The "public domain" refers to copyrights. As far as I'm aware, there is no similiar concept for patents, except for just agreeing to not enforce it (which, of course, is no protection, since you can change your mind any time you want).
True. But what you can do is sign over the patent to someone who can be trusted never to enforce it.. The FSF for example.
IBM has in fact already done so on occasion. They contributed code to linux which was covered by one of their patents, when this was pointed out IBM solve the issue by signing the patent over to Linus Torvalds.
They've NEVER (in the long run) been beneficial to workers OR employers.
Sweden has something like 90% unionized workers. They also have 5 weeks of paid vacation.
The USA has less than 15% unionization, they have 2 weeks of paid vacation.
I think most workers would prefer the former. Say whatever you want about employer conditions, but Sweden hasn't exactly degenerated into a third-world nation, has it?
I'll give you a hint: there's a reason it's called a "corrective" facility.
Aha, so you mean we have prisons to correct criminal behavior? Well, that's the ideal, but it's not the reality. Compared to almost any 'alternative' form of punishment (councilling, electronic surveillance, etc), prison sentences result in a much higher rate of relapsing into criminal behavior.
Prison convicts are now expected to relapse. No-one takes notice. However, when repeat offenses are comitted by people given alternative treatments, the responsible politician unvariably gets labled 'soft on crime'. That's the political reality of the situation.
(It's rather difficult to explain the overall lower crime rates in west Europe, which is much 'softer' on crime. Or the fact that the USA still has so much crime, despite having the world's highest per capita incarceration rate. Source: International Center for Prison Studies)
Could you please direct me to the article of the constitution that grants immunity to 70 year old criminals?
It has nothing to do with immunity or the consitution, it has to do with the principles of justice though.
What was the reason we put people in jail, again?
Oh yeah, to protect society and to punish criminals. Let's see.. is this 70-year-old a danger to society? Hardly. Will he commit the same crime again? I doubt it.
Punishment, then? Well.. putting the guy in jail for any extended period is more or less a life sentence. Hardly warranted for a crime that didn't harm anyone, except financially, and even that's in a rather diffuse manner.
And there are plenty of ways to punish the guy without putting him in jail.
>We *should* be looking into efficient industrial-sized water electrolysis, or maybe some kind of thermolytic or photolytic process.
That's a great plan, except that the energy to do those things has to come from somewhere.
Well.. Solar Energy-->photolytic process is one environmentally popular option.
Now you could just use an existing solar cell and electrolytic process, and get a reasonable efficiency, but as always solar cells are expensive.
So what a lot of research is going into is making organic or biomolecules as a catalyst which can do the whole process for you in one step.
Personally, I'm enthusiastic about the bio-approach, e.g. engineering an enzyme (probably one of the photosynthesis ones) into a hydrogen gas producer. The benifit here is that you could then use existing biotech to make a bacteria who could mass-produce the catalyst for you.
Creating an organic-chemical catalyst is also possible, but the synthesis required to produce the catalyst might make it as cost-prohibitive as solar cells.
Also.. "you can't PROVE anything" is a terrible argument. You can you that against anything and everything, including itself.. (resulting in a nice paradox)
Now please either: Accept that nothing can be 'proven' and thus that there can be no knowledge of anything, that you don't know if the universe is really hear, or that we're not all really speaking spanish. OR: Accept that 'proof' simply means 'with a miniscule degree of uncertainty'.
Just what I've always wanted, the unscientific* and unreliable results of traditional polygraphy, only in portable form!!
Where do I sign up?
(Oh, sorry.. there is research that has PROVEN the polygraph to have 50% accuracy rate.. ranking it right up there with the 'other' lie detector: A coin with the word 'truth' on one side and 'lie' on the other!)
They are using keys that sound big 168 bits, 256 bits, etc. But those aren't really that big, only 21 bytes and 32 bytes respectively. These sentences are longer than those keys.
So? 2^64 is a big number, about 18,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Assume your computer can hash and test a billion passwords a second. It'll take you 584 years to test all combinations, a little less than three centuries on average.
Even the worst users out there change their passwords more often than THAT.
Please allow me to introduce myself I'm an OS of wealth and taste I've been around for a long, long year Stole many a man's soul and faith
And I was 'round when Gary Kildall Had his moment of doubt and pain Made damn sure that Bill Gates Washed his hands and sealed his fate
Pleased to meet you Hope you guess my name But what's puzzling you Is the nature of my game
I stuck around Digital When I saw it was a time for a change Killed VMS and its decendents The VAXen screamed in vain
I rode my way through USLs day when the lawsuit raged and the licenses stank
Hope you guess my name, oh yeah Ah, what's puzzling you Is the nature of my game, oh yeah
I watched with glee While your kings and queens Fought for ten decades For the OSes they made I shouted out, Who killed System V? When after all It was you and me
It's not a big problem, since in most OSS projects, the individual programmer usually retains copyright on the parts he wrote.
So, if he/she submits code that he/she does not have rights to, it is they who are liable, not the entire project.
This could be contrasted against a newspaper or magazine, where the contributing writers do not retain their copyright. That's why the newspaper is liable if a story turns out to be plagiarized.
(Note that in both cases, end users/subscribers are not liable, unlike what SCO seems to think)
Some OSS projects, like GNU and Apache, require you to sign over copyrights, like with newspapers, this makes them liable.
But at the same time, copyright releases usually entail that you agree that your work is original, thus giving them the ability to seek damages against you if you weren't truthful.
They did have to disclose to IBM. But IBM now have to plough through whats been disclosed..
Well, according to the litigous bastards themselves, they've handed over "60 pages" to IBM.
That seems to imply that 60 pages 70 of info, and given that the court ordered them to specify files, lines of code, ownership and a LOT of other information.. I'd be suprized to see much in there. It's hardly "millions of lines of code" by any stretch of the imagination. Or at least not "with specificity" (as the court ordered)
Right, but it does not mean they have to stay with that very same gameplay for the rest of the studio's life, does it ? Actually is does sound like it is their plan.
Welcome to the business world. Small businesses have little to lose and are prepared to take risks. Big businesses are far more conservative.
ID isn't a 5-developer company anymore, they've got a board of directors, investors and whatnot to take into consideration.
Look around.. It's the same everywhere: Small record labels vs. the Big Five. Movie studios, (Remember when Miramax produced innovative films?) TV-channels (FOX was still a new network when "The Simpsons" started, but more recently "South Park" was picked up only by the much smaller Comedy Central)
You're missing a negation, this amendment was to the "Excluded assets" part of the deal.
So all copyrights and trandemarks are EXCLUDED from the deal, except the copyrights they need to exersise their rights.. It's a double negation, as if it wasn't difficult enough to interpret anyway.
It's the "aquisition" part that's difficult. It's clear the agreement wasn't to give SCO all of UNIX. (For instance, SCO gets 5% on SysV royalties, Novell 95%.. )
As much as I'd like Novell to be right, it really isn't clear-cut at all who owns the Unix copyrights.
The original Asset purchase agreement does not give SCO any copyrights, but amendment 2 to the deal raises questions. SCO says this gives them copyrights, Novell disagrees.
What does the amendment say? The section on assets excluded from the deal is: All copyrights and trademarks, except for the copyrights and trademarks owned by Novell as of the date of the Agreement required for SCO to exercise its rights with respect to the acquisition of UNIX and UnixWare technologies.
So, skipping the double-negation and some of the blaha, the deal includes: [Novell] copyrights and trademarks [..] required for SCO to exercise its rights with respect to the acquisition of UNIX
So it really hinges on what is meant by "required with respect to the acquisition".
SCO says this means everything.
Novells interpretation is that SCO must demonstrate a requirement of these copyrights for them to be transferred. Patent rights, which SCO have made claims to (in court documents!) were definetly not transferred. That is explicit in the deal (and the amendments don't change that)
Given, reading the documents, the intent of the deal does not to appear to be to give SCO all rights to UNIX. But it's difficult to say.
Since this is a matter of interpretation, and SCOs whole case against IBM is built on this ownership, it's unlikely that they'll ever accept Novells ownership of copyright. It's also unlikely that they'll sue Novell, they're busy enough litigating as it is. (even if they seem to want more)
I think we all know Novell will have to bring suit to resolve this. The question is if they will, seing that it's not a clear-cut win, and they really don't have much to win on it either. (If Unix had had value as a product, we wouldn't have had this mess to begin with)
This is not really an "SCO approach" type thing, because unlike SCO, they do have a leg to stand on. (Given the validity and applicability of their patent)
To begin with, unlike SCO, we know what the supposed infringement IS.
The SCO case is about breach of contract. Although the "going after end-users" the managment keeps spouting out is about copyright. That is ludicrous.. end users have no liability in such a case, since they did not commit the infringement. (much like a magazine subscriber is not liable if the magazine prints a plagarized story)
In patent cases, this is different. Noone has the right to use patented technology without licence. There is such a thing as contributory infringement concerning patents, which means that you can be liable even if you didn't commit the actual patent infringement.
On the other hand, going after consumers is a bad idea. Not only PR-wise, but there are also laws in place to protect the consumer. So that's very unlikely. Also, there's no money in sueing private OSS developers.
Anyway, there are a few options here:
They back down and pay for a license
They get lawyers and try to get the the patent invalidated in court
If 2 fails, you can either:
Pay for a license
'Break' the patent, find a workaround with the same functionality which isn't covered by the patent.
Slashdot Mirror
The "public domain" refers to copyrights. As far as I'm aware, there is no similiar concept for patents, except for just agreeing to not enforce it (which, of course, is no protection, since you can change your mind any time you want).
True. But what you can do is sign over the patent to someone who can be trusted never to enforce it.. The FSF for example.
IBM has in fact already done so on occasion. They contributed code to linux which was covered by one of their patents, when this was pointed out IBM solve the issue by signing the patent over to Linus Torvalds.
They've NEVER (in the long run) been beneficial to workers OR employers.
Sweden has something like 90% unionized workers. They also have 5 weeks of paid vacation.
The USA has less than 15% unionization, they have 2 weeks of paid vacation.
I think most workers would prefer the former.
Say whatever you want about employer conditions, but Sweden hasn't exactly degenerated into a third-world nation, has it?
I'll give you a hint: there's a reason it's called a "corrective" facility.
Aha, so you mean we have prisons to correct criminal behavior?
Well, that's the ideal, but it's not the reality. Compared to almost any 'alternative' form of punishment (councilling, electronic surveillance, etc), prison sentences result in a much higher rate of relapsing into criminal behavior.
Prison convicts are now expected to relapse. No-one takes notice.
However, when repeat offenses are comitted by people given alternative treatments, the responsible politician unvariably gets labled 'soft on crime'.
That's the political reality of the situation.
(It's rather difficult to explain the overall lower crime rates in west Europe, which is much 'softer' on crime. Or the fact that the USA still has so much crime, despite having the world's highest per capita incarceration rate.
Source: International Center for Prison Studies)
You do not put people in prisons to protect society, nor to punish them. It is a common misconception, however it is wrong.
You don't spend a word on explaining HOW it is wrong, or what the correct reasons are?
That makes no sense. This is a democracy, the 'common' perception of why the government does things IS the reason why the government does things.
Could you please direct me to the article of the constitution that grants immunity to 70 year old criminals?
It has nothing to do with immunity or the consitution, it has to do with the principles of justice though.
What was the reason we put people in jail, again?
Oh yeah, to protect society and to punish criminals.
Let's see.. is this 70-year-old a danger to society? Hardly. Will he commit the same crime again? I doubt it.
Punishment, then? Well.. putting the guy in jail for any extended period is more or less a life sentence. Hardly warranted for a crime that didn't harm anyone, except financially, and even that's in a rather diffuse manner.
And there are plenty of ways to punish the guy without putting him in jail.
>We *should* be looking into efficient industrial-sized water electrolysis, or maybe some kind of thermolytic or photolytic process.
That's a great plan, except that the energy to do those things has to come from somewhere.
Well.. Solar Energy-->photolytic process is one environmentally popular option.
Now you could just use an existing solar cell and electrolytic process, and get a reasonable efficiency, but as always solar cells are expensive.
So what a lot of research is going into is making organic or biomolecules as a catalyst which can do the whole process for you in one step.
Personally, I'm enthusiastic about the bio-approach, e.g. engineering an enzyme (probably one of the photosynthesis ones) into a hydrogen gas producer. The benifit here is that you could then use existing biotech to make a bacteria who could mass-produce the catalyst for you.
Creating an organic-chemical catalyst is also possible, but the synthesis required to produce the catalyst might make it as cost-prohibitive as solar cells.
A famous case is the discovery of the molecular structure of benzene by Friedrich August von Kekule after he had a dream about snakes whirling.
Famous, yes. But also generally regarded as apocryphal. It probably didn't happen.
Note the sarcastic tone in the first post?
Also.. "you can't PROVE anything" is a terrible argument.
You can you that against anything and everything, including itself.. (resulting in a nice paradox)
Now please either: Accept that nothing can be 'proven' and thus that there can be no knowledge of anything, that you don't know if the universe is really hear, or that we're not all really speaking spanish.
OR: Accept that 'proof' simply means 'with a miniscule degree of uncertainty'.
How about Scientific American?
I'd say they're as objective as you get, unless of course you believe in some kind of "science-conspiracy"..
Just what I've always wanted, the unscientific* and unreliable results of traditional polygraphy, only in portable form!!
Where do I sign up?
(Oh, sorry.. there is research that has PROVEN the polygraph to have 50% accuracy rate.. ranking it right up there with the 'other' lie detector: A coin with the word 'truth' on one side and 'lie' on the other!)
More importantly, this is not a copyright-protection device.
Just because the DMCA is bad doesn't mean it's a ban on all reverse engineering.
"Know your enemy" etc..
They are using keys that sound big 168 bits, 256 bits, etc. But those aren't really that big, only 21 bytes and 32 bytes respectively. These sentences are longer than those keys.
So?
2^64 is a big number, about 18,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Assume your computer can hash and test a billion passwords a second. It'll take you 584 years to test all combinations, a little less than three centuries on average.
Even the worst users out there change their passwords more often than THAT.
Just a flashback: Remember 1994?
Me and most of my friends were obsessed with several games at the time. Most notably the classics "Dune II" but also "Doom II".
Very similar. At least for someone with american prounciation.
I always ended up saying "dyone too" to emphasize the 'u'..
Anyway.. that's almost as similar as this case.. (in a different way though)
Yes, he has only given us the best, most stable, FREE OS in the world. My God!
Well, that's all good and well, but I think declaring him to be your God* is a bit much.
(*Actually, to parody a saying about Larry Ellison, the difference between God and Linus Torvalds is that Linus doesn't think he's god..)
Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm an OS of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man's soul and faith
And I was 'round when Gary Kildall
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that Bill Gates
Washed his hands and sealed his fate
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game
I stuck around Digital
When I saw it was a time for a change
Killed VMS and its decendents
The VAXen screamed in vain
I rode my way
through USLs day
when the lawsuit raged
and the licenses stank
Hope you guess my name, oh yeah
Ah, what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game, oh yeah
I watched with glee
While your kings and queens
Fought for ten decades
For the OSes they made
I shouted out,
Who killed System V?
When after all
It was you and me
etc... my apology to the Rolling Stones..
AT&T settled a dispute involving that code base.
Wrong. AFAIK, SysV was never part of the USL-BSDI case, because BSD was not based off SysV, but rather older Unices. (Editions 5-7 and 32V)
From what I've read, SysV is properly copyrighted.
It's not a big problem, since in most OSS projects, the individual programmer usually retains copyright on the parts he wrote.
So, if he/she submits code that he/she does not have rights to, it is they who are liable, not the entire project.
This could be contrasted against a newspaper or magazine, where the contributing writers do not retain their copyright. That's why the newspaper is liable if a story turns out to be plagiarized.
(Note that in both cases, end users/subscribers are not liable, unlike what SCO seems to think)
Some OSS projects, like GNU and Apache, require you to sign over copyrights, like with newspapers, this makes them liable.
But at the same time, copyright releases usually entail that you agree that your work is original, thus giving them the ability to seek damages against you if you weren't truthful.
They did have to disclose to IBM. But IBM now have to plough through whats been disclosed..
Well, according to the litigous bastards themselves, they've handed over "60 pages" to IBM.
That seems to imply that 60 pages 70 of info, and given that the court ordered them to specify files, lines of code, ownership and a LOT of other information.. I'd be suprized to see much in there.
It's hardly "millions of lines of code" by any stretch of the imagination. Or at least not "with specificity" (as the court ordered)
Right, but it does not mean they have to stay with that very same gameplay for the rest of the studio's life, does it ? Actually is does sound like it is their plan.
Welcome to the business world.
Small businesses have little to lose and are prepared to take risks.
Big businesses are far more conservative.
ID isn't a 5-developer company anymore, they've got a board of directors, investors and whatnot to take into consideration.
Look around.. It's the same everywhere: Small record labels vs. the Big Five. Movie studios, (Remember when Miramax produced innovative films?) TV-channels (FOX was still a new network when "The Simpsons" started, but more recently "South Park" was picked up only by the much smaller Comedy Central)
While researching the 'dambuster' bombs, they actually did quite the same thing, built a machine to sling discs to find the 'magic angle'.
So this isn't the first time it's been done.
Further, copyrights are contained in the list of excluded assets, and that list is not modified in any way by Amendment 2.
Wrong. That is exactly what is amended in section A of Amendment 2.
Thus Novells copyrights are NOT explicitly excluded (the patents are though). But it is open to interpetation (see other comments on this).
You're missing a negation, this amendment was to the "Excluded assets" part of the deal.
So all copyrights and trandemarks are EXCLUDED from the deal, except the copyrights they need to exersise their rights.. It's a double negation, as if it wasn't difficult enough to interpret anyway.
It's the "aquisition" part that's difficult. It's clear the agreement wasn't to give SCO all of UNIX.
(For instance, SCO gets 5% on SysV royalties, Novell 95%.. )
December 19, 2003, which means the 30 days is up about 90 minutes after I write this. Anybody know if it's actually happened?
Well, to begin with, that's closer to 20 days.
But apart from that, court order was issued on the 10th, but entered on the 12th, so the day you want to be looking forward to is Jan 11.
As much as I'd like Novell to be right, it really isn't clear-cut at all who owns the Unix copyrights.
The original Asset purchase agreement does not give SCO any copyrights, but amendment 2 to the deal raises questions. SCO says this gives them copyrights, Novell disagrees.
What does the amendment say?
The section on assets excluded from the deal is:
All copyrights and trademarks, except for the copyrights and trademarks owned by Novell as of the date of the Agreement required for SCO to exercise its rights with respect to the acquisition of UNIX and UnixWare technologies.
So, skipping the double-negation and some of the blaha, the deal includes:
[Novell] copyrights and trademarks [..] required for SCO to exercise its rights with respect to the acquisition of UNIX
So it really hinges on what is meant by "required with respect to the acquisition".
SCO says this means everything.
Novells interpretation is that SCO must demonstrate a requirement of these copyrights for them to be transferred. Patent rights, which SCO have made claims to (in court documents!) were definetly not transferred. That is explicit in the deal (and the amendments don't change that)
Given, reading the documents, the intent of the deal does not to appear to be to give SCO all rights to UNIX. But it's difficult to say.
Since this is a matter of interpretation, and SCOs whole case against IBM is built on this ownership, it's unlikely that they'll ever accept Novells ownership of copyright. It's also unlikely that they'll sue Novell, they're busy enough litigating as it is. (even if they seem to want more)
I think we all know Novell will have to bring suit to resolve this. The question is if they will, seing that it's not a clear-cut win, and they really don't have much to win on it either. (If Unix had had value as a product, we wouldn't have had this mess to begin with)
(Given the validity and applicability of their patent)
To begin with, unlike SCO, we know what the supposed infringement IS.
The SCO case is about breach of contract. Although the "going after end-users" the managment keeps spouting out is about copyright.
That is ludicrous.. end users have no liability in such a case, since they did not commit the infringement.
(much like a magazine subscriber is not liable if the magazine prints a plagarized story)
In patent cases, this is different. Noone has the right to use patented technology without licence. There is such a thing as contributory infringement concerning patents, which means that you can be liable even if you didn't commit the actual patent infringement.
On the other hand, going after consumers is a bad idea. Not only PR-wise, but there are also laws in place to protect the consumer. So that's very unlikely.
Also, there's no money in sueing private OSS developers.
Anyway, there are a few options here:
They back down and pay for a license
They get lawyers and try to get the the patent invalidated in court
If 2 fails, you can either:
Pay for a license
'Break' the patent, find a workaround with the same functionality which isn't covered by the patent.