Actually the GPL is a contract, which allows you to do things with a copyright work you would not otherwise be allowed to do. In exactly the same way that a publishing contract can allow a publisher who is not the copyright holder to publish a copyright work.
A minor can enter into a valid contract -- in exchange for necessities of life or otherwise -- but the courts will not *enforce* non-essential contracts pertaining to minors; or, as you accurately put it, such contracts aren't (legally) binding.
They're still valid contracts, however, so long as there is nothing incoherent or legally improper in the form and provisions of the contract. They are *valid but non-binding* contracts.
Not quite they are fully binding on any non minor party. Another way of putting it would be that in a dispute relating to such a contract the minor party can never been a defendant, they can however be a plaintiff.
Being a minor means he can't give anything away either, the IP would still belong to Apple.
Apple still own their IP. However they cannot force him to hand over (or licence) his IP. If he were both a US citizen and resident in the US then there would be little question that all of the IP was Apple's However since he appears to be neither, he may well enjoy full copyright protection on any code he contributed. Without either a licence or assignment of copyright Apple cannot use his code.
They seem to be deliberately screwing him rather than making arrangements like before (and screwing themselves... Finlay's a force to be reckoned with, he's put a lot of effort into OSX).
Which Apple now can't use without his permission anyway. British copyright law is subtly different from that in the US when it comes to "derived works", too.
and I mean that seriously. Why should Apple throw away any code this kid wrote?
Well one reason is that he is perfectly able to deny them any right to use it. If Apple had an agreement to give then a licence to use it, even to assign copyright to them then he can void that agreement.
I am not a lawyer either, but I can feel something wrong with your argument. Do you mean all sales to minors are void? If my 17 year old son popped four quarters into a soda machine and got a can (and drunk it), can I get the money back on the presumption that the information printed in the machine assumes an implicit contract, which is void due to his being a minor? After all, by putting the coins in the slot, you agree to the terms that one dollar will get you a soda can.
You can't get the money back because you were never a party to any contract in the first place... Also contracts of sale, especially if they involve "essentials" (food, drink, accomodation, education, etc) tend to be binding regardles of if a party is a minor or not. Also I doubt using this quirk of civil law for criminal acts such as theft and fraud would work as a defence.
The GNU license suffers the same age of accountability limitation. So, MS could use 18 year olds to circumvent the GPL and there'd be nothing a court could do, since the age of accountability (contract-wise) is 18 in the US.
Actually there is plenty a court could do. Since using GPL code without following the GPL is "copyright infringement" (or as the likes of Microsoft prefer to call it "software piracy"). The only way Microsoft could get off the hook here would be to sucessfully argue that copyright does not apply to software. Which would be a complete "foot shooting" exercise.
If thee was such a problem with contract how do they make movies with minor's in them. "With a contract"!!! Doh!!! They still have to pay the minor and the minor has to perform or... no money.....
Effectivly it's a case of such a contract cannot be used to force the actor to act (if they are a minor) if they change their mind (including half way through shooting) then it's a case of tough luck. However the contract is binding on any non minor party (a corporate or an adult). So if they do act and don't get paid a court will uphold their claim.
Therefore, a minor is not bound by, say, the GPL, to release the code he/she takes for a closed-source project. The licensing of copyright is tricky, to say the least, if he/she decides to violate the GPL...
AFAIK minors do not have special status when it comes to infringing copyright.
The problem is, if they ever had to enforce the terms a minor almost always has the right to "disaffirm" the contract.
"Almost always" means "unless there is a statute saying otherwise".
A contract entered into with a minor can give you a framework of the agreement, and the adult party is bound to it--but the minor may simply disaffirm the contract on the basis that he is a minor.
A corporate is always an "adult" in this context. Also if the minor does not disaffirm the contract they have full use of the civil courts to have in enforced or collect damages if it is breached.
Hmm, I wonder what the implications of this are for a minor buying--ahem, licensing a Microsoft product. Since they are minors they can disaffirm the "contract" entirely...
They can't disaffirm the contract of buying something since that's likely to be in the exceptions catagory. However unless Microsoft does a lot of lobbying software licences are unlikely to be...
In the United States at least this is something that comes up all the time. Child actors for example often have to enter into contracts with the studios producing their movies. I don't know how you would go about doing it in the UK, but here there is a legal process for becoming recognized as a legal adult. (Though it doesn't confer the right to vote, drive or drink, just the ability to enter into a binding contract AFAIK.)
In the UK a contract with a minor (with certain exceptions) can be terminated by the minor for any reason. But it is fully binding on any non minor party.
Why do you think that he is a US citizen? In fact, he seems to be British:
http://www.btinternet.com/~finlay.dobbie/ : (=British Telecom)
Well it is possible for a US citizen to be resident elsewhere. Though it's starting to sound more like someone in the US attempting to apply US law to someone who is not resident in the US and most likely isn't a US citizen. Back to the issue of application of national laws over the Internet. Who's law applies if you are accessing a computer in another country? a) that of the country where you physically b) that of where the machine you are accessing actually is c) that of where the machine you are accessing perports to be e.g. use of a country TLD, contains a catalogue with prices in one currency.
The first laws against child labor - restricting the number of hours and defining the conditions under which children could do factory work - were drafted in Victorian England. They were not drafted at the behest of the straw-man liberal democrats, but rather at the behest of the factory owners - or a subset of them - who were horrified at the prospect of a generation of children whose educations were cut short by the work they were performing.
Also could it possibly be that the factory owners didn't just need unskilled labour, were looking at things long term and didn't want to pay for the entire education of their workers if someone else was prepared to provide education.
If you're suggesting, rather, that the problem is that we have too many laws on the books, I'd agree with you wholeheartedly. That's a problem with the law, not lawyers per se.
But isn't part of the reason for this that many legislatures have a disproportionate number of lawyers amongst their members.
You need to install it as a network install. then run the install for each user and use the workstation option to install the users files.
Which is IMHO a bad practice for a number of reasons. Quite a few of the things it copies don't actually need to be copied, a few M does not sound a lot, but with a large number of users it can easily run into a lot of wasted disk space. Also it is quite trivial for unix and NT machines to pull such information as a user's realname out of their user database. I get the impression of a program originally designed for single user/stand alone use, where multi-user support was added at a late stage. Expecting end users to install software in any way is IMHO a very bad idea. End users should simply be able to run a program and have it work. If certain per user settings don't yet exist then sensible defaults should be used be used. Not an error message and certainly not a "techie screen". Also it should be as much as possible up to the system administrator (rather than the application programmer) to determine which settings should and shouldn't be end user configurable/alterable...
I doubt that. PDF is pretty much a write-only format, a bit like saving your document in JPEG format (well, not that bad - at least PDF is vector- and font-based).
I wonder how often.DOC files are sent out as email attachments (or wind up on webpages) where there is no need at all for the recipient to further edit them. Let alone that there is all sorts of fun involving.DOC files potentially containing information you may not want released.
The trouble is when you have users that use Word for a cappy replacement fror PageMaker, and Excell useres that treat the thing like a database.
The irony here is that Starwriter is probably a better subsitute for a DTP program than Word. Because it has all sorts of nice features for handling frames.
This is an anecdote about installing it. There was no mention of how it handles Office200/XP document importing and exporting. There was no mention on how stable it was. There was no mention of how well it integrates with the KDE or Gnome desktops, cut and paste, drag and drop. There was no mention on how it's usability has evolved.
Can anybody provide information or point to a reference that would delineate which of these new features can and cannot be found in the latest stable OpenOffice?
IIRC OpenOffice dosn't come with some clipart. But you can use the clipart from SO 5.2
It seems to me that the movie critic industry is all cynical.
In some ways it can be a good thing if reviewers of anything are somewhat cynical.
I've learned not to pay attention to reviews and criticism's just because movies that get crappy ratings always turn out ok or good, and movies with GREAT reviews most often turn out to be boring.
Sounds more like the professional reviwers being too much of a homogeneous group...
What would be the point of nuking the US before SDI was operational? We're still operating under MAD. If they were to launch a first strike now, they would only ensure their own destruction.
MAD only works against missile strikes since you have an identifiable enemy. What do you do if someone were to simply detonate nuclear weapons in a city? No launch detection or radar tracking letting you know exactly where the missiles came from and where they are going. (Useful for getting anyone like the US president either into a bunker or onto a plane heading away from the target as fast as possible.) If it actually happened now the US would probably immediatly bomb Bagdad, only question would be Minuteman or Trident? Wonder if anyone dislikes both the US and Iraq...
Any ballistic missle counter measure is very expensive, because its technology (primarily guidance, but everything must be of much higher quality, you just can't afford failures) must be much much better than that of a ballistic missle. Therefore in order to reach, oh say 50% effectiveness (that is 50% of deployed countermeasures successfully neutralize their targets) you must spend far, far more on your countermeasures to defeat the enemies attack, than the attacker has to spend on his missles. Think about it in terms of computers, the guidance chip in a nuke can be equivelant to about a 386 and still be able to perform quite well,
A 386 is probably overkill. The only thing a ballistic missile really needs to be able to cope with is the unevenness of the atmosphere as it reenters. Otherwise it's course is just a matter of newtonian physics. Also it is trivial to defeat such an anti missile system if you can smuggle weapons into your enemy's cities. This isn't viable with high explosive truck bombs since you need to get them very near to specific buildings.
By the way, the idea "that the US will forge closer ties with other nations" is fanciful; the US has gone so far out of its way to piss off every other nation on earth with its arrogance since the end of the Cold War that it can expect little help when it becomes just another one of the pack. What goes around comes around...
Couple of mistakes here.
1) This didn't start with the end of the cold war. Simply that without the cold war people started to notice that the US couldn't be "opposing the spread of communism" through their foreign policy. 2) They havn't quite managed to "piss off every other nation" (yet). The US can still rely on military help from the UK and Canadian governments (even if the people and the odd government minister think it's a bad idea.) Also Israel and the US will often stand together...
That's the problem with productive, increasingly wealthy nations... They have a tendency to demand more and more of what they earn as the price of growth. Maybe China will be able to continue to treat their people like the citizens of a third world country while requiring them to power a first world economy.
Wouldn't it make more sense for mainland China to attempt to copy Taiwan and Hong Kong?
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The GPL is not a contract.
Actually the GPL is a contract, which allows you to do things with a copyright work you would not otherwise be allowed to do. In exactly the same way that a publishing contract can allow a publisher who is not the copyright holder to publish a copyright work.
A minor can enter into a valid contract -- in exchange for necessities of life or otherwise -- but the courts will not *enforce* non-essential contracts pertaining to minors; or, as you accurately put it, such contracts aren't (legally) binding.
They're still valid contracts, however, so long as there is nothing incoherent or legally improper in the form and provisions of the contract. They are *valid but non-binding* contracts.
Not quite they are fully binding on any non minor party. Another way of putting it would be that in a dispute relating to such a contract the minor party can never been a defendant, they can however be a plaintiff.
Being a minor means he can't give anything away either, the IP would still belong to Apple.
Apple still own their IP. However they cannot force him to hand over (or licence) his IP.
If he were both a US citizen and resident in the US then there would be little question that all of the IP was Apple's
However since he appears to be neither, he may well enjoy full copyright protection on any code he contributed. Without either a licence or assignment of copyright Apple cannot use his code.
They seem to be deliberately screwing him rather than making arrangements like before (and screwing themselves... Finlay's a force to be reckoned with, he's put a lot of effort into OSX).
Which Apple now can't use without his permission anyway. British copyright law is subtly different from that in the US when it comes to "derived works", too.
and I mean that seriously. Why should Apple throw away any code this kid wrote?
Well one reason is that he is perfectly able to deny them any right to use it. If Apple had an agreement to give then a licence to use it, even to assign copyright to them then he can void that agreement.
I am not a lawyer either, but I can feel something wrong with your argument. Do you mean all sales to minors are void? If my 17 year old son popped four quarters into a soda machine and got a can (and drunk it), can I get the money back on the presumption that the information printed in the machine assumes an implicit contract, which is void due to his being a minor? After all, by putting the coins in the slot, you agree to the terms that one dollar will get you a soda can.
You can't get the money back because you were never a party to any contract in the first place...
Also contracts of sale, especially if they involve "essentials" (food, drink, accomodation, education, etc) tend to be binding regardles of if a party is a minor or not.
Also I doubt using this quirk of civil law for criminal acts such as theft and fraud would work as a defence.
The GNU license suffers the same age of accountability limitation. So, MS could use 18 year olds to circumvent the GPL and there'd be nothing a court could do, since the age of accountability (contract-wise) is 18 in the US.
Actually there is plenty a court could do. Since using GPL code without following the GPL is "copyright infringement" (or as the likes of Microsoft prefer to call it "software piracy"). The only way Microsoft could get off the hook here would be to sucessfully argue that copyright does not apply to software. Which would be a complete "foot shooting" exercise.
If thee was such a problem with contract how do they make movies with minor's in them. "With a contract"!!! Doh!!! They still have to pay the minor and the minor has to perform or... no money.....
Effectivly it's a case of such a contract cannot be used to force the actor to act (if they are a minor) if they change their mind (including half way through shooting) then it's a case of tough luck. However the contract is binding on any non minor party (a corporate or an adult). So if they do act and don't get paid a court will uphold their claim.
Therefore, a minor is not bound by, say, the GPL, to release the code he/she takes for a closed-source project. The licensing of copyright is tricky, to say the least, if he/she decides to violate the GPL...
AFAIK minors do not have special status when it comes to infringing copyright.
The problem is, if they ever had to enforce the terms a minor almost always has the right to "disaffirm" the contract.
"Almost always" means "unless there is a statute saying otherwise".
A contract entered into with a minor can give you a framework of the agreement, and the adult party is bound to it--but the minor may simply disaffirm the contract on the basis that he is a minor.
A corporate is always an "adult" in this context. Also if the minor does not disaffirm the contract they have full use of the civil courts to have in enforced or collect damages if it is breached.
Hmm, I wonder what the implications of this are for a minor buying--ahem, licensing a Microsoft product. Since they are minors they can disaffirm the "contract" entirely...
They can't disaffirm the contract of buying something since that's likely to be in the exceptions catagory. However unless Microsoft does a lot of lobbying software licences are unlikely to be...
In the United States at least this is something that comes up all the time. Child actors for example often have to enter into contracts with the studios producing their movies. I don't know how you would go about doing it in the UK, but here there is a legal process for becoming recognized as a legal adult. (Though it doesn't confer the right to vote, drive or drink, just the ability to enter into a binding contract AFAIK.)
In the UK a contract with a minor (with certain exceptions) can be terminated by the minor for any reason. But it is fully binding on any non minor party.
Why do you think that he is a US citizen? In fact, he seems to be British:
http://www.btinternet.com/~finlay.dobbie/ : (=British Telecom)
Well it is possible for a US citizen to be resident elsewhere. Though it's starting to sound more like someone in the US attempting to apply US law to someone who is not resident in the US and most likely isn't a US citizen.
Back to the issue of application of national laws over the Internet. Who's law applies if you are accessing a computer in another country?
a) that of the country where you physically
b) that of where the machine you are accessing actually is
c) that of where the machine you are accessing perports to be e.g. use of a country TLD, contains a catalogue with prices in one currency.
The first laws against child labor - restricting the number of hours and defining the conditions under which children could do factory work - were drafted in Victorian England. They were not drafted at the behest of the straw-man liberal democrats, but rather at the behest of the factory owners - or a subset of them - who were horrified at the prospect of a generation of children whose educations were cut short by the work they were performing.
Also could it possibly be that the factory owners didn't just need unskilled labour, were looking at things long term and didn't want to pay for the entire education of their workers if someone else was prepared to provide education.
If you're suggesting, rather, that the problem is that we have too many laws on the books, I'd agree with you wholeheartedly. That's a problem with the law, not lawyers per se.
But isn't part of the reason for this that many legislatures have a disproportionate number of lawyers amongst their members.
You need to install it as a network install. then run the install for each user and use the workstation option to install the users files.
Which is IMHO a bad practice for a number of reasons. Quite a few of the things it copies don't actually need to be copied, a few M does not sound a lot, but with a large number of users it can easily run into a lot of wasted disk space. Also it is quite trivial for unix and NT machines to pull such information as a user's realname out of their user database.
I get the impression of a program originally designed for single user/stand alone use, where multi-user support was added at a late stage. Expecting end users to install software in any way is IMHO a very bad idea. End users should simply be able to run a program and have it work. If certain per user settings don't yet exist then sensible defaults should be used be used. Not an error message and certainly not a "techie screen". Also it should be as much as possible up to the system administrator (rather than the application programmer) to determine which settings should and shouldn't be end user configurable/alterable...
I doubt that. PDF is pretty much a write-only format, a bit like saving your document in JPEG format (well, not that bad - at least PDF is vector- and font-based).
.DOC files are sent out as email attachments (or wind up on webpages) where there is no need at all for the recipient to further edit them. Let alone that there is all sorts of fun involving .DOC files potentially containing information you may not want released.
I wonder how often
The trouble is when you have users that use Word for a cappy replacement fror PageMaker, and Excell useres that treat the thing like a database.
The irony here is that Starwriter is probably a better subsitute for a DTP program than Word. Because it has all sorts of nice features for handling frames.
This is an anecdote about installing it. There was no mention of how it handles Office200/XP document importing and exporting. There was no mention on how stable it was. There was no mention of how well it integrates with the KDE or Gnome desktops, cut and paste, drag and drop. There was no mention on how it's usability has evolved.
Or even comparing Open Office and Star Office...
Can anybody provide information or point to a reference that would delineate which of these new features can and cannot be found in the latest stable OpenOffice?
IIRC OpenOffice dosn't come with some clipart. But you can use the clipart from SO 5.2
I think North American DVDs have so many French tracks due to Canada. There are only 2 main languages in region 1. In Europe there are dozens.
There would be at least 3. Plenty of Spanish speaking Americans, especially in the West and around the Carribean coast.
It seems to me that the movie critic industry is all cynical.
In some ways it can be a good thing if reviewers of anything are somewhat cynical.
I've learned not to pay attention to reviews and criticism's just because movies that get crappy ratings always turn out ok or good, and movies with GREAT reviews most often turn out to be boring.
Sounds more like the professional reviwers being too much of a homogeneous group...
What would be the point of nuking the US before SDI was operational? We're still operating under MAD. If they were to launch a first strike now, they would only ensure their own destruction.
MAD only works against missile strikes since you have an identifiable enemy. What do you do if someone were to simply detonate nuclear weapons in a city? No launch detection or radar tracking letting you know exactly where the missiles came from and where they are going. (Useful for getting anyone like the US president either into a bunker or onto a plane heading away from the target as fast as possible.)
If it actually happened now the US would probably immediatly bomb Bagdad, only question would be Minuteman or Trident? Wonder if anyone dislikes both the US and Iraq...
Any ballistic missle counter measure is very expensive, because its technology (primarily guidance, but everything must be of much higher quality, you just can't afford failures) must be much much better than that of a ballistic missle. Therefore in order to reach, oh say 50% effectiveness (that is 50% of deployed countermeasures successfully neutralize their targets) you must spend far, far more on your countermeasures to defeat the enemies attack, than the attacker has to spend on his missles. Think about it in terms of computers, the guidance chip in a nuke can be equivelant to about a 386 and still be able to perform quite well,
A 386 is probably overkill. The only thing a ballistic missile really needs to be able to cope with is the unevenness of the atmosphere as it reenters. Otherwise it's course is just a matter of newtonian physics.
Also it is trivial to defeat such an anti missile system if you can smuggle weapons into your enemy's cities. This isn't viable with high explosive truck bombs since you need to get them very near to specific buildings.
By the way, the idea "that the US will forge closer ties with other nations" is fanciful; the US has gone so far out of its way to piss off every other nation on earth with its arrogance since the end of the Cold War that it can expect little help when it becomes just another one of the pack. What goes around comes around...
Couple of mistakes here.
1) This didn't start with the end of the cold war. Simply that without the cold war people started to notice that the US couldn't be "opposing the spread of communism" through their foreign policy.
2) They havn't quite managed to "piss off every other nation" (yet). The US can still rely on military help from the UK and Canadian governments (even if the people and the odd government minister think it's a bad idea.) Also Israel and the US will often stand together...
That's the problem with productive, increasingly wealthy nations... They have a tendency to demand more and more of what they earn as the price of growth. Maybe China will be able to continue to treat their people like the citizens of a third world country while requiring them to power a first world economy.
Wouldn't it make more sense for mainland China to attempt to copy Taiwan and Hong Kong?