No.Sorry. Reviewing code is not distribution. Just because someone outside the company reviewed it does not mean it's being distributed, and I wish you luck trying to argue that in a court of law.
When I ask you to 'review' some code I wrote, even if it's based on GPL, I am not 'distributing', I am asking you to act as an 'employee' or 'agent' and to do someting. I am conferring absolutely no rights to the IP to you at all. I simply want you to look at it and give me an opinion. If I were a company, I would be paying you for this service. THis is not 'distribution', and more importantly, this is not the intent of the GPL and it's 'distribution' clauses.
The focus on 'distribution' is to ensure that someone doesn't take everyone elses hard GPL'd work and sell (or give freely)it as a 'product' that is theirs alone. It must stay open. If you are going to give it out to people to use, then you are distributing.
Not unless they distribute. If it's internal to the company, they are under absolutely NO obligation. They can do WHATEVER they want with the software. GPL only covers the ways under which they may redistribute it.
Yes. To cause any work that they 'distribute or publish'. Software that stays internal to the company is neither distributed nor published; it is kept privately.
The guy isn't wondering whether his boss is violating GPL.. that's not the question at all.
The question is, if he makes changes at work (belonging to his employer, not redistributed) and then adds similar changes to his own project (under GPL) on his own time, he may be in some hot water with his employer, as it could be viewed he is simply duplicating IP that belongs to the company.
What he needs to do is, up front, explain to his boss how it's his softwarein the first place, and that many of the requested additions were in his plan already, and work out a situation whereby everyone can be happy.
It shouldbe noted that in many jurisdictions, contractual obligations such as 'anything you do belongs to us' may not be binding. I know that here, in Canada, it happens that an employer cannot have anything in your contract that inhibits your ability to earn a living. ie: clauses like 'you may not work in a competitor's firm after leaving our employ for a period of 2 years..' etc.... This generall does not hold up. In the case of upper management/ceo's, it can hold up because it really is in the companies interests that thier top brass doens't go to the competitor and spill the beans.. but as for a programmer, it is not lawful to keep them from going elsewhere.
In the days of old, it may have been that you learned a GREAT deal of your programming knowledge at work, and spent many years at the same copmany. These days, things are different, and employers may find that statememtns like this aren't worth beans in court. You do not tell a McDonald's worker that he may not work in any other store, or that he may not make hamburgers at home. You do not tell a biologist that they may not do their own research on their own time.
The difference is, when one releases a patch against other code, they are making it PLAINLY CLEAR to ALL INVOLVED that they did *NOT* write and hold *NO* rights over the code that must be patched, and that they simply wrote the patch. In the case of LAME, originally, it was plainly clear to anyone using lame that (sorry for the pun) LAME IS NOT AN ENCODER. It was a patch, and anyone using it would understand that other pieces were required.
The source was never released. They stated that it would be GPL. The problem is, it would appear that those who created Gnutella did not have the legal right to assign licensing, as their work is owned by the parent company, and the parent copmany did not authorize the work. In otherwords, the GPL is only meaningful when lawfully applied to software. You can't just slap a GPL on somethign that's not yours in the first//--e and claim it is free forever.
No.. the new version is not automatically GPL'd. It's simply that the old code used is licenced under GPL, which states that derived code cannot be distributed unless it is ALSO UNDER GPL.
In other words, the new code is only GPL if the owner of the new code DECIDES TO DISTRIBUTE.
Well, although you are the author.. if your employer wants modifications for his internal use only, and is not distributing, GPL is a non-issue. He has the right to make mods. Modifications you make in your capacity as an employee of the company technically belong to the company, not to yourself.
Modifications made at home, on your own time are your own...
Remember, though, this is the day and age of screwed up rules at work. Your employer may raise a little hell.
What I would do, personally, is bring it to the employers attentiont that 'I wrote this in the first place, and you've been using it for free all this time, which is perfectly allowed, that's what I wanted. I'd like to roll the changes you want made back into the free GPL'd version, as they are very similar to things I wanted to do anyway. How about it boss? Chances are, boss will say yes.
As much as I like to argue for the posession of guns.. we do seem much saner up here. People *do* own guns, and even with our new gun registration laws.. many many people can still go out and buy guns.
And how often in Canada do people get shot in a holdup? Aside from the odd armored truck heist.. never..
Yes, in canada guns do have to be registered. We operate differently than the US. Quite differently.
As for when the last time we hat a totalitarian government to defend ourselves against... that's not the point at all. The point is, if we don't have the right to keep arms, then when we DO have a totalitarian government to defend against, we will be powerless to defend.
Remember, government is supposed to be of, by, and for the people. When government crosses that line, and starts acting as a way to rule the people, the people have a right to stand up to it.
You are Canadian, and you haven't heard all this gun control BS before? Dude... *EVERY* Gun in Canada now has to be registered. There is also a yearly FEE for each gun to be registered. The cops now have the right to bust in to your house WITHOUT A WARRANT solely on the smallest suspicion that you have UNREGISTERED weapons in the house. And the project has gone hundreds of millions of dollars over budget already.
And you said it already. Criminals can get guns anyway.
Actually, it was written for windows because windows was the platform they started reverse engineering it on.. due to the availability of licensed players. And as true hackers.. they aren't afraid to code in windows..
It's times like this that I wish I was a better writer.
The thing about our modern, connected world is that the internet, and technology in general empowers us. I mean it REALLY empowers us.
Slashdot... sure.. it's a news site. We slam on Taco and Hemos and whoever else... there are trolls... there are lots of attention-grabbing posts... but in the end.. it is an example of how society has changed.
Taco et-all are my age. We are still fairly young in the grand scheme of things. Technology has empowered this generation, and those to come, to communicate like no other generation in the past. We can communicate en-masse WITHOUT the need to ask our neighbors (governments, etc.) for help.. we can arrange it ourselves. And we DO!
The fact remains... We like technology, we like to learn more and more about technology, and we don't like people telling us we can't.. and we have the technological means to share it. It seems natural!
Sure.. the law says pirating music is illegal, and the law says that exposing MS crap is illegal, I agree that lots of things are illegal.. but that's just the law. Most of us in our generation, agree that the law is out of hand, and too complicated. We also agree that corporations are getting too powerful. We agree that racism is bad. We agree on a great many things, in principle... yet the law prevents us from acting on many of these things. It's a tangled web to unravel. It is very difficult to re-write the law, and the way modern courts work it is even harder. How many people realize that a Jury has the right to declare someone not guilty simply because they don't FEEL that the user should be punished? Seriously.. if a jury feels that the laws themselves are unjust.
Technology gives us the ability to circumvent certain laws.... but it also makes those laws irrelevant. Think 'bout it.
Music... sharing music... we can all debate who stole what from which artist/record label.. but in the end, music can be compressed into an ever smaller amount of data, and the available bandwidth is ever increasing. The addition of encryption layers like IPSec to the internet will make content sniffing much more difficult for law enforcement.. or for anyone. If it can be reduced to data, we can move it around. If people think that the way we move DeCSS around in order to not let a court order quash it is hard.. they must think again. What could we do if we REALLY applied our collective geek efforts to the problem? Freenet is a great example. So is gnutella. Both are fundamentally very simple applications.
The world is chaning. People from different cultures talk on the internet. Politics matter less. Laws matter less. Communications matter more.
What does the fact that they invoke some trade secret lingo have to do with copyright?
Trade secret deals with the materials covered in the documents.. the facts of the matter.
Copyright deals with the document itself.
If you are posting the document itself, you are violating copyright, plain and simple, as you have absolutely no permission from MS to reproduce the document.
If you are simply posting the technical details, and exerpts, re-worded.. that would be trade secret.
Trade secret is a whole issue unto itself, dealing with whether or not something is a 'secret'.
Copyright applies to any original work. The MS Kerberos document *IS* an original work, copyrighted by microsoft, and, as such, can be copyrighted.
As for trade secret, I believe they may have problems claiming trade secret has been violated. It is no longer a secret, by microsoft's own doing, how their protocol works. Anyone who wants can go get the spec. They cannot claim that it is a trade secret.
A trade secret is like, the recipe (formula?) for Coca-cola. Nobody knows it, at least, nobody who isn't in the highest echelons of coca cola corp. Should you manage to steal this secret and publish it, you wouldbe guilty of violating trade secret laws, as you knowingly divulged coke's trade secret, which is very valuable to them.
Otoh, if coke offered this secret to anyone who would sign an NDA.. it's no longer a secret after enough people know about it.. even if they are all under NDA.
MS, however, is not suing under trade secret. THeir license simply says to treat the document as if it were a trade secret.. and you agreed to it.
MS isnt' suing slashdot. MS is requesting that slashdot, as a service provider (they provide the service of allowing you to post content here), they must remove the alleged infringing material (as they DO have the technical means to do this), unless the end-user wishes to contest.
It's no different than if this were slashdot hosting co. and you had a website with them. Yes, you own your website outright, but the hosting co., legally, must remove the alleged infringing material upon notification, which would mean removing the comments, or taking the site offline, or whatever is necessary....
Let me get this straight.
on
An MP3 Update
·
· Score: 2
So.. you were violating copyright law by distributing material (apocalyptica) that you had no legal right to do so, and also violating the napster usage agreement (that requries you to not use napster to traffic in copyrighted works), and you were banned.... And now you are mad?
Certainly, the reason you were banned (for sharing metallica) may be incorrect, but you are still violating the law in a blatant and outright fashion.
Although this is true under the DMCA, it was my impression that, originally, Napster stated that it would remove users who were violating copyright, PERIOD. It did not say 'following the guidelines of the DMCA.. blah blah blah...'. It also notified Metallica's lawyers that, if metallica would be so kind as to point out which users were infringing, they would be blocked.
Sir.. the actual method of encoding is patented (ie: breaking the sounds down however they do it, and encoding it just so..). The ISO sources were simply an example.
If it's an encoder that produces data that is decoded by mp3 decoders, as per the fraunhoffer patent, then it falls under their patent, unless, of course, there is a 100% completely different mathematical way to arrive at the same results..
What did this have to do with 'tight integration'?I don't understand. Do you mean MAPI? The interface that allowed the virus to read the outlook address book and send email? This could have been done by text parsing on a unix system, or by simply parsing the raw address book files on windows as well.. the guy just used mapi because it was there.
Unpriveleged accounts? how would an unpriveleged account have helped? The user would still have access to their own address book, and to send email.. sot he virus would have spread. Please.....
Eudora users WOULD have been just as vulnerable if the user had put in code to read the eudora address book as well, and to place outgoing messages in the eudora outbox.
Oh.. wait.. Eudora can be the MAPI server just like outlook.. so it wouldn't even have been that hard..
The only thing about this virus that was outlook specific was the fact that it used outlook's MAPI facilities to get addresses and send copies of itself around. The writer could have used outlook express, or eudora, or pine, or any other email program had he wished to.. he simply programmed it for outlook. Contrary to what so many people seem to wrongly assume, the virus did NOT run automatically due to some bug in outlook.. dumb users simply RAN the attachment, which was a pure vbscript (no different than a unix user running a perl script). There was no 'embedded' scripting, or 'hidden' scripting, or 'security hole'.
Give me a break. Solaris wasn't effected either. Neither was BE Or VM Or VMS Or HPUX Or MacOS Or DOS Or HP printers Or Palm pilots Or Linux Seriously. It's a VBSCRIPT virus, that only knew how to use MS OUTLOOK to spread mail. So in order to affect a system, you need three things: 1) A VBScript interpreter, that supports all functions and objects used by the virus. 2) MS Outlook, and corresponding MAPI interface. 3) Users who are retarded enough to run the thing in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
No.Sorry. Reviewing code is not distribution. Just because someone outside the company reviewed it does not mean it's being distributed, and I wish you luck trying to argue that in a court of law.
When I ask you to 'review' some code I wrote, even if it's based on GPL, I am not 'distributing', I am asking you to act as an 'employee' or 'agent' and to do someting. I am conferring absolutely no rights to the IP to you at all. I simply want you to look at it and give me an opinion. If I were a company, I would be paying you for this service. THis is not 'distribution', and more importantly, this is not the intent of the GPL and it's 'distribution' clauses.
The focus on 'distribution' is to ensure that someone doesn't take everyone elses hard GPL'd work and sell (or give freely)it as a 'product' that is theirs alone. It must stay open. If you are going to give it out to people to use, then you are distributing.
Not unless they distribute. If it's internal to the company, they are under absolutely NO obligation. They can do WHATEVER they want with the software. GPL only covers the ways under which they may redistribute it.
Yes. To cause any work that they 'distribute or publish'. Software that stays internal to the company is neither distributed nor published; it is kept privately.
The guy isn't wondering whether his boss is violating GPL.. that's not the question at all.
The question is, if he makes changes at work (belonging to his employer, not redistributed) and then adds similar changes to his own project (under GPL) on his own time, he may be in some hot water with his employer, as it could be viewed he is simply duplicating IP that belongs to the company.
What he needs to do is, up front, explain to his boss how it's his softwarein the first place, and that many of the requested additions were in his plan already, and work out a situation whereby everyone can be happy.
IANAL.. yadda yadda..
It shouldbe noted that in many jurisdictions, contractual obligations such as 'anything you do belongs to us' may not be binding. I know that here, in Canada, it happens that an employer cannot have anything in your contract that inhibits your ability to earn a living. ie: clauses like 'you may not work in a competitor's firm after leaving our employ for a period of 2 years..' etc.... This generall does not hold up. In the case of upper management/ceo's, it can hold up because it really is in the companies interests that thier top brass doens't go to the competitor and spill the beans.. but as for a programmer, it is not lawful to keep them from going elsewhere.
In the days of old, it may have been that you learned a GREAT deal of your programming knowledge at work, and spent many years at the same copmany. These days, things are different, and employers may find that statememtns like this aren't worth beans in court. You do not tell a McDonald's worker that he may not work in any other store, or that he may not make hamburgers at home. You do not tell a biologist that they may not do their own research on their own time.
Really, folks..watch what you sign.
23
The difference is, when one releases a patch against other code, they are making it PLAINLY CLEAR to ALL INVOLVED that they did *NOT* write and hold *NO* rights over the code that must be patched, and that they simply wrote the patch.
In the case of LAME, originally, it was plainly clear to anyone using lame that (sorry for the pun) LAME IS NOT AN ENCODER. It was a patch, and anyone using it would understand that other pieces were required.
The source was never released. They stated that it would be GPL. //--e and claim it is free forever.
The problem is, it would appear that those who created Gnutella did not have the legal right to assign licensing, as their work is owned by the parent company, and the parent copmany did not authorize the work. In otherwords, the GPL is only meaningful when lawfully applied to software.
You can't just slap a GPL on somethign that's not yours in the first
No.. the new version is not automatically GPL'd.
It's simply that the old code used is licenced under GPL, which states that derived code cannot be distributed unless it is ALSO UNDER GPL.
In other words, the new code is only GPL if the owner of the new code DECIDES TO DISTRIBUTE.
Well, although you are the author..
if your employer wants modifications for his internal use only, and is not distributing, GPL is a non-issue. He has the right to make mods. Modifications you make in your capacity as an employee of the company technically belong to the company, not to yourself.
Modifications made at home, on your own time are your own...
Remember, though, this is the day and age of screwed up rules at work. Your employer may raise a little hell.
What I would do, personally, is bring it to the employers attentiont that 'I wrote this in the first place, and you've been using it for free all this time, which is perfectly allowed, that's what I wanted. I'd like to roll the changes you want made back into the free GPL'd version, as they are very similar to things I wanted to do anyway. How about it boss?
Chances are, boss will say yes.
As much as I like to argue for the posession of guns.. we do seem much saner up here.
People *do* own guns, and even with our new gun registration laws.. many many people can still go out and buy guns.
And how often in Canada do people get shot in a holdup? Aside from the odd armored truck heist.. never..
Yes, in canada guns do have to be registered. We operate differently than the US. Quite differently.
As for when the last time we hat a totalitarian government to defend ourselves against... that's not the point at all. The point is, if we don't have the right to keep arms, then when we DO have a totalitarian government to defend against, we will be powerless to defend.
Remember, government is supposed to be of, by, and for the people. When government crosses that line, and starts acting as a way to rule the people, the people have a right to stand up to it.
You are Canadian, and you haven't heard all this gun control BS before?
Dude...
*EVERY* Gun in Canada now has to be registered. There is also a yearly FEE for each gun to be registered.
The cops now have the right to bust in to your house WITHOUT A WARRANT solely on the smallest suspicion that you have UNREGISTERED weapons in the house.
And the project has gone hundreds of millions of dollars over budget already.
And you said it already. Criminals can get guns anyway.
Actually, it was written for windows because windows was the platform they started reverse engineering it on.. due to the availability of licensed players. And as true hackers.. they aren't afraid to code in windows..
It would be good to know what type of equipment it is as well.. or what OS(s) are involved....
It would seem logical that supporting 500 unix workstations is considerably easier than 500 windows workstationss.
It's times like this that I wish I was a better writer.
The thing about our modern, connected world is that the internet, and technology in general empowers us. I mean it REALLY empowers us.
Slashdot... sure.. it's a news site. We slam on Taco and Hemos and whoever else... there are trolls... there are lots of attention-grabbing posts... but in the end.. it is an example of how society has changed.
Taco et-all are my age. We are still fairly young in the grand scheme of things. Technology has empowered this generation, and those to come, to communicate like no other generation in the past. We can communicate en-masse WITHOUT the need to ask our neighbors (governments, etc.) for help.. we can arrange it ourselves. And we DO!
The fact remains... We like technology, we like to learn more and more about technology, and we don't like people telling us we can't.. and we have the technological means to share it. It seems natural!
Sure.. the law says pirating music is illegal, and the law says that exposing MS crap is illegal, I agree that lots of things are illegal.. but that's just the law. Most of us in our generation, agree that the law is out of hand, and too complicated. We also agree that corporations are getting too powerful. We agree that racism is bad. We agree on a great many things, in principle... yet the law prevents us from acting on many of these things. It's a tangled web to unravel. It is very difficult to re-write the law, and the way modern courts work it is even harder. How many people realize that a Jury has the right to declare someone not guilty simply because they don't FEEL that the user should be punished? Seriously.. if a jury feels that the laws themselves are unjust.
Technology gives us the ability to circumvent certain laws.... but it also makes those laws irrelevant. Think 'bout it.
Music... sharing music... we can all debate who stole what from which artist/record label.. but in the end, music can be compressed into an ever smaller amount of data, and the available bandwidth is ever increasing.
The addition of encryption layers like IPSec to the internet will make content sniffing much more difficult for law enforcement.. or for anyone.
If it can be reduced to data, we can move it around. If people think that the way we move DeCSS around in order to not let a court order quash it is hard.. they must think again. What could we do if we REALLY applied our collective geek efforts to the problem? Freenet is a great example. So is gnutella. Both are fundamentally very simple applications.
The world is chaning. People from different cultures talk on the internet. Politics matter less. Laws matter less. Communications matter more.
What does the fact that they invoke some trade secret lingo have to do with copyright?
Trade secret deals with the materials covered in the documents.. the facts of the matter.
Copyright deals with the document itself.
If you are posting the document itself, you are violating copyright, plain and simple, as you have absolutely no permission from MS to reproduce the document.
If you are simply posting the technical details, and exerpts, re-worded.. that would be trade secret.
It is illegal to make a program who's primary purpose is to circumvent a copyright control mechanism.
This is not the case with winrar. It's primary purpose is plainly data compression. MS just fucked up here.
Trade secret is a whole issue unto itself, dealing with whether or not something is a 'secret'.
Copyright applies to any original work. The MS Kerberos document *IS* an original work, copyrighted by microsoft, and, as such, can be copyrighted.
As for trade secret, I believe they may have problems claiming trade secret has been violated. It is no longer a secret, by microsoft's own doing, how their protocol works. Anyone who wants can go get the spec. They cannot claim that it is a trade secret.
A trade secret is like, the recipe (formula?) for Coca-cola. Nobody knows it, at least, nobody who isn't in the highest echelons of coca cola corp.
Should you manage to steal this secret and publish it, you wouldbe guilty of violating trade secret laws, as you knowingly divulged coke's trade secret, which is very valuable to them.
Otoh, if coke offered this secret to anyone who would sign an NDA.. it's no longer a secret after enough people know about it.. even if they are all under NDA.
MS, however, is not suing under trade secret. THeir license simply says to treat the document as if it were a trade secret.. and you agreed to it.
MS isnt' suing slashdot. MS is requesting that slashdot, as a service provider (they provide the service of allowing you to post content here), they must remove the alleged infringing material (as they DO have the technical means to do this), unless the end-user wishes to contest.
It's no different than if this were slashdot hosting co. and you had a website with them. Yes, you own your website outright, but the hosting co., legally, must remove the alleged infringing material upon notification, which would mean removing the comments, or taking the site offline, or whatever is necessary....
So.. you were violating copyright law by distributing material (apocalyptica) that you had no legal right to do so, and also violating the napster usage agreement (that requries you to not use napster to traffic in copyrighted works), and you were banned....
And now you are mad?
Certainly, the reason you were banned (for sharing metallica) may be incorrect, but you are still violating the law in a blatant and outright fashion.
Although this is true under the DMCA, it was my impression that, originally, Napster stated that it would remove users who were violating copyright, PERIOD. It did not say 'following the guidelines of the DMCA.. blah blah blah...'.
It also notified Metallica's lawyers that, if metallica would be so kind as to point out which users were infringing, they would be blocked.
Sir.. the actual method of encoding is patented (ie: breaking the sounds down however they do it, and encoding it just so..).
The ISO sources were simply an example.
If it's an encoder that produces data that is decoded by mp3 decoders, as per the fraunhoffer patent, then it falls under their patent, unless, of course, there is a 100% completely different mathematical way to arrive at the same results..
I will fix it for you.
Please, in simple terms, tell me what is wrong with it in the first place? What 'bug' or 'problem' allowed this virus to hit?
What did this have to do with 'tight integration'?I don't understand.
Do you mean MAPI? The interface that allowed the virus to read the outlook address book and send email? This could have been done by text parsing on a unix system, or by simply parsing the raw address book files on windows as well.. the guy just used mapi because it was there.
Unpriveleged accounts? how would an unpriveleged account have helped? The user would still have access to their own address book, and to send email.. sot he virus would have spread. Please.....
Eudora users WOULD have been just as vulnerable if the user had put in code to read the eudora address book as well, and to place outgoing messages in the eudora outbox.
Oh.. wait.. Eudora can be the MAPI server just like outlook.. so it wouldn't even have been that hard..
The only thing about this virus that was outlook specific was the fact that it used outlook's MAPI facilities to get addresses and send copies of itself around. The writer could have used outlook express, or eudora, or pine, or any other email program had he wished to.. he simply programmed it for outlook. Contrary to what so many people seem to wrongly assume, the virus did NOT run automatically due to some bug in outlook.. dumb users simply RAN the attachment, which was a pure vbscript (no different than a unix user running a perl script). There was no 'embedded' scripting, or 'hidden' scripting, or 'security hole'.
Give me a break. Solaris wasn't effected either. Neither was BE Or VM Or VMS Or HPUX Or MacOS Or DOS Or HP printers Or Palm pilots Or Linux Seriously. It's a VBSCRIPT virus, that only knew how to use MS OUTLOOK to spread mail. So in order to affect a system, you need three things: 1) A VBScript interpreter, that supports all functions and objects used by the virus. 2) MS Outlook, and corresponding MAPI interface. 3) Users who are retarded enough to run the thing in the first place.