Why does either side deserve to be able to place an idea off-limits, no matter how good that idea is, in such a way that if they see you do it and hear you talk about it, they still aren't allowed to use it?
IMHO, the only things that deserve patents protection are things that could be trade-secrets. In other words, if you could concievable kept your invention a secret, using it to make your product better, but in such a way that a user of the product couldn't deduce your invention, then you should be encouraged to share it and gived patent protection for doing so. If patents could only be on trade-secret-worthy processes, a case could be made for stealing them. As in, that was a secret that they didn't have to tell anyone about, but they did because they were promised some protection.
But when an invention covers a public process (something people see you doing, or see your product doing when they open the hood) there shouldn't be protection. At that point, patents prevent people from learning and applying knowledge. That leads to obvious gross injustice such as patenting a business model, which would be like patenting the idea of baking a food which was traditionally fried, and expecting chefs who hear of it to not experiment with it at home.
People need to understand that patents *can* encourage innovation, but that they do not all do so, and in fact, can easily negatively impact innovation.
Well, I'd never heard of InstallAnywhere by Zero G, so it didn't stand out. But now (after a quick googling) I have, and my post of their unobfuscated name means that this discussion will get archived for an eternity on various search engines.
Whenever I have a complaint about a company I make sure to use search terms, (as a search engine looks for them; company name together, etc) so that my post will be found by others.
I don't need an installer now, but if I did, I wouldn't buy their product because I hate dealing with jerks who do things like remotely disable software. (Hell, jerks who write phone-home routines in the first place.)
Exactly. Shrink-wrap licenses violate standard contract law in many ways.
Not only is there no consideration (once they sell you the software they don't have anything to offer you, post sale, for agreeing to the contract) but the post-agreement changes to a contract have never been valid. Then there's the strong argument that shrinkwrap licenses may actually be criminal, as they attempt to prevent use of the legally purchased software until you agree to an extorive "contract".
They aren't worth the ink they're printed on. But, unfortunately, big businesses don't need a leg to stand on, they can tie you up in court for an eternity and are (for the same financial reasons) immune to charges of barratry.
Except that Rand had it backwards. It's the companies that are the leeches. They're trying to get laws passed that require people to purchase their services, like it or not.
Mandatory CD taxes, on the assumption that everyone is a criminal. (Hell, on the assumption that copyright violation is criminal...)
Laws like the UCITA that deny you any right to except a product to do what it's advertised to do. Hell, under the UCITA they could pretty well sell you an empty box and get away with it.
While there are some pretty stupid injury claims files by consumers, they rarely get all that much money. (The initial multi-million dollar judgements not only get reduced on appeal, but they include punative damages as well as the compensation payments.)
Businesses are also quite good at using a ton of public resources and not paying a lot for taxes. Hell, US law allows you to claim the 'average retail value' of a charitable donation... Microsoft donates hundreds of millions of dollars of licenses, literally for the cost to print them.
And then, if you're rich (as in, CEO of a business) you won't get punished for anything. Ken Lay won't get half the jail time of a clerk who embezles from 7-11, despite the fact that Ken Lay's crimes ruined thousands of people.
Yes, there are leeches out there, removing any incentive to work from the honest man. But it's not the average person doing this, it's thieves hiding behind the corporate shield.
The courts are all about interpretting the word "reasonable". Nobody says a small, cheap, software product has to be flawless. It just can't contain any unreasonable flaws that due care and attention would have caught.
As in, if the customer types in a bizarre string into the zipcode box and it crashes, this is probably reasonable for cheap software. If you sell it and it turns out that it can't save documents...
If you buy a car there's an implicit guarantee that it will function as a car. No guarantee about how reliable it'll be (past a certain point) or if it'll perform as the looks would suggest, but it had better get your from point A to B. If it doesn't, you can sue the company to refund your money, plus pay for the time you wasted trying to get the lemon to work.
Why should software be any different? If you sell a product that doesn't even function as promised on the back of the jewel case, why isn't that fraud? Just because it's a CD and not a device isn't a compelling argument in my opinion.
Re:There are no legitimate "privacy concerns"
on
Walmart to Push RFID
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· Score: 1
If they're designed to be read reliably from 10cm away, you should be able to often get a reading from 50cm away. So sensors in a door (or under a register, aimed at the customer) wouldn't be 100%, but if we assume there'll be 5+ sensors on everyone (major item of clothing, plus gadgets like watches and phones, glasses, etc) it wouldn't be hard to associate all of them with the owner through a few seperate scannings.
Also, the issue of short range can be easily beaten with specialized hardware. It's fairly easy to focus RF, in order to power a more distant device, and sensitive enough hardware can pick up a signal from a much greater distance than your run of the mill store scanner.
Even if this doesn't allow reading sensors through walls, it would allow you to scan a more distant person.
As you say, I've never had anyone turn down this sort of offer.
All companies tend to mean, when they ask if they own it, is if it can ever be taken away from them if they don't pay.
While they haven't quite broken away from MS, they are starting to learn that they want to buy software, like a book, instead of licensing it and having insane restrictions. Open Source, being restriction-free to users, fits the bill perfectly. It also reduces what they pay to get it created or customized, so it's another win.
I've *never* had a client not like the idea of open source software.
(Well, with the exception of one client who wanted to write a program to sell, and wanted to have exclusive rights to it, but this is different circumstances and they told me what the job was at the interview.)
This is the root of the whole argument against the GPL. Is the agreement to accept the GPL a valid contract when there's no consideration?
I don't think it's relevant in this case though. Nullsoft released code, acting as agents of AOL, and people downloaded that and (presumably) started to tinker with it in good faith. As soon as one person did anything that required them to agree to the GPL (such as sending a patch, or modified version to a friend) they accepted Nullsoft's offer of the GPL. As that offer isn't rescindable, the software is now in the open.
Moreover, if there's a single element of previously GPLed code in the Nullsoft release, AOL *can't* take it back. They're published GPLed code and they either admit to publishing it without permission (copyright violation) or they leave the whole thing under the GPL.
Finally, as to the validity of the "no consideration to the author" argument. How much attention do you think another dodgy P2P client would have gotten, if it wasn't GPLed and available for the community to tinker with? There's a lot of value in having a thousand people looking at your work within a day. Imagine the resume material that makes. People pay a lot for hosting to distribute their code, it must have value to them, inherent in just having other people see it, or they wouldn't do this. And of course, the value of being able to use GPLed software in your own is indisputably of value.
In your example of being in Canada, committing mail fraud into the states, you can only be charged because it's a crime in Canada.
If you were doing something legal in Canada and sending it into the states, the Canadian government wouldn't let the US do anything about it. (Well, in most cases, get a rich company involved and start throwing around bribe money and anything can happen.) Note that I don't mean your action has to harm Canadians, I mean that it has to be something that would be illegal if it were happening here. You couldn't mail anthrax across the border and claim it was okay because you weren't killing anyone, in Canada.
DirectTV is way out of line here. They know they can cost the owner of the site a lot of money with spurious charges that have no real weight, and they're going to bankrupt him to make him comply. Legalities are irrelevant.
Feel free to beam something through my property (if it's not harmful) but don't tell me I can't listen to it. If you don't want me to listen, we get to the issue that you're using my property (and the space I occupy) without asking, so if one of us is going to accomodate the other, I'd prefer it be the broadcaster changing their practice.
Think of this as me selling a stock-quote service, where I sit on my house with a bull-horn and shout the quotes to subscribers who live nearby. You start to listen, without paying, and I sue to force you to stay inside or wear ear-plugs. By listening to what I'm shouting, across your property, you're stealing my service.
Would this be different if I "encrypted" stock quotes in pig latin? Should I be able to force people to stop discussing how to decrypt pig latin?
But, if I rented space from the phone company, ran speaking tubes under the street to each subscriber, and didn't send a signal across your property, I'd have a case about you cracking open a telco access hatch, splicing into my cable, and reducing the ammount of "signal" (compression waves in the air) going by.
If DirecTV wants to send the signal out to everyone, they should accept that everyone can listen. If they want privacy they can run cables to people. There are drawbacks both ways.
As long as the Nullsoft employee believed they were acting in good faith, the release is valid and AOL can't change their mind.
If a store clerk sold you a new computer, only to find that it wasn't general stock but intended to be a sales terminal, it wouldn't mean that they could find you and take the computer back. (With some small exceptions.)
A more relevant example might be if I worked in a tech support job and a customer called with a problem. I write a small GPLed perl script for them run to fix their computer. Technically, the company owns that program because I wrote it on company time, but this doesn't mean the customer doesn't have the right to use their copy (and if the license allows, distribute it). I was acting as a representative of the company at the time so my actions are their actions...
If I trick you into distributing your copyrighted material with a "free for everyone" statement in the license info, it's not binding on you. Contracts are all about intent.
If SCO distributed Linux without knowing about their supposed code, then they weren't authorizing anything. But once they discover this, they have to take reasonable steps to stop giving their code out or they're implicitly allowing it.
Hard, as in complexity, no. It's hard to get into. The book drones on for at least a hundred pages about the most uninteresting stuff happening to a character you aren't interested in at that point.
Some authors get you interested in the character within the first few pages, it's a style I prefer. I can read a text book, but when I read for enjoyment I'd like there to be something to enjoy.
What it'll take for "us" to not assume that MS is doing something evil? How about a year or two of not doing evil crap.
They keep supporting things like the UCITA, the BSA, attacking open source... They try to trick people into signing up for passport accounts. They support "trusted computing" which is pretty much the opposite of what users want.
There are easily accepted alternatives to GM, and to Xerox, and even to 3M for sticky notes. Your boss wouldn't bat an eye if you suggested buying copiers from Canon next time they died.
You're generally stuck buying electricity from a single provider but almost everything else the average business has to buy has easily accepted multiple sources, except operating systems/office suites.
Who, except sales and marketing, or secretarial, has a job that hangs on the presentation of a word document? At my company I'm fine as long as I can open the ms-word attachments that the PHBs send out in email. I don't care if their memo is properly formatted.
Ditto with everyone else in tech, except the tech writers.
If this was just me at home, well I have VMWare running to let me check web pages in IE for compatibility, so I'd just pirate MS-Office and be done with it. But it's for a business who might be audited, they can't just pirate it. If they realize that it's a $500 savings per developer if we don't get MS Office they'll probably gladly accept us using a "substandard" package.
Right now they have licenses for everyone, but when it comes time to "upgrade" from Office2k I'm sure they'll go along with, if not insist that, the techs run Open Office.
Seriously, the original poster was right. EULAs and the GPL are *nothing* alike.
With an EULA the company expects you to believe that you bought the product, yet this hidden contract that you not only didn't see, but couldn't see, and which contains unenforceable elements, is suddenly binding.
With GPLed software, you receive the software and can use the software is *any* way that copyright allows. There are *no* usage restrictions in the GPL. As they say, anyone who does not distribute GPLed software can completely ignore the license. But, if you want to do what would be copyright infringement you can read the license and see that the author is willing to let you do that, if you do it in a specific way.
Again, the GPL is voluntary and does not restrict use at all. An EULA isn't voluntary, isn't pre-sale, and heavily restricts your usage and non-usage actions. (You can't do X with the software, you also can't post benchmarks, etc.)
But, EULAs aren't enforceable. The consumer doesn't know what they say, often doesn't know they exist, they're expected to take effect after a finalized sale, etc. (You can't buy a stick of gum, then show the clerk a "contract" stating that with all gum purchases you're also entitled to a can of pop.) And, think of this. If EULAs were enforceable, would the software companies have wasted so much money on bribery... err lobbying... to get the UCITA passed in some states?
Others have adequately covered the legal distinction between theft and copyright infringement. I'll deal with the practical aspect.
What's valid IP? Is it theft if I watch you selling ice to eskimos and I start importing the same product? In any rational way, no. But with the new business-model patents you could own that IP and by your standard it would be theft. Bullshit.
Intellectual Property is a misnomer. It's a government granted monopoly to help fund research. You can violate the monopoly but you can't steal ideas (really, look it up in a dictionary - words have actual meanings and you can't go around changing them just to help your case). Not only can't ideas be owned (laws aren't always enforceable) but if you copy what someone else made you aren't stealing it from them, you're copying it. They still have the original.
Further, may you develop a festering wound for being a karma troll.
Have you actually ever used the internet? Who pays for porn? It's everywhere, and free. There are newsgroups whose names indicate illegal pictures and except for bandwidth charges, you don't pay to download them.
Besides, how much "kiddy porn" do you think is someone molesting their kids and taping and how much is 16-yo Dutch chicks who are perfectly legal where the video was made?
Because "Child Pornography" as demonized by the FBI probably shouldn't be a crime. As far as I've ever heard, it's all 16-year olds from Amsterdam doing what are 18-year olds are allowed to do.
It's stupid escalation of terminology. Now everything is terrorism, even if it's what would have been called Assault with a Deadly Weapon a few years back. Ditto with kiddy porn. A few years ago the term would have meant 12yo or under, and rape. Now it seems to be used for anything where anyone is under the age of consent in any country. I'm not ready to condone locking people up for watching dutch porno. I want more details before I grab the pitch-fork.
What about the issue of most child pornography being legal somewhere else? Nobody is claiming that there are child-molestation rings cranking out kiddie rape videos. I don't doubt that there are a few, but surely 99%+ are simply Dutch porn where the age of consent is lower than 18.
Hell, many of "our" porn sites proudly state "Only 18!". How is that not a crime for us, but a mortal crime for someone in a country where 19 is the age of consent?
Videos/Pics that actually involve harm to a minor certainly deserve the witch-hunt mentality we see on here, but nobody is questioning the fact that this is probably only illegal because of an arbitrary limit being different between countries.
The "problem" with gentoo is the users who run around saying you can get a massive speed increase by compiling it yourself. Assuming you stick to a safe level of optimization and use an Athlon or P4, you're not going to get more than a 5% speed increase in your executables. The architectures aren't that different.
Is there anything wrong with the distro itself? Hell no. And it's really sweet not just having a 'Kernel Sources' package, but source for *everything*. It's like going back to the level of tinkering available on the first PCs.
When I get an Opteron, I'll go to Gentoo for the speed increase. Until then, if I go it'll be for the geek factor of having built everything and (theoretically) taking much more care about what goes into it.
The rulings of the supreme court are more than simple precedent. Precedents can refer to the opinions behind a decision as well as the specific laws mentioned in the case.
Are their answers derivative works? After all, they don't make much sense without the context you provided. (Well, assuming they answer the question at all, as opposed to going off on a tangent.)
Slashdot Mirror
Why does either side deserve to be able to place an idea off-limits, no matter how good that idea is, in such a way that if they see you do it and hear you talk about it, they still aren't allowed to use it?
IMHO, the only things that deserve patents protection are things that could be trade-secrets. In other words, if you could concievable kept your invention a secret, using it to make your product better, but in such a way that a user of the product couldn't deduce your invention, then you should be encouraged to share it and gived patent protection for doing so. If patents could only be on trade-secret-worthy processes, a case could be made for stealing them. As in, that was a secret that they didn't have to tell anyone about, but they did because they were promised some protection.
But when an invention covers a public process (something people see you doing, or see your product doing when they open the hood) there shouldn't be protection. At that point, patents prevent people from learning and applying knowledge. That leads to obvious gross injustice such as patenting a business model, which would be like patenting the idea of baking a food which was traditionally fried, and expecting chefs who hear of it to not experiment with it at home.
People need to understand that patents *can* encourage innovation, but that they do not all do so, and in fact, can easily negatively impact innovation.
> Most users would find it easier to create a fairly complex document in Word than in either SO or OO.
I think you mean...
Most users would find it [more familiar] to create a fairly complex document in Word than in either SO or OO.
Well, I'd never heard of InstallAnywhere by Zero G, so it didn't stand out. But now (after a quick googling) I have, and my post of their unobfuscated name means that this discussion will get archived for an eternity on various search engines.
Whenever I have a complaint about a company I make sure to use search terms, (as a search engine looks for them; company name together, etc) so that my post will be found by others.
I don't need an installer now, but if I did, I wouldn't buy their product because I hate dealing with jerks who do things like remotely disable software. (Hell, jerks who write phone-home routines in the first place.)
Exactly. Shrink-wrap licenses violate standard contract law in many ways.
Not only is there no consideration (once they sell you the software they don't have anything to offer you, post sale, for agreeing to the contract) but the post-agreement changes to a contract have never been valid. Then there's the strong argument that shrinkwrap licenses may actually be criminal, as they attempt to prevent use of the legally purchased software until you agree to an extorive "contract".
They aren't worth the ink they're printed on. But, unfortunately, big businesses don't need a leg to stand on, they can tie you up in court for an eternity and are (for the same financial reasons) immune to charges of barratry.
Except that Rand had it backwards. It's the companies that are the leeches. They're trying to get laws passed that require people to purchase their services, like it or not.
Mandatory CD taxes, on the assumption that everyone is a criminal. (Hell, on the assumption that copyright violation is criminal...)
Laws like the UCITA that deny you any right to except a product to do what it's advertised to do. Hell, under the UCITA they could pretty well sell you an empty box and get away with it.
While there are some pretty stupid injury claims files by consumers, they rarely get all that much money. (The initial multi-million dollar judgements not only get reduced on appeal, but they include punative damages as well as the compensation payments.)
Businesses are also quite good at using a ton of public resources and not paying a lot for taxes. Hell, US law allows you to claim the 'average retail value' of a charitable donation... Microsoft donates hundreds of millions of dollars of licenses, literally for the cost to print them.
And then, if you're rich (as in, CEO of a business) you won't get punished for anything. Ken Lay won't get half the jail time of a clerk who embezles from 7-11, despite the fact that Ken Lay's crimes ruined thousands of people.
Yes, there are leeches out there, removing any incentive to work from the honest man. But it's not the average person doing this, it's thieves hiding behind the corporate shield.
The courts are all about interpretting the word "reasonable". Nobody says a small, cheap, software product has to be flawless. It just can't contain any unreasonable flaws that due care and attention would have caught.
As in, if the customer types in a bizarre string into the zipcode box and it crashes, this is probably reasonable for cheap software. If you sell it and it turns out that it can't save documents...
If you buy a car there's an implicit guarantee that it will function as a car. No guarantee about how reliable it'll be (past a certain point) or if it'll perform as the looks would suggest, but it had better get your from point A to B. If it doesn't, you can sue the company to refund your money, plus pay for the time you wasted trying to get the lemon to work.
Why should software be any different? If you sell a product that doesn't even function as promised on the back of the jewel case, why isn't that fraud? Just because it's a CD and not a device isn't a compelling argument in my opinion.
If they're designed to be read reliably from 10cm away, you should be able to often get a reading from 50cm away. So sensors in a door (or under a register, aimed at the customer) wouldn't be 100%, but if we assume there'll be 5+ sensors on everyone (major item of clothing, plus gadgets like watches and phones, glasses, etc) it wouldn't be hard to associate all of them with the owner through a few seperate scannings.
Also, the issue of short range can be easily beaten with specialized hardware. It's fairly easy to focus RF, in order to power a more distant device, and sensitive enough hardware can pick up a signal from a much greater distance than your run of the mill store scanner.
Even if this doesn't allow reading sensors through walls, it would allow you to scan a more distant person.
As you say, I've never had anyone turn down this sort of offer.
All companies tend to mean, when they ask if they own it, is if it can ever be taken away from them if they don't pay.
While they haven't quite broken away from MS, they are starting to learn that they want to buy software, like a book, instead of licensing it and having insane restrictions. Open Source, being restriction-free to users, fits the bill perfectly. It also reduces what they pay to get it created or customized, so it's another win.
I've *never* had a client not like the idea of open source software.
(Well, with the exception of one client who wanted to write a program to sell, and wanted to have exclusive rights to it, but this is different circumstances and they told me what the job was at the interview.)
This is the root of the whole argument against the GPL. Is the agreement to accept the GPL a valid contract when there's no consideration?
I don't think it's relevant in this case though. Nullsoft released code, acting as agents of AOL, and people downloaded that and (presumably) started to tinker with it in good faith. As soon as one person did anything that required them to agree to the GPL (such as sending a patch, or modified version to a friend) they accepted Nullsoft's offer of the GPL. As that offer isn't rescindable, the software is now in the open.
Moreover, if there's a single element of previously GPLed code in the Nullsoft release, AOL *can't* take it back. They're published GPLed code and they either admit to publishing it without permission (copyright violation) or they leave the whole thing under the GPL.
Finally, as to the validity of the "no consideration to the author" argument. How much attention do you think another dodgy P2P client would have gotten, if it wasn't GPLed and available for the community to tinker with? There's a lot of value in having a thousand people looking at your work within a day. Imagine the resume material that makes. People pay a lot for hosting to distribute their code, it must have value to them, inherent in just having other people see it, or they wouldn't do this. And of course, the value of being able to use GPLed software in your own is indisputably of value.
In your example of being in Canada, committing mail fraud into the states, you can only be charged because it's a crime in Canada.
If you were doing something legal in Canada and sending it into the states, the Canadian government wouldn't let the US do anything about it. (Well, in most cases, get a rich company involved and start throwing around bribe money and anything can happen.) Note that I don't mean your action has to harm Canadians, I mean that it has to be something that would be illegal if it were happening here. You couldn't mail anthrax across the border and claim it was okay because you weren't killing anyone, in Canada.
DirectTV is way out of line here. They know they can cost the owner of the site a lot of money with spurious charges that have no real weight, and they're going to bankrupt him to make him comply. Legalities are irrelevant.
How about you take the corn cob out of your ass?
Feel free to beam something through my property (if it's not harmful) but don't tell me I can't listen to it. If you don't want me to listen, we get to the issue that you're using my property (and the space I occupy) without asking, so if one of us is going to accomodate the other, I'd prefer it be the broadcaster changing their practice.
Think of this as me selling a stock-quote service, where I sit on my house with a bull-horn and shout the quotes to subscribers who live nearby. You start to listen, without paying, and I sue to force you to stay inside or wear ear-plugs. By listening to what I'm shouting, across your property, you're stealing my service.
Would this be different if I "encrypted" stock quotes in pig latin? Should I be able to force people to stop discussing how to decrypt pig latin?
But, if I rented space from the phone company, ran speaking tubes under the street to each subscriber, and didn't send a signal across your property, I'd have a case about you cracking open a telco access hatch, splicing into my cable, and reducing the ammount of "signal" (compression waves in the air) going by.
If DirecTV wants to send the signal out to everyone, they should accept that everyone can listen. If they want privacy they can run cables to people. There are drawbacks both ways.
As long as the Nullsoft employee believed they were acting in good faith, the release is valid and AOL can't change their mind.
If a store clerk sold you a new computer, only to find that it wasn't general stock but intended to be a sales terminal, it wouldn't mean that they could find you and take the computer back. (With some small exceptions.)
A more relevant example might be if I worked in a tech support job and a customer called with a problem. I write a small GPLed perl script for them run to fix their computer. Technically, the company owns that program because I wrote it on company time, but this doesn't mean the customer doesn't have the right to use their copy (and if the license allows, distribute it). I was acting as a representative of the company at the time so my actions are their actions...
If I trick you into distributing your copyrighted material with a "free for everyone" statement in the license info, it's not binding on you. Contracts are all about intent.
If SCO distributed Linux without knowing about their supposed code, then they weren't authorizing anything. But once they discover this, they have to take reasonable steps to stop giving their code out or they're implicitly allowing it.
Hard, as in complexity, no. It's hard to get into. The book drones on for at least a hundred pages about the most uninteresting stuff happening to a character you aren't interested in at that point.
Some authors get you interested in the character within the first few pages, it's a style I prefer. I can read a text book, but when I read for enjoyment I'd like there to be something to enjoy.
Trolling you mean.
What it'll take for "us" to not assume that MS is doing something evil? How about a year or two of not doing evil crap.
They keep supporting things like the UCITA, the BSA, attacking open source... They try to trick people into signing up for passport accounts. They support "trusted computing" which is pretty much the opposite of what users want.
Why should we give them the benefit of the doubt?
There are easily accepted alternatives to GM, and to Xerox, and even to 3M for sticky notes. Your boss wouldn't bat an eye if you suggested buying copiers from Canon next time they died.
You're generally stuck buying electricity from a single provider but almost everything else the average business has to buy has easily accepted multiple sources, except operating systems/office suites.
Who, except sales and marketing, or secretarial, has a job that hangs on the presentation of a word document? At my company I'm fine as long as I can open the ms-word attachments that the PHBs send out in email. I don't care if their memo is properly formatted.
Ditto with everyone else in tech, except the tech writers.
If this was just me at home, well I have VMWare running to let me check web pages in IE for compatibility, so I'd just pirate MS-Office and be done with it. But it's for a business who might be audited, they can't just pirate it. If they realize that it's a $500 savings per developer if we don't get MS Office they'll probably gladly accept us using a "substandard" package.
Right now they have licenses for everyone, but when it comes time to "upgrade" from Office2k I'm sure they'll go along with, if not insist that, the techs run Open Office.
Seriously, the original poster was right. EULAs and the GPL are *nothing* alike.
With an EULA the company expects you to believe that you bought the product, yet this hidden contract that you not only didn't see, but couldn't see, and which contains unenforceable elements, is suddenly binding.
With GPLed software, you receive the software and can use the software is *any* way that copyright allows. There are *no* usage restrictions in the GPL. As they say, anyone who does not distribute GPLed software can completely ignore the license. But, if you want to do what would be copyright infringement you can read the license and see that the author is willing to let you do that, if you do it in a specific way.
Again, the GPL is voluntary and does not restrict use at all. An EULA isn't voluntary, isn't pre-sale, and heavily restricts your usage and non-usage actions. (You can't do X with the software, you also can't post benchmarks, etc.)
But, EULAs aren't enforceable. The consumer doesn't know what they say, often doesn't know they exist, they're expected to take effect after a finalized sale, etc. (You can't buy a stick of gum, then show the clerk a "contract" stating that with all gum purchases you're also entitled to a can of pop.) And, think of this. If EULAs were enforceable, would the software companies have wasted so much money on bribery... err lobbying... to get the UCITA passed in some states?
Others have adequately covered the legal distinction between theft and copyright infringement. I'll deal with the practical aspect.
What's valid IP? Is it theft if I watch you selling ice to eskimos and I start importing the same product? In any rational way, no. But with the new business-model patents you could own that IP and by your standard it would be theft. Bullshit.
Intellectual Property is a misnomer. It's a government granted monopoly to help fund research. You can violate the monopoly but you can't steal ideas (really, look it up in a dictionary - words have actual meanings and you can't go around changing them just to help your case). Not only can't ideas be owned (laws aren't always enforceable) but if you copy what someone else made you aren't stealing it from them, you're copying it. They still have the original.
Further, may you develop a festering wound for being a karma troll.
Have you actually ever used the internet? Who pays for porn? It's everywhere, and free. There are newsgroups whose names indicate illegal pictures and except for bandwidth charges, you don't pay to download them.
Besides, how much "kiddy porn" do you think is someone molesting their kids and taping and how much is 16-yo Dutch chicks who are perfectly legal where the video was made?
Because "Child Pornography" as demonized by the FBI probably shouldn't be a crime. As far as I've ever heard, it's all 16-year olds from Amsterdam doing what are 18-year olds are allowed to do.
It's stupid escalation of terminology. Now everything is terrorism, even if it's what would have been called Assault with a Deadly Weapon a few years back. Ditto with kiddy porn. A few years ago the term would have meant 12yo or under, and rape. Now it seems to be used for anything where anyone is under the age of consent in any country. I'm not ready to condone locking people up for watching dutch porno. I want more details before I grab the pitch-fork.
What about the issue of most child pornography being legal somewhere else? Nobody is claiming that there are child-molestation rings cranking out kiddie rape videos. I don't doubt that there are a few, but surely 99%+ are simply Dutch porn where the age of consent is lower than 18.
Hell, many of "our" porn sites proudly state "Only 18!". How is that not a crime for us, but a mortal crime for someone in a country where 19 is the age of consent?
Videos/Pics that actually involve harm to a minor certainly deserve the witch-hunt mentality we see on here, but nobody is questioning the fact that this is probably only illegal because of an arbitrary limit being different between countries.
The "problem" with gentoo is the users who run around saying you can get a massive speed increase by compiling it yourself. Assuming you stick to a safe level of optimization and use an Athlon or P4, you're not going to get more than a 5% speed increase in your executables. The architectures aren't that different.
Is there anything wrong with the distro itself? Hell no. And it's really sweet not just having a 'Kernel Sources' package, but source for *everything*. It's like going back to the level of tinkering available on the first PCs.
When I get an Opteron, I'll go to Gentoo for the speed increase. Until then, if I go it'll be for the geek factor of having built everything and (theoretically) taking much more care about what goes into it.
The rulings of the supreme court are more than simple precedent. Precedents can refer to the opinions behind a decision as well as the specific laws mentioned in the case.
Are their answers derivative works? After all, they don't make much sense without the context you provided. (Well, assuming they answer the question at all, as opposed to going off on a tangent.)