riminal behavior is probably similar. As a kid this guy probably stole money from his mom's purse and got away with it. He got caught stealing a pack of gum from the store, but his mom let him get away with it. He probably discovered that his mother would believe him no matter how outrageous his lies. You know his mother, she's the one that always says "my little boy would never do something like that." Thus, he learns that theft and lying are an acceptable means of getting what you want.
"Patent Pending". How soon until you have to pay royalties for browsing? Why not just use a frame instead like everyone else?
Why do you need a tax deduction before you can give to charity? It's like demanding a discount on your giving. "I'm sorry, I won't give you $20 unless I can get some of it back at tax time..."
the users are taken for a ride by the OS companies
Note the use of the plural. This is incorrect. Only Microsoft is demanding the expensive video card upgrade cycle. As demonstrated by the iBook and Mini lines, even eye candy rich Mac OS X can happily get by with a low end video card (it's not the size of your card, son, it's how you use it). And despite the demands of pimply newbies fresh from Microsoft-land, the next releases of KDE and GNOME will only need basic 3D video even with all the new eyecandy turned on.
I'm still waiting for the AjaxBrowser. Then I can dump Internet Explorer, and do all of my browsing, like my word processing, online.
Dynamic linkage. The FSF's interpretation of the GPL says I may not link a non-GPL program to a GPL library. You can't do it with static linkage, because that's clearly distributing the software, but both dynamic and runtime linkage should be acceptable. Except that the FSF says the GPL won't let you.
You aren't distributing the software with dynamic linkage. And you're not creating a derivative work either, not in the way copyright law defines it. The FSF offers up some excuse about the two separate works running in the same process space create a derivative work, but they're just making it up. But the process space "threshold" isn't in copyright law, so they might just as well say "because we said so".
For more information on this exception, from a real lawyer, see http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6366. Don't respond to my post, respond to Larry Rosen's article.
You're saying that Bush's appointment of Roberts and Alito is treason? That's one of the most preposterous things I've ever read on Slashdot.
Canada is so poor it has to borrow someone else's monarch...
Will I get modded down if I blame all this on Bush?
I see you flunked civics in high school. Congress makes the laws, the president signs them or not, and the supreme court rules on it if there's a disagreement regarding the prior two. In your example case, the president has not made a new law, he has merely stated how he intends to enforce it. If this is out of line with the intent of the law, a case can be brought before the supreme court. In the meantime, congress retains the power to impeach the president.
You act like no president has ever nominated supreme court judges before.
Thanks to copyright law, GPL violators are always in the wrong.
Except in those few cases where the GPL (and/or the FSF's interpretation of it) restricts something that (classic non-DMCA) copyright law does not. They are corner cases to be sure, but a few do exist.
It's a brand new 12" iBook. I guess notebooks have expanded considerably since my day in school. Hmmm, let me measure. Okay, I exaggerated, I only takes *four* notepads to equal the thickness of my laptop. I should have said "legal pad", because I can fit five of them in 1.35 inches.
You are not describing capitalism, you are describing one gross distortion of greed.
Capitalism is not unfettered, as government provides a court system for the adjudication of disputes, and a police force to hinder and deter crime and fraud. Beyond this minimal level of force and a certain amount of infrastructure, government has relatively little involvement in a capitalist economy. Profits are (thankfully) accrued under capitalism, but the idea that profits are paramount is twisted.
Greed does exist in capitalism. But that's because greed exists in all people, regardless of their status as capitalists. Greed alone is rarely dangerous to other), but when combined with the coercive force of government, can become quite a destructive force. That's how plutocracies arise. The problem isn't capitalists, the problem is capitalists with government power. Of course, socialists with government power is just as problematic.
Our current US economy is not an example of free market capitalism. It is instead a bit of capitalism mixed with a heavy dose of government management. This very topic of DRM is an example. Copyright and DRM are not a product of capitalism, but an invention of government. We don't need new laws to protect us from DRM, we need to get rid of the old laws that created it!
So in other words, it's not a law at all, but an event. There was never a law for the Hebrews to kill all first-born Egyptians. This was an act of God, not an act of the legislature.
I believe that's the whole point of "copy-left" type licenses - i.e. they make it ok for you to copy my work, otherwise it would not be ok.
You've defined copyleft wrong. Copyleft refers to a free license that includes a requirement to share. All Free Software licenses, for example, allow one to freely copy the work, but only a subset of them are copyleft. Non-copyleft Free Software licenses are usually called "unencumbered" or "unrestricted".
It's easier to bring along one laptop instead of several binders full of dog-eared papers to take notes.
Have you ever thought of ONE binder instead? Or even NOTEPADS? Five notepads are the same thickness as my laptop, but only weigh half as much. While I would prefer the laptop, simply because I can type faster than I can write, not using a laptop during one class is hardly the oppressive and intolerable burden this thread is making it out to be.
Why is this filed under YRO? Using your laptop in someone else's classroom is not a right, nor is it online.
It will stop casual piracy. Technically versatile pirates are extraordinarily rare. Most just share cracking programs and consider themselves l33t for it. A friend of mine couldn't crack a rot13 password if a gun was held to his head, but considers himself the macho swaggering pirate. If he can't find the crack for a program, he will NOT be able to crack it. His only pirating skill is determination. A pirate without his determination is going to give up and buy his own copy of the software.
In economic terms, DRM increases the marginal cost of piracy. For some people, that increased cost (the inconvenience) is enough to tip the balance away from pirating the software. It's enough to increase that "nothing to stop pirates" to "little to stop pirates".
I sometimes read the Iraqi blogs (you know, those written by native Iraqis in Iraq) just for a change of pace from the excessive negativity in the western mainstream media. For the past few weeks the press has been warning us about an imminent civil war in Iraq. This week they've changed their tone, and are now talking as if civil war is in fact occurring. But you read the Iraqi blogs and you realize it is not, nor is ever likely to. The situation there is one of continual improvement by every measure. The road ahead is still rocky and rough, but the sun is still shining upon it.
This is not unreasanoble in light of the adverse legal envyronment and export limitations that security research faces in US.
It used to be the case under the Clinton administration, but it finally removed them in 2000. Even Clinton couldn't hold back the tide of progress.
Does Darwin/OSX use the wheel group? If so, you can lock an admin out of root without having to immediately change the password. RMS considers wheel to be evil incarnate, and thus you don't see this on Linux too much. But it's a damned useful group to have.
p.s. Of course, with multiple admins, you should be changing the password frequently anyway.
Our IT department (of a 70,000 person organization) audited my lab, and discovered that I had used an "insecure" password password. They determined this because they were able to crack it... ...but it took them 18 hours to crack, and they had to do it within the lab because the system in question was behind two firewalls, and the system itself had no sensitive information on it. It was an internal development system, and the password was made easy (two English words separated by a symbol) so that our sixty developers could remember it. The password itself was written on the whiteboard in the lab, but the auditors didn't mention that.