Information is easily copied and essentially impossible to restrict in ways that a single piece of physical property is.
Even more important and to the point, if I have your physical property I am depriving you of your use of that property. If you copy IP we both have it, you arent deprived of your use of it and both are happy.
The patent criteria do not require that form of obviousness. The idea is not patentable if it is obvious to the average person in the buisness.
Storing the majority of the actual data on the server side is natural and obvious to anyone doing web development (security, bandwidth and latency issues). You just need a hash to identify the user; this is what is stored in the browser cookie. Ordinary procedure. Even more natural when reducing a HUGE security risk (storing CC data in cookie) to a very large security risk (storing the CC data on server and identifying user based on cookie).
Using databases for processing of ordering information is natural. Using databases for tracking users and saving said cookie information is natural. Combining both of them is also a natural process. Using it to avoid users having to retype info is natural (altho storing CC number is idiotic in either case). This is no invention. This is a completely natural evolution, and comes as natural and obvious for anyone involved in this type of work (now _or_ then), as natural as drawing another breath.
All of this was done before Amazon. I made part implementations of similar things (storing user data and using cookies to identify user) and connecting it to an order system (web frontend for a database) in, IIRC 1994 or early 95, and it was hardly a revolutionary idea for web access to legacy databases.
It _is_ and _was_ obvious to anyone involved in it at that time. Like my earlier quote, it was even suggested when cookies were dreamed up. The original spec even mentions all the keywords to trigger the idea in a few sentances. The implementation details arent of any consequence to the innovativeness; they're just a natural progression of how you can implement the original idea; store data about a user, use cookie, combine with shopping, avoid retyping.
Look at the draft for cookies from netscape:
http://home.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spec .html
"This simple mechanism provides a powerful new tool which enables a host of new types of applications to be written for web-based environments. Shopping applications can now store information about the currently selected items, for fee services can send back registration information and free the client from retyping a user-id on next connection, sites can store per-user preferences on the client, and have the client supply those preferences every time that site is connected to."
Which part of that doesnt make storing user information like credit cards __**BLINDINGLY**__ obvious? This if from the original _draft_ of the cookie spec. Im sure if you ask netscape they can dig up the original date they submitted it on or something.
Ehm, so you trust Suns support for Solaris on anything but Sparc? Let me tell you, I do not. Sun is a single architecture vendor and that is unlikely to change. Solaris x86 is mostly a look-we-do-x86 port. Sun people have explicitly told me to not run it for serious production. Why would Solaris-MIPS be any more useable?
True. With Microsofts behaviour in court it's not like an even longer trial will make it better for MS. My guess is we'll see new forged evidence (this video has been rendered on NT! your honor!), sexual favours, massive bribing and blackmail attempts before this is over.
... let them stage their spectacle in your hometown. Throwing rotten tomatoes at the corrupt IOC officials or just staging a few anti olympics demonstrations when the local greaseboys try to get them to your town will usually do it.
The bill in new sports arenas, police invasion and associated costs usually makes the Olymics a lot more expensive than any local tourism or sales can make up for (depending which for of creative accounting you use, of course)... so the taxpayers end up paying a load to host that corrupt spectacle of drugged up degenerates anyway.
Well, considering the competence level they've shown when designing their buisness model...
DC is 'asking' for 'payment' in the fashion that they require you to use their service for referrals, require you to agree to their terms, now call the cuecat givaway only a 'loan', etc. None of which is enforcable, since they've essentially given the cuecats away no strings attached by mailing it the way they have.
The patent even specifies RFC 1631 in its references section, so anything in RFC 1631 would obviously be prior art... so it seems rather unclear what exactly the patent is about.
The danger is that with a changed patent law in the EU we will get an en-masse approval of US patents.
However, the patent situation isnt the same as in the Netherlands here at least; no software patents are granted, software is equivalent with other art and falls under copyright, except the parts that fall under discoveries, which is not either patentable or copyrightable (maths and stuff).
You can, however, patent software as part of a device (device running software to encrypt blahblah, etc). This isnt quite the same, and not as dangerous.
Actually, not much of OSS is based on protected intellectual property, except as to work around the concept, either putting it into public domain or enforcing distributability. The foundation of both OSS and the internet lies largely in not-for-profit non-proprietary software.
You seem to miss the point that people write software without IP protection. They even write software to get around IP. Virtually every useful but patented software has gotten its own unencumbered workalike. RSA has multiple replacements. GIF has multiple replacements. mp3 replacements are in progress. And they are obviously *not* clones or copies, but new 'inventions', considering they are workarounds for patents.
I think that 5 years is ok. Plus a voidance clause. The patent becomes invalid if the method is in common use after one year from original filing date, combined with an invalidation if the patent holder does not inform standards groups of their patent (to get rid of shits like Rambus and Fraunhofer who dump their patent ridden excretions into standards and then tell the world). Plus bounty afforded on invalidating patents. Earn $50000 proving prior art on Amazons 1-click patent, for example, payable by amazon.
So, once you've done all that work writing the code, do you want to get sued for patent infringement?
*That* is what software patents are about. Patenting things that a lot of people are bound to implement and 'invent' independent of the patent holder, not even knowing someone has done it before.
Advisory boards would work well, tech experts too. After all, 'high tech' isnt really that complicated compared to many other things the courts have to handle.
The 'problems' in the DeCSS case was a prejudiced judge with a conflict of interest, and in the Microsoft case, well, you know and I know (well, everyone not subject to Microsoft groupthink and stock option blindness knows), when you're forging evidence you're usually in a rather legally untenable position so I dont think a high tech judge would make any difference.
But like you say, for the sake of humanity, _do_ something about the raving madmen passing the laws like the DMCA and UCITA.
No, it cant be summed up as 'not my problem'. Even in the silly US patent system you may not lie in a patent application. That would be fraud and could carry its own legal consequence. This is one of the reasons that people are discouraged to look for prior art; if they dont know of the prior art they arent lying in the applicaion, are they...?
You are correct of course, the RIAA contains many labels that dont quite fall under that category, or even under the 'do-research-pickup-band-engineer-market-sell' concept. Altho a lot of it does, even with my own non-mainstream music taste I think about half my music is RIAA member produced (altho I would suggest to a lot of those bands that they ask their labels to disengage from the RIAA for ethical reasons).
How do you know that software would not get written without the copyright model? A lot of the software enabling the Internet is written under licenses that (although through the method of copyright) directly destroy the very model of copyright. Software, more than many other forms of creative expression, gets written to solve a problem. Every solution is applicable an infinite number of times within a free software (or copyright-less) world. While you wouldnt get 10 or 100's of reimplementations of the same code (how many spellcheckers have been written?), you dont _need_ more than one if it can be used by anyone.
Remember, a huge amount of software good enough for most use has been produced without the financial incentive of copyright; an even more huge amount is the result of illegal copying by employees moving from one company to another who bring along the code they used in the last place they worked.
I dont really want everything free. I want society to get as far as possible as fast as possible (and as fun as possible), and I truly doubt that the current incarnation of intellectual property (software/math/buisness method/basic research patents primarily, copyright secondarily) does no longer serve that purpose, and in some cases begins to hinder progress.
Well, you are right and wrong on the argument. Hell, I even enjoy listening to Brittany on the radio every now and then, altho I'd never buy one of 'her' (havent researched her music enough to know wether or not she or some mass production writers do it) albums. But one point, I think, is that you could easily find 10 or 20 generic Brittany Spears clones (or music 'designers'). Add marketing effort and you create the selling phenomena. This is a careful and coordinated act, but it involves little creativity (altho some research and lots of marketing) and it could probably be done even without copyright since the turnover rate is virtually faster than anyone can set up a real pirating act (pick it, engineer it, _flood the market_, drop it). The trick is knowing (or marketing engineering) the audience, picking the correct 'artist', and then using appropriate channels (radio stations, MTV, etc). The point is; the artist and creativity involved is generic (most sound probably barely deviates from what a keyboard/drum machine delivers from the store). There are hundreds of interchangable performers who barely get compensated in this game, unless they through a miscalculation by the companies actually manage to obtain a power of their own.
The point isnt that everything is crap; the point is that the original artist wont be compensated, there are a hundred other artists with virtually the exact same music who dont even get to sell one cd, the artist is discarded in the end and the next sucker get picked up by the design/engineering/marketing departments.
Im not saying there is no worth in this kind of expression. But the RIAA companies manage to drown out the efforts of thousands or hundreds of thousands of artists who will never have a chance, while at the same time charging a high premium for selecting and engineering an artist that could probably make as much (and evolve! on their own) through direct sales if they werent automatically losers if they get crowded out in the media by the RIAA engineered groups.
Of course, wether this situation requires the IP laws, copyright in particular, to be revoked, or merely changed, is a matter of opinion. In my opinion the very foundation for intellectual property has been degraded enough to require the actual removal of the concept, analysis of what material still gets produced in sufficient amounts to fulfill the requirement of society, and then reinstated for such material as would be difficult or impossible to produce without the incentive of copyright (movies or other high-budget (marketing disregarded) productions come into mind (altho this will change as technology evolves to the point that a script writer will be able to populate his/her movies with artifically generated entities for no more than a household budget).
The question is, do we need to? The financial incentive was invented because it promoted more creativity. I sincerely doubt that it actually does promote creativity anymore; what the RIAA are involved in is not a form of creativity, it is a form of marketing.
Today, the vast majority of creativity *is* unrewarded. In the forms of all those unpaid artists, wether music makers or painters or others.
The remaining large part of creative effort is commissioned. Through sponsored art in the cultural parts of creative society, to government paid research, to progammers working to solve problems, paid to do the work. These will continue to pay for the art or work, even if they cannot hope to reap as large rewards (through patents) as today. Because they need to be *ahead* to stay competetive, and even without copyrights or patents technology transfer and actual implementation is slow enough to allow an edge for those who pay to develop something, especially if they can cut the development costs through not having to start from scratch because they have a usable unpatented base.
The microscopic part of creativity that actually generates some form of true wealth for the artists is (ie, not the parts that just generate wealth for labels) not, I think, worth the cost of said copyright system.
Of course, I could be wrong. But I would like to see a test of it, for a decade or something, *before* the concept of intellectual property becomes so ingrained into society that people do not remember why we originally created that legal construct.
Intellectual property has no inherent value because there is no inherent scarcity.
However, there is an inherent value in creativity, and to compensate that there are the various government granted artificial scarcity generators like copyright, patents, etc.
But in my opinion, artifical scarcity for intellectual property does very little to stimulate this creativity anymore; it is more often used to suppress creativity through litigation and market manipulation. The sheer amount of intellectual property created every day is by now so huge that it needs no such artificial stimulation anymore.
The mere need for software to heighten productivity or solve problems will cause software to be created. The mere fun of artistic creation will cause enough to be created. Remember, apart from your 0.0001 percent of bands who make it to MTV, you have the rest who dont and for some reason create anyway. There are millions of books that remain unpublished but get written anyway. How many painters can survive on their IP rights? And how many create without the ability to live off it?
Do not delude yourself into believing that the the RIAA companies or the book publishers decide on 'quality'. They can basically take any sucker, wether Britney Spears or her lookalike Whitney Shears from the garage next door, market the hell out of them, take all the profits, dump them and go on with the next sucker.
No, I think it's time for a moratorium on intellectual property. Maybe five or ten years in which no new patent or copyright is granted, to remind the IP holders that there is a reason for why they are granted this artifical monopoly, and when that artificial scarcity is no longer needed to serve society and begins to hinder progress, it _will_ be revoked.
Well, you know, in a lot of countries that is _EXACTLY_ what the RIAA or their counterparts do. Media taxes etc are just that, taxes on recordable media that goes straight to the pockets of those lobbies.
True, a lot of people object to this, and it's a reasonable objection. To accept it it requires that you understand and agree with RMS and the FSF that the goal is that software should be entirely free (speech), including anything and everything it depends on, since a piece of software isnt 'really' free if you have to pay for something it has to have (the only exception is OS components like libc and kernels, but for that exception to be valid the GPL code may not be distributed together with the component eligeble for the exception).
In some cases like (QPL) Qt it just causes annoying legal problems since the thing you arent allowed to link to is already free (speech). But the legal problem is the same wether it's free or the software is proprietary and costs money, since you dont really get differing degrees of violations as long as you conflict with the GPL. Thus it requires extra permission, which can be implicit, but in that case causes an immense amount of problem when you throw 'real' GPL code into the mix.
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Information is easily copied and essentially impossible to restrict in ways that a single piece of physical property is.
Even more important and to the point, if I have your physical property I am depriving you of your use of that property. If you copy IP we both have it, you arent deprived of your use of it and both are happy.
The patent criteria do not require that form of obviousness. The idea is not patentable if it is obvious to the average person in the buisness.
Storing the majority of the actual data on the server side is natural and obvious to anyone doing web development (security, bandwidth and latency issues). You just need a hash to identify the user; this is what is stored in the browser cookie. Ordinary procedure. Even more natural when reducing a HUGE security risk (storing CC data in cookie) to a very large security risk (storing the CC data on server and identifying user based on cookie).
Using databases for processing of ordering information is natural. Using databases for tracking users and saving said cookie information is natural. Combining both of them is also a natural process. Using it to avoid users having to retype info is natural (altho storing CC number is idiotic in either case). This is no invention. This is a completely natural evolution, and comes as natural and obvious for anyone involved in this type of work (now _or_ then), as natural as drawing another breath.
All of this was done before Amazon. I made part implementations of similar things (storing user data and using cookies to identify user) and connecting it to an order system (web frontend for a database) in, IIRC 1994 or early 95, and it was hardly a revolutionary idea for web access to legacy databases.
It _is_ and _was_ obvious to anyone involved in it at that time. Like my earlier quote, it was even suggested when cookies were dreamed up. The original spec even mentions all the keywords to trigger the idea in a few sentances. The implementation details arent of any consequence to the innovativeness; they're just a natural progression of how you can implement the original idea; store data about a user, use cookie, combine with shopping, avoid retyping.
Look at the draft for cookies from netscape:c .html
http://home.netscape.com/newsref/std/cookie_spe
"This simple mechanism provides a powerful new tool which enables a host of new types of applications to be written for web-based environments. Shopping applications can now store information about the currently selected items, for fee services can send back registration information and free the client from retyping a user-id on next connection, sites can store per-user preferences on the client, and have the client supply those preferences every time that site is connected to."
Which part of that doesnt make storing user information like credit cards __**BLINDINGLY**__ obvious? This if from the original _draft_ of the cookie spec. Im sure if you ask netscape they can dig up the original date they submitted it on or something.
Oh, but Sun doesnt recommend Solaris x86 for serious use (not to mention it's been facing discontinuation status the last few years).
Ehm, so you trust Suns support for Solaris on anything but Sparc? Let me tell you, I do not. Sun is a single architecture vendor and that is unlikely to change. Solaris x86 is mostly a look-we-do-x86 port. Sun people have explicitly told me to not run it for serious production. Why would Solaris-MIPS be any more useable?
True. With Microsofts behaviour in court it's not like an even longer trial will make it better for MS. My guess is we'll see new forged evidence (this video has been rendered on NT! your honor!), sexual favours, massive bribing and blackmail attempts before this is over.
... let them stage their spectacle in your hometown. Throwing rotten tomatoes at the corrupt IOC officials or just staging a few anti olympics demonstrations when the local greaseboys try to get them to your town will usually do it.
The bill in new sports arenas, police invasion and associated costs usually makes the Olymics a lot more expensive than any local tourism or sales can make up for (depending which for of creative accounting you use, of course)... so the taxpayers end up paying a load to host that corrupt spectacle of drugged up degenerates anyway.
Well, considering the competence level they've shown when designing their buisness model...
DC is 'asking' for 'payment' in the fashion that they require you to use their service for referrals, require you to agree to their terms, now call the cuecat givaway only a 'loan', etc. None of which is enforcable, since they've essentially given the cuecats away no strings attached by mailing it the way they have.
The patent even specifies RFC 1631 in its references section, so anything in RFC 1631 would obviously be prior art... so it seems rather unclear what exactly the patent is about.
Not if you get the patent overturned. And morally you would be obliged to refrain from perpetuating a fraudulent patent.
The danger is that with a changed patent law in the EU we will get an en-masse approval of US patents.
However, the patent situation isnt the same as in the Netherlands here at least; no software patents are granted, software is equivalent with other art and falls under copyright, except the parts that fall under discoveries, which is not either patentable or copyrightable (maths and stuff).
You can, however, patent software as part of a device (device running software to encrypt blahblah, etc). This isnt quite the same, and not as dangerous.
Actually, not much of OSS is based on protected intellectual property, except as to work around the concept, either putting it into public domain or enforcing distributability. The foundation of both OSS and the internet lies largely in not-for-profit non-proprietary software.
You seem to miss the point that people write software without IP protection. They even write software to get around IP. Virtually every useful but patented software has gotten its own unencumbered workalike. RSA has multiple replacements. GIF has multiple replacements. mp3 replacements are in progress. And they are obviously *not* clones or copies, but new 'inventions', considering they are workarounds for patents.
I think that 5 years is ok. Plus a voidance clause. The patent becomes invalid if the method is in common use after one year from original filing date, combined with an invalidation if the patent holder does not inform standards groups of their patent (to get rid of shits like Rambus and Fraunhofer who dump their patent ridden excretions into standards and then tell the world). Plus bounty afforded on invalidating patents. Earn $50000 proving prior art on Amazons 1-click patent, for example, payable by amazon.
So, once you've done all that work writing the code, do you want to get sued for patent infringement?
*That* is what software patents are about. Patenting things that a lot of people are bound to implement and 'invent' independent of the patent holder, not even knowing someone has done it before.
Then you get sued for writing your program.
Advisory boards would work well, tech experts too. After all, 'high tech' isnt really that complicated compared to many other things the courts have to handle.
The 'problems' in the DeCSS case was a prejudiced judge with a conflict of interest, and in the Microsoft case, well, you know and I know (well, everyone not subject to Microsoft groupthink and stock option blindness knows), when you're forging evidence you're usually in a rather legally untenable position so I dont think a high tech judge would make any difference.
But like you say, for the sake of humanity, _do_ something about the raving madmen passing the laws like the DMCA and UCITA.
No, it cant be summed up as 'not my problem'. Even in the silly US patent system you may not lie in a patent application. That would be fraud and could carry its own legal consequence. This is one of the reasons that people are discouraged to look for prior art; if they dont know of the prior art they arent lying in the applicaion, are they...?
Wanna bet that's the next step? Require that the telcos block napster traffic on the backbones or get sued? They could even win that one in court.
You are correct of course, the RIAA contains many labels that dont quite fall under that category, or even under the 'do-research-pickup-band-engineer-market-sell' concept. Altho a lot of it does, even with my own non-mainstream music taste I think about half my music is RIAA member produced (altho I would suggest to a lot of those bands that they ask their labels to disengage from the RIAA for ethical reasons).
How do you know that software would not get written without the copyright model? A lot of the software enabling the Internet is written under licenses that (although through the method of copyright) directly destroy the very model of copyright. Software, more than many other forms of creative expression, gets written to solve a problem. Every solution is applicable an infinite number of times within a free software (or copyright-less) world. While you wouldnt get 10 or 100's of reimplementations of the same code (how many spellcheckers have been written?), you dont _need_ more than one if it can be used by anyone.
Remember, a huge amount of software good enough for most use has been produced without the financial incentive of copyright; an even more huge amount is the result of illegal copying by employees moving from one company to another who bring along the code they used in the last place they worked.
I dont really want everything free. I want society to get as far as possible as fast as possible (and as fun as possible), and I truly doubt that the current incarnation of intellectual property (software/math/buisness method/basic research patents primarily, copyright secondarily) does no longer serve that purpose, and in some cases begins to hinder progress.
Well, you are right and wrong on the argument. Hell, I even enjoy listening to Brittany on the radio every now and then, altho I'd never buy one of 'her' (havent researched her music enough to know wether or not she or some mass production writers do it) albums. But one point, I think, is that you could easily find 10 or 20 generic Brittany Spears clones (or music 'designers'). Add marketing effort and you create the selling phenomena. This is a careful and coordinated act, but it involves little creativity (altho some research and lots of marketing) and it could probably be done even without copyright since the turnover rate is virtually faster than anyone can set up a real pirating act (pick it, engineer it, _flood the market_, drop it). The trick is knowing (or marketing engineering) the audience, picking the correct 'artist', and then using appropriate channels (radio stations, MTV, etc). The point is; the artist and creativity involved is generic (most sound probably barely deviates from what a keyboard/drum machine delivers from the store). There are hundreds of interchangable performers who barely get compensated in this game, unless they through a miscalculation by the companies actually manage to obtain a power of their own.
The point isnt that everything is crap; the point is that the original artist wont be compensated, there are a hundred other artists with virtually the exact same music who dont even get to sell one cd, the artist is discarded in the end and the next sucker get picked up by the design/engineering/marketing departments.
Im not saying there is no worth in this kind of expression. But the RIAA companies manage to drown out the efforts of thousands or hundreds of thousands of artists who will never have a chance, while at the same time charging a high premium for selecting and engineering an artist that could probably make as much (and evolve! on their own) through direct sales if they werent automatically losers if they get crowded out in the media by the RIAA engineered groups.
Of course, wether this situation requires the IP laws, copyright in particular, to be revoked, or merely changed, is a matter of opinion. In my opinion the very foundation for intellectual property has been degraded enough to require the actual removal of the concept, analysis of what material still gets produced in sufficient amounts to fulfill the requirement of society, and then reinstated for such material as would be difficult or impossible to produce without the incentive of copyright (movies or other high-budget (marketing disregarded) productions come into mind (altho this will change as technology evolves to the point that a script writer will be able to populate his/her movies with artifically generated entities for no more than a household budget).
The question is, do we need to? The financial incentive was invented because it promoted more creativity. I sincerely doubt that it actually does promote creativity anymore; what the RIAA are involved in is not a form of creativity, it is a form of marketing.
Today, the vast majority of creativity *is* unrewarded. In the forms of all those unpaid artists, wether music makers or painters or others.
The remaining large part of creative effort is commissioned. Through sponsored art in the cultural parts of creative society, to government paid research, to progammers working to solve problems, paid to do the work. These will continue to pay for the art or work, even if they cannot hope to reap as large rewards (through patents) as today. Because they need to be *ahead* to stay competetive, and even without copyrights or patents technology transfer and actual implementation is slow enough to allow an edge for those who pay to develop something, especially if they can cut the development costs through not having to start from scratch because they have a usable unpatented base.
The microscopic part of creativity that actually generates some form of true wealth for the artists is (ie, not the parts that just generate wealth for labels) not, I think, worth the cost of said copyright system.
Of course, I could be wrong. But I would like to see a test of it, for a decade or something, *before* the concept of intellectual property becomes so ingrained into society that people do not remember why we originally created that legal construct.
Intellectual property has no inherent value because there is no inherent scarcity.
However, there is an inherent value in creativity, and to compensate that there are the various government granted artificial scarcity generators like copyright, patents, etc.
But in my opinion, artifical scarcity for intellectual property does very little to stimulate this creativity anymore; it is more often used to suppress creativity through litigation and market manipulation. The sheer amount of intellectual property created every day is by now so huge that it needs no such artificial stimulation anymore.
The mere need for software to heighten productivity or solve problems will cause software to be created. The mere fun of artistic creation will cause enough to be created. Remember, apart from your 0.0001 percent of bands who make it to MTV, you have the rest who dont and for some reason create anyway. There are millions of books that remain unpublished but get written anyway. How many painters can survive on their IP rights? And how many create without the ability to live off it?
Do not delude yourself into believing that the the RIAA companies or the book publishers decide on 'quality'. They can basically take any sucker, wether Britney Spears or her lookalike Whitney Shears from the garage next door, market the hell out of them, take all the profits, dump them and go on with the next sucker.
No, I think it's time for a moratorium on intellectual property. Maybe five or ten years in which no new patent or copyright is granted, to remind the IP holders that there is a reason for why they are granted this artifical monopoly, and when that artificial scarcity is no longer needed to serve society and begins to hinder progress, it _will_ be revoked.
Hmm, but if they had a really really big CD-jukebox would it be ok then?
Well, you know, in a lot of countries that is _EXACTLY_ what the RIAA or their counterparts do. Media taxes etc are just that, taxes on recordable media that goes straight to the pockets of those lobbies.
True, a lot of people object to this, and it's a reasonable objection. To accept it it requires that you understand and agree with RMS and the FSF that the goal is that software should be entirely free (speech), including anything and everything it depends on, since a piece of software isnt 'really' free if you have to pay for something it has to have (the only exception is OS components like libc and kernels, but for that exception to be valid the GPL code may not be distributed together with the component eligeble for the exception).
In some cases like (QPL) Qt it just causes annoying legal problems since the thing you arent allowed to link to is already free (speech). But the legal problem is the same wether it's free or the software is proprietary and costs money, since you dont really get differing degrees of violations as long as you conflict with the GPL. Thus it requires extra permission, which can be implicit, but in that case causes an immense amount of problem when you throw 'real' GPL code into the mix.
Your understanding is correct.
Amen to that.