But seriously, it can be difficult to actually steal Open Source software. It's possible, of course. What you have to do is make your own "derived work" version of the software, and sell that for profit without accompanying source code.
This is something a corporation might well do, but how likely is any government agency to do such a thing? Anyone have numbers on how many governments are in the business of selling software for profit?
Of course, with Free Software, most users don't have the gall to complain when they know they didn't pay the programmer anything.
This doesn't stop some of them, of course. With those, I just say that I wrote the program for my own use, and it does exactly what I want in the way I want it to. If they don't like that, they can get the source from my web site and change it. If they don't like that, well, I'd be happy to work on it for them for $N per hour. "Just tell me clearly what you want it to do."
This isn't being facetious. I've gotten a number of good (if short) jobs this way. And since I was talking directly to the end user(s), I could in fact give them what they wanted.
This latter point is significant. On organized, commercial projects, it's almost always impossible to communicate with the end users. Software managers have developed really good techniques for preventing this from happening. So every requirement that I read has gone through N translations as it passes from the end users to me. We all know what that means.
I've been working on a major corporate project for about a year, and I have yet to speak to a single end user. In the past few months, I finally managed to get through to two low-level managers at the other end. I was not at all surprised to find that we spoke different languages and could hardly communicate. All the words were English, but that was about the end of the similarity. But I've figures out some of their language, and I've been able to modify some of the software so that they can actually use it. And on a nearly daily basis, I ask for contacts who are actual users.
When management puts such effective barriers between the geeks and the end users, it's hardly surprising that the products come out unusable.
(Hey, all you end users; when was the last time you *insisted* on talking to a developer about new software? If you don't, you are going along with the corporate communication barriers, so you have no reason to complain if the people you won't talk to don't deliver what you want.)
I sent them back a message with a copy of the GPL attached, and told them that it covered all my installed software.
I did admit that one of the machines here had come with Windows installed, but I'd erased the disk and installed linux, so although I actually do have one Windows license, I'm not using it. I offered to sell it to them.
I haven't got a reply yet (and it's been a couple years).
Really; why tolerate a shakedown like this? Just send letters to the sales people at all their member companies, saying that this sort of extortion has persuaded you to switch entirely to Open Source software, and that since they support the BSA, you are afraid to buy any software from them. Don't send letters to the BSA; write to the companies that actually sell the software.
Maybe if enough of us do this, it'll get a message across.
Who are their members now, anyway? Do we have a complete list?
Its to prevent someone from going out and buying all the software they use once they know they're going to be audited
More likely: They'll add you to their list of suckers who can be pressured into paying a second time for something you already bought. They'll wait a year or two. Then they'll send you another letter, to see if you'll fall for it a third time.
It's a very cheap scam for them to run. It's sorta like the conventional mass mailings, which are often profitable if they get a 1% or 2% response. But this one is even more profitable, because they don't have to deliver anything. You just pay them, and they don't harrass you for a while.
It's traditionally known as a "protection racket".
Although we did have the invoices detailing what was purchased, it was deemed insufficient by the BSA as proof of license compliance requirements, so to avoid drama and expidite the process,the various software was purchased again.
About 15 years ago, I was working on for a consulting firm (which shall remain nameless here;-) that does mostly government contract work. I was one of a small group that was assigned the task of analyzing and reporting on security issues with the growing collection of commercial networked small computers. My task was mostly collecting and/or writing security-test software.
After a couple of months, the security guys discovered some of the things that I'd collected (or written). I was summarily fired.
During the discussions, my boss observed that I was perhaps lucky that they didn't decide to prosecute me. He thought that there were two reasons they merely fired me: 1) I was doing the job that I'd been assigned, and 2) They were afraid that my lawyer would merely demand that all the evidence against me be presented in court.
Within six months, all the rest of the group had quietly resigned. I'm still in occasional contact with some of them. None of us has ever accepted another security-related job.
Computer security is of growing importance. But nobody with much experience in it is likely to accept a government job. I wouldn't avise anyone to take such a job, unless you know that you have the power and money to defend yourself when the inevitable happens.
(It might be interesting to hear from others with similar experiences. Of course, the poster boy for this whole topic is Randal Shwartz. Google him and read all about it.)
NASA engineers don't make mistakes? Was a different set of engineers in charge of the last shuttle explosion?
If you reread the post-mortems of the Challenger disaster, you'll find that the engineers warned of exactly what happened, and tried to delay the takeoff. They were overruled by management.
Indeed it's not. Several years ago, Linus Torvalds commented that the best backup approach was to make your files so useful that others would volunteer to back them up on their machines.
He seems to have been fairly successful at implementing this scheme.
I've used it myself. I have a bunch of online stuff that has resulted in several people volunteering free login accounts on their server machines if I would mirror my stuff there. I have an rsync running right now to update one of those machines from my primary server. It's chugging along nicely, despite the 5000-km separation between the two machines.
Some of the files have nothing to do with the online stuff, but they don't seem to mind.
Hey, I'd be happy to back some of it up on my hard drives. With apache and kazaa servers running, they can get anything quickly anytime they need it. I'm sure that there are lots of others who would volunteer a couple of GB to the effort.
In the interviews that NPR has broadcast, some of the LoC people mentioned that they are worried about the likelyhood that they won't be able to distribute some things of historic importance, due to copyright problems.
Apparently the staff can study it and can share it with other libraries, but they may have to protect it from public access.
Combine this with the way that a lot of old recordings and movies are being lost through decay because the copyright owners see no profit in preserving them. The copyright laws are more and more having the effect of interfering with those "useful arts" that the Constitution says are to be furthered.
Actually, their sites will be cracked, and the sound files will be replaced with files of equal size but containing silence.
Other files will start with a 30-second FBI warning that most customers will have to listen to because MS Media Player and RealPlayer will both refuse to skip over it.
And after a few days, the files won't play at all unless you pay more to extend your license.
(You don't think you'll be legally buying the songs, do you?)
I was wondering if anyone would notice where I stole the sig from. Actually, the Onion's line of pictures is cute, but it doesn't add much humor. The real joke is just the headline. I've found that nearly everyone loves it.
I think of it every time I hear a newcritter announce that someone has been "linked to" some terrorist or criminal. Somehow they never tell us just what the "link" is. You can put most of these claims in perspective by adding "... Yeah, just like Kevin Bacon has been linked to Al Qaeda."
500 CDs at $2 each; around $1000. That's consistent with what I've seen. I've been involved in making several CDs in the past few years, and the total costs of studio time, artwork, and making the CDs has ranged from $1000 to $5000. And they were pretty high quality CDs, if I may say so myself. Of course, they're not teen pop, so the recording industry wouldn't be interested. But if you want to make your own CD in the US, that's a reasonable estimate.
Mass producing them would take a bit more, of course, but if you're making a million copies, there's no way it should cost you even $1 per CD.
Marketing is something else. If you want to get to the traditional outlets, you have to sell to the marketing oligopoly, or nobody will ever hear you. And, as we well know, this is where they get you.
But if you're not aiming at the mass pop market, we are reaching the point where you're much better off just ignoring the oligopoly, and doing your own marketing online. A small commercial web site only takes a few thousand bucks for the hardware, and $50-$100 per month for the connection. And some of your time packaging all those CDs and taking them to the PO or UPS or FedEx or wherever.
Music distribution is turning into a cottage industry. This will have two results. First, the musicians themselves will get most of the money. And second, the marketing and distribution oligarchy will die of starvation.
They killed the music business half a century ago, so that only a handful of musicians can now make a living at the job. It's time they died, too.
Re:Java is NOT in danger, sun is.
on
The Future of Java?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
... ava were placed under the GPL,...virtually every Java program distributed would have to be released under the GPL as well.
Oh, FUD and nonsense. Perl is GPL, and nobody has even hinted that this means that perl programs must be GPL'd. Tcl and TK and GPL, and the same applies. If you bother to read the GPL, you'll find language that explicitly covers things like libraries (which is what the JVM amounts to), and it is made clear that GPL licensing for libraries doesn't extent to things that use the libraries.
Methinks people are falling for Microsoft's anti-GPL propaganda.
Actually, this isn't a frivolous worry. I worked on projects at several companies, including Digital, where the lawyers advised strongly against basing any products on Sys/V or any ATT libraries. They thought that ATT's licensing did imply that if you linked to ATT's libc.a, then ATT could claim to own your software. The story seemed to be that the lawyers thought this could be challenged in court, and you'd probably win, but if ATT wanted to press the issue, it could cost you a decade and a billion dollars to get the case decided. Better to go with BSD or OSF or roll your own (or now use linux), and be safe.
This was widely believed at Digital to be the primary reason they went with other kinds of unix. It was much of the reason that the BSD gang decided to eliminate ATT code from their system. It was also a serious concern among the GNU people, which is why they explicitly address the issue in the GPL.
Yeah, and consider that the RIAA is 1) a business, and 2) part of the entertainment industry. So everything is this week; long term is next month. Anything they say about a year in the future is pure fantasy, and has no relation to any actual plans.
The only question here is: What are their motives for making such an announcement now? How can they profit from it?
f someone releases a program that contains GPL code, the derived program must also be licensed under the GPL.... it very effectively prevents companies from stealing GPL'd code.
It does no such thing. It only does this if the thieves allow their source code to be seen. If they can keep their code secret, it's very difficult to verify that they've stolen GPL'd code. So your code hasn't been protected at all.
Code isn't like physical things. If you steal my car, I'm missing a car, and I notice real fast. If you steal my code, I still have it, and I may not notice the theft. The only way I can tell that you stole it is if I can see your code (or if I can run it and test that it has the same bugs as my code;-).
There is a resonable suspicion that the reason that Microsoft and other corporations insist on keeping their code secret is so that we can't discover that they have stolen a lot of it. Lots of Open-Source code is easy to "steal", and a few cosmetic changes to the UI can make the theft difficult to discover.
The conventional argument that if they release their source, everyone will steal it, is bogus. Lots of honest companies have released lots of source in the past, and theft has been very rare. Their main worry is that customers will see the crappy quality of the code; a secondary worry is that customers just might recognize some of the code.
They know it can't start showing up in applications, because they haven't released it legally
It seems to me that if pieces of my GPL'd code show up in Microsoft applications, when I've had no access to their source, the obvious inference is that they've stolen my code. If they don't give me credit, they've violated the GPL.
Unless they've bribed the judge, any court will see this as much more likely than the possibility that I copied code which I had no access to.
I wonder if I could get venture funding to challenge MS's infringement of my IP?
The claim that the Swiss had the first Internet vote is rather silly. I took part in quite a number of Internet votes back in the early 80's. The techniques were fairly well worked out in a number of newsgroups. A lot of mailing lists have held votes over the years.
Of course, there is little if any secrecy involved in these votes (and little need for it). The main concern has usually been with minimizing multiple votes and votes by "outsiders".
Some rather large-scale votes were held before the major reorg that produced the current newsgroup heirarchy.
But I suppose the political crowd can be expected to ignore such voting. It's just a bunch of silly geeks, after all. We don't need to give them credit for anything, do we now?
May I call it unidentified flying critter (UFC) then?
Well, you could, but how do you know? If you really get into the UFO thing, you'd have to realize that it could be a tiny robot spy. Those aliens have advanced nano-robot technology, you know. How many of the flies and mosquitoes are really tiny mobile cameras? We don't know...
Yeah; I just saw a UFO out of my window here. It landed in a nearby tree. It was probably either a sparrow or a downy woodpecker, both of which are fairly common in this neighborhood. But it's getting dark, and the critter was too far away to identify clearly.
Hasn't Microsoft used a similar clause in their.NET license agreement? Can that be challenged too?
Yes, of course. But it'll take you ten years and a few million dollars in court costs. And in the end, the court will "punish" Microsoft by ordering them to send copies of the EOLA to the Technical Committee that was set up by the DoJ's "punishment". After doing that, of course, nobody will be able to use the EULA as evidence against Microsoft in any further court actions.
Yeah; you're right; I guess I was thinking "John Cage" and didn't get it right.
It's probably useful to point out that it was Batt's crediting Cage that got the Cage estate folks upset. I guess they have no sense of humor. There's some irony there somewhere, since Cage himself would have probably sent the letter to Batt with a huge grin on his face, and the two of them would have proceeded to have a good tongue-in-cheek copyright battle with maximum publicity. Then they would have gotten together for a beer, after Batt promised to never be silent about anything again in his life.
mostly I got mp3s that were the right length, but just silence
They'd better be careful with this. Remember that last year John Batt got into trouble for including a silent track on his CD. John Cage's estate charged him with copyright infringement.
If a recording company is responding to copyright violations by sending around unauthorized copies (or derived works) of John Cage's copyright on his famous 4'33" composition, they deserve to be punished to the maximum extent of the law.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh; cute.
But seriously, it can be difficult to actually steal Open Source software. It's possible, of course. What you have to do is make your own "derived work" version of the software, and sell that for profit without accompanying source code.
This is something a corporation might well do, but how likely is any government agency to do such a thing? Anyone have numbers on how many governments are in the business of selling software for profit?
So how do they intend to enforce it on spammers whose machines are in Libya or Togo?
Of course, with Free Software, most users don't have the gall to complain when they know they didn't pay the programmer anything.
This doesn't stop some of them, of course. With those, I just say that I wrote the program for my own use, and it does exactly what I want in the way I want it to. If they don't like that, they can get the source from my web site and change it. If they don't like that, well, I'd be happy to work on it for them for $N per hour. "Just tell me clearly what you want it to do."
This isn't being facetious. I've gotten a number of good (if short) jobs this way. And since I was talking directly to the end user(s), I could in fact give them what they wanted.
This latter point is significant. On organized, commercial projects, it's almost always impossible to communicate with the end users. Software managers have developed really good techniques for preventing this from happening. So every requirement that I read has gone through N translations as it passes from the end users to me. We all know what that means.
I've been working on a major corporate project for about a year, and I have yet to speak to a single end user. In the past few months, I finally managed to get through to two low-level managers at the other end. I was not at all surprised to find that we spoke different languages and could hardly communicate. All the words were English, but that was about the end of the similarity. But I've figures out some of their language, and I've been able to modify some of the software so that they can actually use it. And on a nearly daily basis, I ask for contacts who are actual users.
When management puts such effective barriers between the geeks and the end users, it's hardly surprising that the products come out unusable.
(Hey, all you end users; when was the last time you *insisted* on talking to a developer about new software? If you don't, you are going along with the corporate communication barriers, so you have no reason to complain if the people you won't talk to don't deliver what you want.)
I sent them back a message with a copy of the GPL attached, and told them that it covered all my installed software.
I did admit that one of the machines here had come with Windows installed, but I'd erased the disk and installed linux, so although I actually do have one Windows license, I'm not using it. I offered to sell it to them.
I haven't got a reply yet (and it's been a couple years).
Really; why tolerate a shakedown like this? Just send letters to the sales people at all their member companies, saying that this sort of extortion has persuaded you to switch entirely to Open Source software, and that since they support the BSA, you are afraid to buy any software from them. Don't send letters to the BSA; write to the companies that actually sell the software.
Maybe if enough of us do this, it'll get a message across.
Who are their members now, anyway? Do we have a complete list?
Its to prevent someone from going out and buying all the software they use once they know they're going to be audited
More likely: They'll add you to their list of suckers who can be pressured into paying a second time for something you already bought. They'll wait a year or two. Then they'll send you another letter, to see if you'll fall for it a third time.
It's a very cheap scam for them to run. It's sorta like the conventional mass mailings, which are often profitable if they get a 1% or 2% response. But this one is even more profitable, because they don't have to deliver anything. You just pay them, and they don't harrass you for a while.
It's traditionally known as a "protection racket".
Although we did have the invoices detailing what was purchased, it was deemed insufficient by the BSA as proof of license compliance requirements, so to avoid drama and expidite the process,the various software was purchased again.
Hah! They found a live one with you.
YHBS. (You Have Been Scammed.)
About 15 years ago, I was working on for a consulting firm (which shall remain nameless here ;-) that does mostly government contract work. I was one of a small group that was assigned the task of analyzing and reporting on security issues with the growing collection of commercial networked small computers. My task was mostly collecting and/or writing security-test software.
After a couple of months, the security guys discovered some of the things that I'd collected (or written). I was summarily fired.
During the discussions, my boss observed that I was perhaps lucky that they didn't decide to prosecute me. He thought that there were two reasons they merely fired me: 1) I was doing the job that I'd been assigned, and 2) They were afraid that my lawyer would merely demand that all the evidence against me be presented in court.
Within six months, all the rest of the group had quietly resigned. I'm still in occasional contact with some of them. None of us has ever accepted another security-related job.
Computer security is of growing importance. But nobody with much experience in it is likely to accept a government job. I wouldn't avise anyone to take such a job, unless you know that you have the power and money to defend yourself when the inevitable happens.
(It might be interesting to hear from others with similar experiences. Of course, the poster boy for this whole topic is Randal Shwartz. Google him and read all about it.)
NASA engineers don't make mistakes? Was a different set of engineers in charge of the last shuttle explosion?
If you reread the post-mortems of the Challenger disaster, you'll find that the engineers warned of exactly what happened, and tried to delay the takeoff. They were overruled by management.
Indeed it's not. Several years ago, Linus Torvalds commented that the best backup approach was to make your files so useful that others would volunteer to back them up on their machines.
He seems to have been fairly successful at implementing this scheme.
I've used it myself. I have a bunch of online stuff that has resulted in several people volunteering free login accounts on their server machines if I would mirror my stuff there. I have an rsync running right now to update one of those machines from my primary server. It's chugging along nicely, despite the 5000-km separation between the two machines.
Some of the files have nothing to do with the online stuff, but they don't seem to mind.
Hey, I'd be happy to back some of it up on my hard drives. With apache and kazaa servers running, they can get anything quickly anytime they need it. I'm sure that there are lots of others who would volunteer a couple of GB to the effort.
In the interviews that NPR has broadcast, some of the LoC people mentioned that they are worried about the likelyhood that they won't be able to distribute some things of historic importance, due to copyright problems.
Apparently the staff can study it and can share it with other libraries, but they may have to protect it from public access.
Combine this with the way that a lot of old recordings and movies are being lost through decay because the copyright owners see no profit in preserving them. The copyright laws are more and more having the effect of interfering with those "useful arts" that the Constitution says are to be furthered.
Actually, their sites will be cracked, and the sound files will be replaced with files of equal size but containing silence.
Other files will start with a 30-second FBI warning that most customers will have to listen to because MS Media Player and RealPlayer will both refuse to skip over it.
And after a few days, the files won't play at all unless you pay more to extend your license.
(You don't think you'll be legally buying the songs, do you?)
TheOnion posted this pic a while ago:
I was wondering if anyone would notice where I stole the sig from. Actually, the Onion's line of pictures is cute, but it doesn't add much humor. The real joke is just the headline. I've found that nearly everyone loves it.
I think of it every time I hear a newcritter announce that someone has been "linked to" some terrorist or criminal. Somehow they never tell us just what the "link" is. You can put most of these claims in perspective by adding "... Yeah, just like Kevin Bacon has been linked to Al Qaeda."
500 CDs at $2 each; around $1000. That's consistent with what I've seen. I've been involved in making several CDs in the past few years, and the total costs of studio time, artwork, and making the CDs has ranged from $1000 to $5000. And they were pretty high quality CDs, if I may say so myself. Of course, they're not teen pop, so the recording industry wouldn't be interested. But if you want to make your own CD in the US, that's a reasonable estimate.
Mass producing them would take a bit more, of course, but if you're making a million copies, there's no way it should cost you even $1 per CD.
Marketing is something else. If you want to get to the traditional outlets, you have to sell to the marketing oligopoly, or nobody will ever hear you. And, as we well know, this is where they get you.
But if you're not aiming at the mass pop market, we are reaching the point where you're much better off just ignoring the oligopoly, and doing your own marketing online. A small commercial web site only takes a few thousand bucks for the hardware, and $50-$100 per month for the connection. And some of your time packaging all those CDs and taking them to the PO or UPS or FedEx or wherever.
Music distribution is turning into a cottage industry. This will have two results. First, the musicians themselves will get most of the money. And second, the marketing and distribution oligarchy will die of starvation.
They killed the music business half a century ago, so that only a handful of musicians can now make a living at the job. It's time they died, too.
... ava were placed under the GPL, ...virtually every Java program distributed would have to be released under the GPL as well.
Oh, FUD and nonsense. Perl is GPL, and nobody has even hinted that this means that perl programs must be GPL'd. Tcl and TK and GPL, and the same applies. If you bother to read the GPL, you'll find language that explicitly covers things like libraries (which is what the JVM amounts to), and it is made clear that GPL licensing for libraries doesn't extent to things that use the libraries.
Methinks people are falling for Microsoft's anti-GPL propaganda.
Actually, this isn't a frivolous worry. I worked on projects at several companies, including Digital, where the lawyers advised strongly against basing any products on Sys/V or any ATT libraries. They thought that ATT's licensing did imply that if you linked to ATT's libc.a, then ATT could claim to own your software. The story seemed to be that the lawyers thought this could be challenged in court, and you'd probably win, but if ATT wanted to press the issue, it could cost you a decade and a billion dollars to get the case decided. Better to go with BSD or OSF or roll your own (or now use linux), and be safe.
This was widely believed at Digital to be the primary reason they went with other kinds of unix. It was much of the reason that the BSD gang decided to eliminate ATT code from their system. It was also a serious concern among the GNU people, which is why they explicitly address the issue in the GPL.
What? You mean they still haven't filled that position left vacant when Satan accepted the promotion to VP at Microsoft?
Yeah, and consider that the RIAA is 1) a business, and 2) part of the entertainment industry. So everything is this week; long term is next month. Anything they say about a year in the future is pure fantasy, and has no relation to any actual plans.
The only question here is: What are their motives for making such an announcement now? How can they profit from it?
--
f someone releases a program that contains GPL code, the derived program must also be licensed under the GPL. ... it very effectively prevents companies from stealing GPL'd code.
;-).
It does no such thing. It only does this if the thieves allow their source code to be seen. If they can keep their code secret, it's very difficult to verify that they've stolen GPL'd code. So your code hasn't been protected at all.
Code isn't like physical things. If you steal my car, I'm missing a car, and I notice real fast. If you steal my code, I still have it, and I may not notice the theft. The only way I can tell that you stole it is if I can see your code (or if I can run it and test that it has the same bugs as my code
There is a resonable suspicion that the reason that Microsoft and other corporations insist on keeping their code secret is so that we can't discover that they have stolen a lot of it. Lots of Open-Source code is easy to "steal", and a few cosmetic changes to the UI can make the theft difficult to discover.
The conventional argument that if they release their source, everyone will steal it, is bogus. Lots of honest companies have released lots of source in the past, and theft has been very rare. Their main worry is that customers will see the crappy quality of the code; a secondary worry is that customers just might recognize some of the code.
They know it can't start showing up in applications, because they haven't released it legally
It seems to me that if pieces of my GPL'd code show up in Microsoft applications, when I've had no access to their source, the obvious inference is that they've stolen my code. If they don't give me credit, they've violated the GPL.
Unless they've bribed the judge, any court will see this as much more likely than the possibility that I copied code which I had no access to.
I wonder if I could get venture funding to challenge MS's infringement of my IP?
...the first legally binding internet vote
Good point.
The claim that the Swiss had the first Internet vote is rather silly. I took part in quite a number of Internet votes back in the early 80's. The techniques were fairly well worked out in a number of newsgroups. A lot of mailing lists have held votes over the years.
Of course, there is little if any secrecy involved in these votes (and little need for it). The main concern has usually been with minimizing multiple votes and votes by "outsiders".
Some rather large-scale votes were held before the major reorg that produced the current newsgroup heirarchy.
But I suppose the political crowd can be expected to ignore such voting. It's just a bunch of silly geeks, after all. We don't need to give them credit for anything, do we now?
May I call it unidentified flying critter (UFC) then?
...
Well, you could, but how do you know? If you really get into the UFO thing, you'd have to realize that it could be a tiny robot spy. Those aliens have advanced nano-robot technology, you know. How many of the flies and mosquitoes are really tiny mobile cameras? We don't know
A "UFO" is just an unidentified flying object.
Yeah; I just saw a UFO out of my window here. It landed in a nearby tree. It was probably either a sparrow or a downy woodpecker, both of which are fairly common in this neighborhood. But it's getting dark, and the critter was too far away to identify clearly.
So it was definitely a UFO.
Hasn't Microsoft used a similar clause in their .NET license agreement? Can that be challenged too?
Yes, of course. But it'll take you ten years and a few million dollars in court costs. And in the end, the court will "punish" Microsoft by ordering them to send copies of the EOLA to the Technical Committee that was set up by the DoJ's "punishment". After doing that, of course, nobody will be able to use the EULA as evidence against Microsoft in any further court actions.
It was Mike Batt
Yeah; you're right; I guess I was thinking "John Cage" and didn't get it right.
It's probably useful to point out that it was Batt's crediting Cage that got the Cage estate folks upset. I guess they have no sense of humor. There's some irony there somewhere, since Cage himself would have probably sent the letter to Batt with a huge grin on his face, and the two of them would have proceeded to have a good tongue-in-cheek copyright battle with maximum publicity. Then they would have gotten together for a beer, after Batt promised to never be silent about anything again in his life.
mostly I got mp3s that were the right length, but just silence
They'd better be careful with this. Remember that last year John Batt got into trouble for including a silent track on his CD. John Cage's estate charged him with copyright infringement.
If a recording company is responding to copyright violations by sending around unauthorized copies (or derived works) of John Cage's copyright on his famous 4'33" composition, they deserve to be punished to the maximum extent of the law.
--