I agree that this use of technology is completely ok, and doesn't violate anyone's privacy, but your later comments are scary. When thoughtcrime becomes a reality we are all fucked, no matter how repulsive the thoughts.
The photoshopped photos will of course not be entered into evidence. Did you even look at the pictures? There are no people in them. They just want to know where the pictures were taken.
I see what you are saying there, the owner can of course choose not to distribute to you if you don't agree to their terms.
It must be before the fact though. I can't send you a copy of my work, and then ask you to accept a license after the fact. The copy has already been made by an authorized party, your copy will never "become infringing" due to some external event.
The reason EULAs are different is that the distribution has already occured by the time you see the EULA. The GPL avoids relying on EULA style concepts for this reason, they don't have any legal basis.
If I download or buy a program, and then they pop up some EULA after the fact, too bad for them if I don't agree with it, I don't have to, the distribution has already taken place.
UCITA may change this of course, but that has only passed in a couple states. This was the reason the UCITA was attempted to be passed in the first place, EULAs aren't binding or enforcable without it. They are just pissing in the wind legally with EULAs without something like the UCITA.
That's just not the case. If that were the case, when you bought a book, you wouldn't be allowed to read it.
Almost all books are "All Rights Reserved". You vastly overestimate the rights copyright gives the creator.
Here are the rights as laid out in the law: (1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
Ok, lets say I write a program. I release it under the GPL and I hold the copyright. Bob downloads the program and gets a copy of the GPL with it. Bob does not have to even agree with the GPL unless he wants to modify or distribute the program. The GPL isn't an EULA, it's not a click through agreement. It's a license for modification and distribution.
OK, so Bob wants to send the program to Alice. He then must agree with the GPL because he has no right to copy the program otherwise and send it to Alice. So he does agree and comply with the GPL. Alice is not bound by the GPL unless she wants to modify or distribute the program.
From the GPL:
"Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope."
In the above example, even if Bob violated the GPL in his distribution to Alice, Alice would still have the right to use the program, without agreeing to the GPL, or to modify or distribute the program, in accordance to the GPL.
I guess it all does hinge on the question of preparing a derivative work.
But then, editing/etc/whatever.conf is also preparing a derivative work. It doesn't seem to be the intent of the FSF to limit mere use, or even compel acceptance of the GPL with mere use, however this sort of mere use where you edit a configuration file would be a derivative work under the more strict definition.
The question is very fuzzy. My original example of tearing up a book could be argued to create a derivative work also, but I've never heard of copyright law being applied in that way.
I don't plan to act on this line of logic, I'm happy complying with the GPL as RMS et al say it is. I just think this is something important to talk about, especially now when they are looking at updating the GPL.
But that's not true with the GPL. You can download and run GPL software without agreeing to it. It's even in the GPL:
"You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License."
The assertion that you can't modify the work without agreeing to the GPL is wrong. If you legally get a copy of a copyrighted work, you are free to modify it however you want, as in my book example. You own that copy of the work, and are free to multilate, amend, or dispose of it however you want. That's true of "All rights reserved" works, and it's surely true of GPL works, since agreement with the GPL is only required on acts not already permitted by copyright law.
So yes, I assert the GPL contains a fundamental legal flaw, with regard to this.
The people that wrote the GPL are lawyers and I'm not, so take this how you will. I don't see any flaws in my logic, you are free to point any you see out.
It is possible... I think it would depend on the way it was done. Stick with me here.
As I said in the other reply on this thread, if you bought a reference book for your company to use, modified it, added pages, ripped pages out, etc, and used it internally, none of that would trigger any copyright protections.
If you Xeroxed the book 50 times to sit on everyone's desk, that almost surely would.
Now, with a GPLed program, the cost is usually zero. You can download and install as many copies as you want for free, and all of them would be legal.
Here's the tricky part. There is no difference if you download the software 50 times to put on each person's desktop, and then patch that each copy with your modifications, than it is to just distribute your modified version within the company.
Since there is a lack of a practical difference there, and the first case is strongly analogous of buying 50 copies of the paper reference manual and modifying all 50 copies to read the same and handing them out, I think it is safe to say that at least in the "zero cost" GPL case, copyright law can't apply to internal modification and distribution.
If you were to purchase exactly one copy of the GPL software for money, however, that would be a different story, the analogy no longer holds, since it's not the same as getting 50 copies from your authorized distributer, that would cost more money. And you would have to agree to the GPL to distribute it otherwise.
If I buy a paper manual for my company to use, and put highlights on some of the text, rip some pages out, add some pages of my own... and we use it within the company as a reference, none of that violates copyright law, even if it's "all rights reserved".
See, you don't have to agree to the GPL unless you do something which would be violate copyright if "All Rights Reserved" were the license.
Downloading and running a program doesn't violate copyright even if all rights were reserved, assuming the person you are getting it from is duly authorized to distribute it to you (lets assume they are).
Using the program internally and modifying it also fall outside the realm of copyright law.
Only distribution triggers copyright law restrictions, and only then does the GPL apply.
So even if they wanted to, the GPL couldn't make the requirement to submit internally used changes back to the maintainer, without putting it into the weaker legal realm of a "click through" agreement, like an MS EULA, which is probably not enforcable except in UCITA states.
Has any company ever been forced by a lawsuit to open-source software it distributed because it used GPL'ed code?
No. And there likely never will be. It's the same as your latter statement, if they don't follow the GPL, they have violated copyright law, and could be held liable for damages in a civil suit. Any other remedy would be an extreme and new precedent.
Regarding your last comment, after more people replied I did see that the article was misleading, but since this thread already went down this path I decided to continue.
There are other places MS has done crap like article accuses, even if this isn't one of them.
I wouldn't say no money. As the person writing the open source, you are in a unique position to be the best person to add some little custom development for someone that wants a specific feature.
Just look at writing as a part of the implementation and maintenence, and it's all good.
Not sure how you can say that, there's a lot of "cooking" that's more on the art side of things. Mostly inedible "gingerbread" houses, various sugar sculptures that border on the inedible, etc.
The browser should output a warning or error when fed bad HTML, but it could be in some debug window that isn't normally shown. I guarantee if browsers had this function, the web would be much more compliant than it is today, since instead of just "playing with the tag soup until it looks right on IE", they could actually see where they misnested an element and fix it, or whatever they need to do to make it valid.
I'll use a company that is not much higher in MS in most people's view as an example.
Adobe arguably has a monopoly in some areas. Yet, their software doesn't accept totally broken files generally (at least no where near the extent that MS does).
As a producer of files, Adobe generally produces files that follow the PDF/PS standards that they have laid out. Their software does accept some broken files, but it doesn't seem to be their goal to create a new standard with hidden specs ("ebook" silliness aside).
The intent is the key difference here. Adobe wants to encourage the use of an open standard that they have defined and given full documentation on, and even licensed for anyone to use, free of charge.
MS wants to create broken standards that only they know the true definition of. The way they have done this without making a PR mess is to take existing standards and "extend" them in undocumented ways. Their monopoly power then encourages producers of said files to only work to the MS standard instead of the true one.
About your URL:
First to skip ahead to number 6, since that's what you pointed me at. My point is that with a structured language, there's no such thing as malformed unambiguous input. If you misnest a tag, how the hell am I supposed to guess what you meant? Should compilers also guess the 50 different ways you could screw up a "for" loop, and attempt to produce output anyway?
Besides, his comments are aimed at things you get the user to enter, not things programmers do. Programmers should be held to a higher standard of creating unambiguous input, the input we create is many times more complex than the user's. That includes web developers.
This also caught my eye (unrelated):
Store (encrypted) information in cookies even before transfer to the server, so information is preserved from all but the most serious "melt-downs."
This seems useless to me. If my computer loses power right now, I will lose this very long message I have typed into this very small box on this form on slashdot, and there's nothing the Slash devs can do to help that.
Their point about local applications saving data every few seconds is more reasonable. A lot already do this... vim for example. I'll assume they didn't really mean "continuous save"... I don't want to wait 10 seconds for the text I type to appear because my hard disk happens to be bogged down. Hard disk write caches would also have to all become battery backed for this to work effectively.
The comments on electrolytic capacitors to keep the entire computer up are unreasonable. 1 farad is one amp-second. You'd need at least 60 or 70 1F 5V supercapacitors. Each one is $2 in bulk. You'd also need a special section of the power supply to step up the constantly falling capacitor voltage. Have fun.
A defense against civil suit for ROM sites is that it would be hard to prove that you were damaging them in any monetary way. At least that's true of things like C64 or NES images.
Yeah, they own the copyrights, but without damages they don't have much to stand on in court. I think this would be the same way that you could defend against a suit for downloading ROMs too.
Your argument about the downloaders applies equally well to people that merely download mp3s too. Haven't all the cases thus far been against people sharing files?
Really, I think it's time to declare science fiction dead. It's really a terrible thing for humanity overall. There are two main things that act as a sanity check on society, comedy and science fiction. Film can help only to a lesser extent.
Just stop having episodes with Nazis. Or on historical Earth. Or both.
You say to return to the roots.. then you say this.
Those are part of the roots. How many TOS were set in a western setting, or in the early 1900s, or in rome/greece (or something that looks just like rome/greece), or victorian times?
TNG had a good amount of "holodeck" episodes along the same lines too. Not as many because they didn't need to recycle as many sets and costumes as TOS, but still a good amount.
In addition to the other excellent replies, it's a misconception that code ever unwittingly "becomes GPL".
If you use GPL code in your application in a way that violates the GPL, you have violated copyright law. That's it. The GPL doesn't control the remedies, the legal system does. Generally the remedy would be in the form of a cash settlement to the copyright owner of the software you violated the copyright on.
When a company with monopoly power writes software that accepts broken, non standards compliance input, it's creating a new standard, one that isn't published, since people will generally only work on their software until it produces an output that works with the monopoly's software.
It's just a trick to take what was an open standard and turn it into one with secret formats and rules only MS knows.
Robust would mean it wouldn't crash on broken input. That's fine. It should output an error or a warning and try to recover. Silently accepting broken input creates a new standard, one that is not well defined.
I posted this in my journal here, but I might as well rant in public too. What the hell is up with Ubuntu? I tried to download it, there's only one US mirror, which I got 20KB/sec on. Other mirrors weren't much faster.
So I figure I'd get the torrent. 5 hours later and still zero seeds, 0 progress on the amd64 iso.
Screw it. This "large user base" apparently is in someone's head, because no one seems to be willing to distribute this distro.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that this use of technology is completely ok, and doesn't violate anyone's privacy, but your later comments are scary. When thoughtcrime becomes a reality we are all fucked, no matter how repulsive the thoughts.
The photoshopped photos will of course not be entered into evidence. Did you even look at the pictures? There are no people in them. They just want to know where the pictures were taken.
What are you talking about man? I've never seen any racism against any tribe of indians on slashdot.
I see what you are saying there, the owner can of course choose not to distribute to you if you don't agree to their terms.
It must be before the fact though. I can't send you a copy of my work, and then ask you to accept a license after the fact. The copy has already been made by an authorized party, your copy will never "become infringing" due to some external event.
The reason EULAs are different is that the distribution has already occured by the time you see the EULA. The GPL avoids relying on EULA style concepts for this reason, they don't have any legal basis.
If I download or buy a program, and then they pop up some EULA after the fact, too bad for them if I don't agree with it, I don't have to, the distribution has already taken place.
UCITA may change this of course, but that has only passed in a couple states. This was the reason the UCITA was attempted to be passed in the first place, EULAs aren't binding or enforcable without it. They are just pissing in the wind legally with EULAs without something like the UCITA.
That's just not the case. If that were the case, when you bought a book, you wouldn't be allowed to read it.
Almost all books are "All Rights Reserved". You vastly overestimate the rights copyright gives the creator.
Here are the rights as laid out in the law:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
---
EULAs aren't even part of copyright law.
Unknot your panties, he meant it like "So you traded your Honda for a Toyota?"
You seem to have a fundamental misconception.
Ok, lets say I write a program. I release it under the GPL and I hold the copyright. Bob downloads the program and gets a copy of the GPL with it. Bob does not have to even agree with the GPL unless he wants to modify or distribute the program. The GPL isn't an EULA, it's not a click through agreement. It's a license for modification and distribution.
OK, so Bob wants to send the program to Alice. He then must agree with the GPL because he has no right to copy the program otherwise and send it to Alice. So he does agree and comply with the GPL. Alice is not bound by the GPL unless she wants to modify or distribute the program.
From the GPL:
"Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope."
In the above example, even if Bob violated the GPL in his distribution to Alice, Alice would still have the right to use the program, without agreeing to the GPL, or to modify or distribute the program, in accordance to the GPL.
I guess it all does hinge on the question of preparing a derivative work.
/etc/whatever.conf is also preparing a derivative work. It doesn't seem to be the intent of the FSF to limit mere use, or even compel acceptance of the GPL with mere use, however this sort of mere use where you edit a configuration file would be a derivative work under the more strict definition.
But then, editing
The question is very fuzzy. My original example of tearing up a book could be argued to create a derivative work also, but I've never heard of copyright law being applied in that way.
I don't plan to act on this line of logic, I'm happy complying with the GPL as RMS et al say it is. I just think this is something important to talk about, especially now when they are looking at updating the GPL.
But that's not true with the GPL. You can download and run GPL software without agreeing to it. It's even in the GPL:
"You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License."
The assertion that you can't modify the work without agreeing to the GPL is wrong. If you legally get a copy of a copyrighted work, you are free to modify it however you want, as in my book example. You own that copy of the work, and are free to multilate, amend, or dispose of it however you want. That's true of "All rights reserved" works, and it's surely true of GPL works, since agreement with the GPL is only required on acts not already permitted by copyright law.
So yes, I assert the GPL contains a fundamental legal flaw, with regard to this.
The people that wrote the GPL are lawyers and I'm not, so take this how you will. I don't see any flaws in my logic, you are free to point any you see out.
It is possible... I think it would depend on the way it was done. Stick with me here.
As I said in the other reply on this thread, if you bought a reference book for your company to use, modified it, added pages, ripped pages out, etc, and used it internally, none of that would trigger any copyright protections.
If you Xeroxed the book 50 times to sit on everyone's desk, that almost surely would.
Now, with a GPLed program, the cost is usually zero. You can download and install as many copies as you want for free, and all of them would be legal.
Here's the tricky part. There is no difference if you download the software 50 times to put on each person's desktop, and then patch that each copy with your modifications, than it is to just distribute your modified version within the company.
Since there is a lack of a practical difference there, and the first case is strongly analogous of buying 50 copies of the paper reference manual and modifying all 50 copies to read the same and handing them out, I think it is safe to say that at least in the "zero cost" GPL case, copyright law can't apply to internal modification and distribution.
If you were to purchase exactly one copy of the GPL software for money, however, that would be a different story, the analogy no longer holds, since it's not the same as getting 50 copies from your authorized distributer, that would cost more money. And you would have to agree to the GPL to distribute it otherwise.
If I buy a paper manual for my company to use, and put highlights on some of the text, rip some pages out, add some pages of my own... and we use it within the company as a reference, none of that violates copyright law, even if it's "all rights reserved".
Well, that's one of the big unanswered questions. "What exactly constitutes distribution?"
The GPL doesn't work that way.
See, you don't have to agree to the GPL unless you do something which would be violate copyright if "All Rights Reserved" were the license.
Downloading and running a program doesn't violate copyright even if all rights were reserved, assuming the person you are getting it from is duly authorized to distribute it to you (lets assume they are).
Using the program internally and modifying it also fall outside the realm of copyright law.
Only distribution triggers copyright law restrictions, and only then does the GPL apply.
So even if they wanted to, the GPL couldn't make the requirement to submit internally used changes back to the maintainer, without putting it into the weaker legal realm of a "click through" agreement, like an MS EULA, which is probably not enforcable except in UCITA states.
You can't patent an implementation.
Has any company ever been forced by a lawsuit to open-source software it distributed because it used GPL'ed code?
No. And there likely never will be. It's the same as your latter statement, if they don't follow the GPL, they have violated copyright law, and could be held liable for damages in a civil suit. Any other remedy would be an extreme and new precedent.
Regarding your last comment, after more people replied I did see that the article was misleading, but since this thread already went down this path I decided to continue.
There are other places MS has done crap like article accuses, even if this isn't one of them.
I wouldn't say no money. As the person writing the open source, you are in a unique position to be the best person to add some little custom development for someone that wants a specific feature.
Just look at writing as a part of the implementation and maintenence, and it's all good.
Not sure how you can say that, there's a lot of "cooking" that's more on the art side of things. Mostly inedible "gingerbread" houses, various sugar sculptures that border on the inedible, etc.
This is all about context and intent.
The browser should output a warning or error when fed bad HTML, but it could be in some debug window that isn't normally shown. I guarantee if browsers had this function, the web would be much more compliant than it is today, since instead of just "playing with the tag soup until it looks right on IE", they could actually see where they misnested an element and fix it, or whatever they need to do to make it valid.
I'll use a company that is not much higher in MS in most people's view as an example.
Adobe arguably has a monopoly in some areas. Yet, their software doesn't accept totally broken files generally (at least no where near the extent that MS does).
As a producer of files, Adobe generally produces files that follow the PDF/PS standards that they have laid out. Their software does accept some broken files, but it doesn't seem to be their goal to create a new standard with hidden specs ("ebook" silliness aside).
The intent is the key difference here. Adobe wants to encourage the use of an open standard that they have defined and given full documentation on, and even licensed for anyone to use, free of charge.
MS wants to create broken standards that only they know the true definition of. The way they have done this without making a PR mess is to take existing standards and "extend" them in undocumented ways. Their monopoly power then encourages producers of said files to only work to the MS standard instead of the true one.
About your URL:
First to skip ahead to number 6, since that's what you pointed me at. My point is that with a structured language, there's no such thing as malformed unambiguous input. If you misnest a tag, how the hell am I supposed to guess what you meant? Should compilers also guess the 50 different ways you could screw up a "for" loop, and attempt to produce output anyway?
Besides, his comments are aimed at things you get the user to enter, not things programmers do. Programmers should be held to a higher standard of creating unambiguous input, the input we create is many times more complex than the user's. That includes web developers.
This also caught my eye (unrelated):
Store (encrypted) information in cookies even before transfer to the server, so information is preserved from all but the most serious "melt-downs."
This seems useless to me. If my computer loses power right now, I will lose this very long message I have typed into this very small box on this form on slashdot, and there's nothing the Slash devs can do to help that.
Their point about local applications saving data every few seconds is more reasonable. A lot already do this... vim for example. I'll assume they didn't really mean "continuous save"... I don't want to wait 10 seconds for the text I type to appear because my hard disk happens to be bogged down. Hard disk write caches would also have to all become battery backed for this to work effectively.
The comments on electrolytic capacitors to keep the entire computer up are unreasonable. 1 farad is one amp-second. You'd need at least 60 or 70 1F 5V supercapacitors. Each one is $2 in bulk. You'd also need a special section of the power supply to step up the constantly falling capacitor voltage. Have fun.
A defense against civil suit for ROM sites is that it would be hard to prove that you were damaging them in any monetary way. At least that's true of things like C64 or NES images.
Yeah, they own the copyrights, but without damages they don't have much to stand on in court. I think this would be the same way that you could defend against a suit for downloading ROMs too.
Your argument about the downloaders applies equally well to people that merely download mp3s too. Haven't all the cases thus far been against people sharing files?
SciFi has consistantly done shit like that.
Really, I think it's time to declare science fiction dead. It's really a terrible thing for humanity overall. There are two main things that act as a sanity check on society, comedy and science fiction. Film can help only to a lesser extent.
Just stop having episodes with Nazis. Or on historical Earth. Or both.
You say to return to the roots.. then you say this.
Those are part of the roots. How many TOS were set in a western setting, or in the early 1900s, or in rome/greece (or something that looks just like rome/greece), or victorian times?
TNG had a good amount of "holodeck" episodes along the same lines too. Not as many because they didn't need to recycle as many sets and costumes as TOS, but still a good amount.
In addition to the other excellent replies, it's a misconception that code ever unwittingly "becomes GPL".
If you use GPL code in your application in a way that violates the GPL, you have violated copyright law. That's it. The GPL doesn't control the remedies, the legal system does. Generally the remedy would be in the form of a cash settlement to the copyright owner of the software you violated the copyright on.
Well, yeah you can blame them.
When a company with monopoly power writes software that accepts broken, non standards compliance input, it's creating a new standard, one that isn't published, since people will generally only work on their software until it produces an output that works with the monopoly's software.
It's just a trick to take what was an open standard and turn it into one with secret formats and rules only MS knows.
Robust would mean it wouldn't crash on broken input. That's fine. It should output an error or a warning and try to recover. Silently accepting broken input creates a new standard, one that is not well defined.
I posted this in my journal here, but I might as well rant in public too. What the hell is up with Ubuntu? I tried to download it, there's only one US mirror, which I got 20KB/sec on. Other mirrors weren't much faster.
So I figure I'd get the torrent. 5 hours later and still zero seeds, 0 progress on the amd64 iso.
Screw it. This "large user base" apparently is in someone's head, because no one seems to be willing to distribute this distro.