There are tons of other options. The judge could order the company to release Steam's source code.
There's no legal basis to do so. If Valve had entered into a contract whereby they had promised to do so, a judge could order a specific performance, but as (to the best of our knowledge) no such contract exists (the GPL isn't such a contract, and we are unaware of any other contracts between the parties), such an outcome would not be plausible.
(Yes, I'm aware that a judge can order whatever they want, really, but they do tend to confine themselves to established law, which is quite clear in this case)
The judge could issue an injunction forcing Steam to cease operations.
The judge would be reasonably likely to issue an injunction to force Valve or id to refrain from distributing the software that is alleged to be infringing. This is quite possible, but would not force Steam to cease operation. Any other such injunction would have no legal basis, so would be a very unlikely outcome.
The judge could issue an injunction forbidding Valve or id from engaging in commercial exchanges.
Such injunctions are very rarely used, and would be highly unlikely in this kind of case.
The judge could put a freeze on Valve's or id's assets.
Yes, but the only legal basis for doing this is that the judge believes (a) a monetary award is likely to be made in favour of the copyright holders and (b) Valve and/or id are likely to transfer their assets away to prevent this occurring. As there are (to the best of our knowledge) no grounds to believe the latter, such an outcome would have no legal basis and be quite unlikely.
How do you KNOW that "active" for them doesn't mean "responded?"
Because if you look through their historical archives, you'll find that whenever they change their methodology, they give a report on the changes. The first survey that has a breakdown into active and inactive explains the criteria they use.
Do they actually compare the HTML and count anything above a 95% similarity as one site? That is what they would have to do in order to be analyzing it as you assume they are. Anyone going to that trouble would, as GP suggested, provide some modicum of an explanation as to their methods if for no other reason than to say "See how cool we were?" and score geek points.
The only reason someone does not back up statistics and such, as has been pointed out here many many times, is they are meaningless if you actually say how little work went into obtaining them.
They do back up the stats. Just because you haven't bothered looking for the details, doesn't mean they aren't there. See description of methodology here. I believe they may have tweaked it a little since then, but can't be bothered to look up the details. The differences aren't major, I believe.
No, not really. If you actually look at the figures, it seems particularly bad because there's a big drop in the number of apache users... but that's because google's in the process of migrating their datacentres from apache to an internally-developed server. Over the last 3 months, 4.4% of the servers Netcraft examine have switched from Apache to this new server. But it doesn't mean anything, because those 4.4% are operated by a single entity, so it was only one decision to move that made that difference. One decision to move away != apache dying.
One thing I've tried and loved is Blumenthal's ideas for low temperature cooking. There's something about a joint of beef, roast for 10 hours at 55 degrees, that is hard to imagine until you've tried it...
If the authors aren't willing to grant you a non-GPL license, then any use in violation of the GPL is piracy.
So? It still doesn't mean they can order you to release your source code. They can sue you, at which point you'll be ordered to pay them compensation, which is what I was trying to say in my original post. No court is going to order a source code release, because *there isn't a contract which would require one*.
They don't get a choice. They accept your money, or they sue you, at which point the court will order you to pay them some money. In the end, it all comes down to money...
It doesn't mean any code of the old DOS iD games has to be released. Only modifications they might have made to DOSbox will have to be made public.
Not even that. The GPL isn't a contract that must be followed: it's a license grant. You can choose not to accept it, and pay the original authors compensation for your use, if you'd rather not follow the terms.
A few minutes spent with Google search reveals that sale negitiations are not binding UNTIL the seller accepts an offer from a potential byer. Then it becomes a contract to sell. Makes no difference if the negotiation is face to face or over the internet.
At least, that's the opinion of US and UK law.
At least in the UK, auctions are somewhat different. When you place an item under auction, it is considered an implicit contract to accept the highest offer made during the auction.
That's one of the reasons I prefer where I am, the UK. Over here, we have a law that if a *business* sells something to a *consumer*, and that consumer can later prove that the goods were defective at the time of delivery (which they are assumed to be if they can be shown to be defective within 3 months and it cannot be proved the defect is new), then he is entitled to redress.
Consumer protection laws are important, and I can't understand why the US is so far behind us in these terms.
Anyways, secondly, _WHY_ reserialize as HTML if it's already XHTML? In one case, IE will render as HTML poorly, in the other case, IE will render as HTML poorly.
Because internet explorer will trigger its "quirks" (i.e. bug compatibility) mode if it doesn't detect a valid _HTML_ doctype declaration at the top of the file. XHTML does not allow such a declaration to be present. Sending XHTML to IE is a recipe for disaster: it processes valid HTML better.
And you still haven't given any reason for preferring XHTML over HTML, other than that you've already made the switch. Well, fine. But why should anyone else?
Other than diehard Linux fans, does anyone really care if they have to keep paying Microsoft to do basic word processing?
I've said it before, but it's worth repeating. Who has to keep paying MS anything? I've been using the same copy of Office97 for the past eight years, and have yet to encounter a real life situation where it fails to open a document I want to open. I have never wanted a feature that is available in a more modern word processor and which it lacks. (Of course, these days I only use it as backup for the documents OO.o doesn't open, but still, the point applies...)
I've actually recommended installing OO.o as a means of converting MS Word.doc files to PDFs. So far, I've never had a problem with it messing up the format. OTOH, I interact primarily with people who also use OO.o.
I've had fairly extensive experience doing the same thing. The primary problem is with people who use word for DTP work. Some of its features, particularly paragraph-anchored floating frames, get rendered slightly differently from time to time, and that can screw up the layout of a document catastrophically if it's been put together badly.
That said, it rarely takes more than 10 minutes or so to fix up a newsletter-style publication. And the PDFs I produce are substantially better compressed than the ones my clients are able to make with Word and Acrobat.
According to the first article you linked, the researcher found hidden data in PDFs, to so simply forcing emailed of PDFs versus docs doesn't necessarily fool proof you.
True, although it's much harder to screw up with PDF. The idiots that got that wrong thought that by opening a PDF document in a graphical PDF editor and drawing black rectangles over sensitive information, it wouldn't be readable. This is (a) an unusual situation: most people would edit the information out in a word processor (much easier) before exporting to PDF (I suspect the censored documents were scanned rather than word-processed) and (b) requires software most people don't have (e.g., the full edition of Acrobat rather than an export filter) and don't know how to use if they do have it (it isn't taught in your basic IT skills classes).
Yes!!! I've been using emoticons for years!:) Since about 1994, actually, when they looked a little different.;-)!! And now I'm hooked on bangs!!!!1! (exclamation marks to you ordinary folks!)
Or does he claim that he did indeed accept the terms of the GPL, in which case he's on the hook for (I'll phrase this carefully just to annoy the "contract vs. license" folks out there:P) "breach of the terms and conditions of the contract"?
The GPL is not a contract.
Go and read it. No part of it is phrased as an obligation on behalf of the licensee. Every condition is a *condition that must be fulfilled for a license to be granted* not *a condition that must be followed after the license has been granted*. A contract is an exchange of promises. The GPL is a unilateral grant of rights.
The implication of this is that you cannot breach its terms. You either follow them (and therefore get a license and are fine) or you don't follow them (and therefore don't have a license and are guilty of copyright infringement).
There's a reason they haven't caught on, and it's the same reason that Dvorak keyboards haven't -- it's very hard to learn unless you're relatively young.
Utter bollocks. Skills like this can be picked up easily at any stage of life. I'm a member of a novelist's web group that has a large number of dvorak typists. Most of them learned it after the age of 40, and few reported any serious difficulties. I learned a device very much like the one the blogger is describing in just a few hours, substantially less time than it took me to learn dvorak.
Also: Dvorak is hard to remember if you ever stop using it and revert to QWERTY. It's been 15 years since I last used a chord keypad, but I bet I could pick one up and be using it profficiently within ten minutes.
It would also help if there was a standard for chorded data entry.
The input device it used was invented a few years earlier. But thanks for reminding me of the name... here it is. "Early 80's" according to wikipedia, so yeah, I guess the patents should have expired by now.
The first variant that used just 5 buttons was invented some time in the late eighties, I believe, so may still be under patent. I remember seeing it on Tommorow's World. I remember watching Judith Hann spelling her name with this big clunky handheld device, about the size of a brick, with an LED display on it.
Agreed. I know a variation of this type of thing with 60 combinations (29 + shift + caps lock in the basic set, 31 in the shifted set). That took a couple of hours to learn. However a 325-combination alphabet would likely be pretty tricky to remember. Stick to that basic 60 and the idea's viable, particularly if the combinations are mnemonic (as they were in the system I used).
I thought we had signed up to make the european court the highest court in the land sometime ago.
You're confusing the European Union's Court of Justice (which is what this article is about, and which decides cases related to laws introduced by EU directives, such as the data retention directive, which is the law in question here) with the European Court of Human Rights (which is not an EU institution, and doesn't enforce EU laws).
This has nothing to do with rights, the decision is that the EU data retention directive doesn't require telefonica to disclose the retained information it holds except in a criminal case.
The fact that nobody should be able to peek at my personal data or internet usage unless a court orders it is so self-evident that I don't see why it even deserves a mention.
The point is that the court was asked to order it, and decided that it had no authority to do so. That *is* relevant.
Exactly. The point here is that in Spain it seems there is no existing law that could compel telefonica to reveal this information, so the copyright owner tried to use EU ISP data retention laws. The EU (correctly) stated that these laws don't apply, because they're only for criminal cases.
But the thing is, in most of Europe there are existing laws or procedures. For instance, here in the UK, the copyright holder would start a claim against an unnamed defendant, and ask the court to issue a Norwich Pharmacal Order to the ISP requiring them to identify the user. It's not an EU law that enables this, hence the EUCJ has no say in the matter.
Developing markup in an xhtml-aware environment ensures your markup is well formed.
Developing markup in an html-aware environment ensures that it is well formed, also. It's not like there aren't tools that can generate correct HTML and/or enforce rules of correct HTML when the user writes his own content.
Slashdot Mirror
There are tons of other options. The judge could order the company to release Steam's source code.
There's no legal basis to do so. If Valve had entered into a contract whereby they had promised to do so, a judge could order a specific performance, but as (to the best of our knowledge) no such contract exists (the GPL isn't such a contract, and we are unaware of any other contracts between the parties), such an outcome would not be plausible.
(Yes, I'm aware that a judge can order whatever they want, really, but they do tend to confine themselves to established law, which is quite clear in this case)
The judge could issue an injunction forcing Steam to cease operations.
The judge would be reasonably likely to issue an injunction to force Valve or id to refrain from distributing the software that is alleged to be infringing. This is quite possible, but would not force Steam to cease operation. Any other such injunction would have no legal basis, so would be a very unlikely outcome.
The judge could issue an injunction forbidding Valve or id from engaging in commercial exchanges.
Such injunctions are very rarely used, and would be highly unlikely in this kind of case.
The judge could put a freeze on Valve's or id's assets.
Yes, but the only legal basis for doing this is that the judge believes (a) a monetary award is likely to be made in favour of the copyright holders and (b) Valve and/or id are likely to transfer their assets away to prevent this occurring. As there are (to the best of our knowledge) no grounds to believe the latter, such an outcome would have no legal basis and be quite unlikely.
Et cetera et cetera.
Do you actually know what you're talking about?
How do you KNOW that "active" for them doesn't mean "responded?"
Because if you look through their historical archives, you'll find that whenever they change their methodology, they give a report on the changes. The first survey that has a breakdown into active and inactive explains the criteria they use.
Do they actually compare the HTML and count anything above a 95% similarity as one site? That is what they would have to do in order to be analyzing it as you assume they are. Anyone going to that trouble would, as GP suggested, provide some modicum of an explanation as to their methods if for no other reason than to say "See how cool we were?" and score geek points.
The only reason someone does not back up statistics and such, as has been pointed out here many many times, is they are meaningless if you actually say how little work went into obtaining them.
They do back up the stats. Just because you haven't bothered looking for the details, doesn't mean they aren't there. See description of methodology here. I believe they may have tweaked it a little since then, but can't be bothered to look up the details. The differences aren't major, I believe.
No, not really. If you actually look at the figures, it seems particularly bad because there's a big drop in the number of apache users... but that's because google's in the process of migrating their datacentres from apache to an internally-developed server. Over the last 3 months, 4.4% of the servers Netcraft examine have switched from Apache to this new server. But it doesn't mean anything, because those 4.4% are operated by a single entity, so it was only one decision to move that made that difference. One decision to move away != apache dying.
It's worth noting the Blumenthal runs a restaurant considered by many to be one of the best in the world.
Just saying...
One thing I've tried and loved is Blumenthal's ideas for low temperature cooking. There's something about a joint of beef, roast for 10 hours at 55 degrees, that is hard to imagine until you've tried it...
If the authors aren't willing to grant you a non-GPL license, then any use in violation of the GPL is piracy.
So? It still doesn't mean they can order you to release your source code. They can sue you, at which point you'll be ordered to pay them compensation, which is what I was trying to say in my original post. No court is going to order a source code release, because *there isn't a contract which would require one*.
If they'll accept your money.
They don't get a choice. They accept your money, or they sue you, at which point the court will order you to pay them some money. In the end, it all comes down to money...
It doesn't mean any code of the old DOS iD games has to be released. Only modifications they might have made to DOSbox will have to be made public.
Not even that. The GPL isn't a contract that must be followed: it's a license grant. You can choose not to accept it, and pay the original authors compensation for your use, if you'd rather not follow the terms.
A few minutes spent with Google search reveals that sale negitiations are not binding UNTIL the seller accepts an offer from a potential byer. Then it becomes a contract to sell. Makes no difference if the negotiation is face to face or over the internet.
At least, that's the opinion of US and UK law.
At least in the UK, auctions are somewhat different. When you place an item under auction, it is considered an implicit contract to accept the highest offer made during the auction.
That's one of the reasons I prefer where I am, the UK. Over here, we have a law that if a *business* sells something to a *consumer*, and that consumer can later prove that the goods were defective at the time of delivery (which they are assumed to be if they can be shown to be defective within 3 months and it cannot be proved the defect is new), then he is entitled to redress.
Consumer protection laws are important, and I can't understand why the US is so far behind us in these terms.
Anyways, secondly, _WHY_ reserialize as HTML if it's already XHTML? In one case, IE will render as HTML poorly, in the other case, IE will render as HTML poorly.
Because internet explorer will trigger its "quirks" (i.e. bug compatibility) mode if it doesn't detect a valid _HTML_ doctype declaration at the top of the file. XHTML does not allow such a declaration to be present. Sending XHTML to IE is a recipe for disaster: it processes valid HTML better.
And you still haven't given any reason for preferring XHTML over HTML, other than that you've already made the switch. Well, fine. But why should anyone else?
Other than diehard Linux fans, does anyone really care if they have to keep paying Microsoft to do basic word processing?
I've said it before, but it's worth repeating. Who has to keep paying MS anything? I've been using the same copy of Office97 for the past eight years, and have yet to encounter a real life situation where it fails to open a document I want to open. I have never wanted a feature that is available in a more modern word processor and which it lacks. (Of course, these days I only use it as backup for the documents OO.o doesn't open, but still, the point applies...)
I've actually recommended installing OO.o as a means of converting MS Word .doc files to PDFs. So far, I've never had a problem with it messing up the format. OTOH, I interact primarily with people who also use OO.o.
I've had fairly extensive experience doing the same thing. The primary problem is with people who use word for DTP work. Some of its features, particularly paragraph-anchored floating frames, get rendered slightly differently from time to time, and that can screw up the layout of a document catastrophically if it's been put together badly.
That said, it rarely takes more than 10 minutes or so to fix up a newsletter-style publication. And the PDFs I produce are substantially better compressed than the ones my clients are able to make with Word and Acrobat.
According to the first article you linked, the researcher found hidden data in PDFs, to so simply forcing emailed of PDFs versus docs doesn't necessarily fool proof you.
True, although it's much harder to screw up with PDF. The idiots that got that wrong thought that by opening a PDF document in a graphical PDF editor and drawing black rectangles over sensitive information, it wouldn't be readable. This is (a) an unusual situation: most people would edit the information out in a word processor (much easier) before exporting to PDF (I suspect the censored documents were scanned rather than word-processed) and (b) requires software most people don't have (e.g., the full edition of Acrobat rather than an export filter) and don't know how to use if they do have it (it isn't taught in your basic IT skills classes).
1! == 1. Divide both sides by 1: ! == 1.
Yes!!! I've been using emoticons for years!
!!!!1!1.
Or does he claim that he did indeed accept the terms of the GPL, in which case he's on the hook for (I'll phrase this carefully just to annoy the "contract vs. license" folks out there :P) "breach of the terms and conditions of the contract"?
The GPL is not a contract.
Go and read it. No part of it is phrased as an obligation on behalf of the licensee. Every condition is a *condition that must be fulfilled for a license to be granted* not *a condition that must be followed after the license has been granted*. A contract is an exchange of promises. The GPL is a unilateral grant of rights.
The implication of this is that you cannot breach its terms. You either follow them (and therefore get a license and are fine) or you don't follow them (and therefore don't have a license and are guilty of copyright infringement).
There's a reason they haven't caught on, and it's the same reason that Dvorak keyboards haven't -- it's very hard to learn unless you're relatively young.
Utter bollocks. Skills like this can be picked up easily at any stage of life. I'm a member of a novelist's web group that has a large number of dvorak typists. Most of them learned it after the age of 40, and few reported any serious difficulties. I learned a device very much like the one the blogger is describing in just a few hours, substantially less time than it took me to learn dvorak.
Also: Dvorak is hard to remember if you ever stop using it and revert to QWERTY. It's been 15 years since I last used a chord keypad, but I bet I could pick one up and be using it profficiently within ten minutes.
It would also help if there was a standard for chorded data entry.
There is, although it isn't currently popular. Scroll down to the bottom to see the list of basic shapes.
The input device it used was invented a few years earlier. But thanks for reminding me of the name... here it is. "Early 80's" according to wikipedia, so yeah, I guess the patents should have expired by now.
The first variant that used just 5 buttons was invented some time in the late eighties, I believe, so may still be under patent. I remember seeing it on Tommorow's World. I remember watching Judith Hann spelling her name with this big clunky handheld device, about the size of a brick, with an LED display on it.
Agreed. I know a variation of this type of thing with 60 combinations (29 + shift + caps lock in the basic set, 31 in the shifted set). That took a couple of hours to learn. However a 325-combination alphabet would likely be pretty tricky to remember. Stick to that basic 60 and the idea's viable, particularly if the combinations are mnemonic (as they were in the system I used).
I thought we had signed up to make the european court the highest court in the land sometime ago.
You're confusing the European Union's Court of Justice (which is what this article is about, and which decides cases related to laws introduced by EU directives, such as the data retention directive, which is the law in question here) with the European Court of Human Rights (which is not an EU institution, and doesn't enforce EU laws).
This has nothing to do with rights, the decision is that the EU data retention directive doesn't require telefonica to disclose the retained information it holds except in a criminal case.
The fact that nobody should be able to peek at my personal data or internet usage unless a court orders it is so self-evident that I don't see why it even deserves a mention.
The point is that the court was asked to order it, and decided that it had no authority to do so. That *is* relevant.
Exactly. The point here is that in Spain it seems there is no existing law that could compel telefonica to reveal this information, so the copyright owner tried to use EU ISP data retention laws. The EU (correctly) stated that these laws don't apply, because they're only for criminal cases.
But the thing is, in most of Europe there are existing laws or procedures. For instance, here in the UK, the copyright holder would start a claim against an unnamed defendant, and ask the court to issue a Norwich Pharmacal Order to the ISP requiring them to identify the user. It's not an EU law that enables this, hence the EUCJ has no say in the matter.
Developing markup in an xhtml-aware environment ensures your markup is well formed.
Developing markup in an html-aware environment ensures that it is well formed, also. It's not like there aren't tools that can generate correct HTML and/or enforce rules of correct HTML when the user writes his own content.