Software piracy is a way to make an honest living. Piracy isn't inherently wrong. The US only granted copyrights to US authors for an exceptionally long time -- thus we wound up pirating the works of Dickens, who was really pissed off about this state of affairs.
Copyrights should only be granted if the country granting them, or recognizing those granted elsewhere, finds it to be in the best interests of THAT country.
Thus there is a very strong argument that developing nations should not have copyrights or patents -- it allows them to rapidly improve their state of living to the point where they can afford such luxuries as IP law.
Why should someone in Asia give a rat's ass about Americans? What's in it for _them_?
Hell, that's the fundemental copyright question right there -- why should the public of any country give a rat's ass about even their local authors and inventors? What's in it for the _public_?
How I wish that were so. But the 2600 Court didn't stop for a moment amid concerns that the DMCA impaired if not blocked decryption of works where no infringement would occur (as with classical examples of fair use, or public domain works).
There is much concern that the DMCA is effectively providing for copyright on uncopyrighted/able works, and in situations where copyright yields for various reasons. It is a law very much in need of challenging, if not repeal.
By which I absolutely do not mean to say that Windows is the best possible OS, or even tolerably good. I hate Windows with the burning passion of a hundred suns. I find MS's business practices deplorable. I don't even care for the poor values in the Windows developer culture.
The problem is a lack of superior alternatives. I'm only using this thing by default, after all.
I used to use MacOS until pretty recently. It had a lot of heart. But it was also a very old design and was honestly at its peak in the early 90's. Apple should have pursued Taligent and replaced it by 1994 with something heads and shoulders better.
OS X is the devil. While it masquerades as a Mac, it embodies none of the values or design goals that were responsible for the Mac being as well-crafted as it was. Without this, OS X is turning out to be very poor indeed. It isn't significantly advancing the state of UI. In fact, in many areas it is regressing. Where there are Mac carryovers they are usually half-assed; they are the result of a cargo cult of imitators, just as happens with Windows and Unix. Largely they are dominated by NeXT, which was also never any good. (I speak from experience here -- looking slick isn't the same as actually being good, and NeXT is a master of form without substance)
Linux, and other Unices are popular here, but again, there's no dedication towards designing the entire OS and its attendant software around well-conceived and tested UI purposes. Without that, it's doomed to be bad. No one has ever delivered a good desktop Unix -- I don't think that it's really possible without so much work as to make it harder than it would've been to start from scratch with lessons learned and brand-new ideas to try.
I DESPERATELY want something new and better. But at this point in time, no one is interested in doing so. I'd switch to something else in a heartbeat if there were only something to switch to.
Now, on the other hand, I seem to recall a copyright restriction about the loss of copyright by the owner after x years. Now, x may be 20 or so, so the only roms that might fall under this category may be those from Atari (think the 2600), but seeing how a lot of the companies that made the 8-bit Nintendo games are now out of business, this particular clause may come in handy in finding "legal" roms, now or a few years down the road. But alas, IANAL....:(
I also am not a lawyer.
What you're thinking of is (in the US anyway) the constitutionally mandated copyright expiration date. Really the mandate is just that there is one -- there's some dispute as to if it also goes to when it happens.
Right now for a typical video game it'll probably be 95 years after it was published + any time needed to get to the nearest following New Year's. (I assume they're works for hire)
So for Pong, which was built in 1972 IIRC, we ought to be getting it into the public domain on Jan 1, 2068, if it was indeed copyrighted.
This is certainly a few years down the road. I wasn't born when Pong came out... and I'll be pretty impressed if I live long enough to play it in the public domain. This doesn't really sit well with me.
While we wait, let's all join in calling for a significant reduction in copyright's length and scope!
Re:OT - How many Roms are legal?
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MAME To Become GPL?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Ah -- actually we're both right.
The statute of limitations on CRIMINAL copyright infringement is 5 years; the statute of limitations on CIVIL copyright infringement is 3 years. 17 U.S.C. 507 (2002).
(I.e. the gov't has 5 years to get you, the actual copyright holder has only 3)
Thus, assuming there is no discovery rule (too lazy to check) you need only get away with it for a while. Once the clock runs out, welcome to The Perfect Crime. Population: you.
I don't recommend it. But this is almost exactly how adverse posession (aka squatter's rights) works.
No. U.S. Const. is the United States Constitution. U.S.C. is the United States Code, i.e. the main body of federal statutory law passed by Congress. The Law School at Cornell has an excellent web site with a copy of the U.S.C. there. Of course, a somewhat better resource is the U.S.C.A. (U.S.C. Annotated) which has various refrences to decisions interpreting the statutes.
Re:OT - How many Roms are legal?
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MAME To Become GPL?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Sure there is. Unless there's a discovery rule in play, the statute of limitations on copyright infringement is something like what, 2 years? 3?
It won't give you good title like adverse possession will, but it's basically the same thing if you don't plan to redistribute.
Incidentally, adverse possession also applies to physical objects, although then there typically is a discovery rule in play, IIRC.
Well, to me there is a big difference between an element of the prima face case, and a defense. Besides, what's wrong with semantics? If we're talking about law, bigger issues than this have hinged on finer points. Lawyers love arguing semantics.
In other words: - It is possible for a copyright owner to grant permission to cite a work on the condition of viral licensing, however this is not typical. - GPL'ed work is copyrighted and must be licensed virally.
So you see: the two cases are different. One is a subset of the other.
That one is a subset of the other doesn't make them different in a meaningful way for this analysis, however. Particularly as it should be noted that GPLed works are atypical anyway, and thus neatly fall within your 'not typical' language above.
Remember -- you said that using a work under the GPL was different than using the work "by permission or fair use." You have just admitted that that prior statement was wrong, by agreeing that the GPL is within the set of works used where "a copyright owner [grants] permission."
Whatever other differences there may be, I think we've resolved this point given how you offered it originally.
The point is that, just as in all the fair-use and anti-copyright rants on slashdot, the example you cite is an edge case rather than a typical one. The ethics of quoting a stolen manuscript are questionable to say the least.
No, that case is a typical one. Hell, it regularly appears in IP textbooks. Furthermore, it is a case that is AGAINST fair use -- Time was found to have infringed and was unable to offer a defense. Time _lost_.
As for ethics, this is a rare case where I would agree that ethical concerns are implicated. You're right; it was unethical. However in almost all copyright matters I find that infringers are acting ethically. This doesn't mean that I think they should uniformly get away with it, only that I base my position on utility, and not on ethics.
No, it's not the same. The difference is that when I publish an essay that quotes a copyrighted work, I still retain control of what others can do with the 90% of the essay that I still own. When I am forced to release my code under the GPL, I may be able to assemble a non-GPL'ed version, but the genie is already out of the bottle and I can't control what others do with my code anymore. This makes a huge difference to anyone who is still pursuing traditional software business models.
No, no....
When you publish an essay that quotes a copyrighted work, you have comitted infringement. If that infringement is not judicially resolvable, with permission, or defensible e.g. under fair use, then you're fine. If it is not, then you are liable for having done so and may wind up not being able to publish your work at all, depending on the precise specifics.
LIKEWISE, if you use GPLed code under, say, the auspices of fair use, you do not have to agree to the GPL in order to do so. If you can manage to do so in a way that cannot be pursued, you can avoid the GPL. If you do so with permission via a source other than the GPL e.g. parallel licensing from the copyright holder, you can avoid the GPL.
Only where you resort to obtaining permission VIA the GPL are you bound by the GPL.
Perhaps we need to strengthen fair use, or shorten copyright terms or something so that more alternatives to the GPL for any given GPLed work are available. I would not especially be against this if the proposal were well-crafted.
However, remember: no one made you have to seek out _that_ particular work, nor infringe upon it in the first place.
If GPLed software is that dangerous to you, and you are unable to use it by any other means, then I suggest that you simply don't use it.
Hardly anyone* runs around and says that they want to write their own version of Windows and that MS should be compelled to give them the source code so as to do this. No one would complain if MS required a huge cash payment to do so, or refused outright.
Why is GPLed software considered to be so special?
* n.b. that I actually think that we need to mandate source disclosure as a condition of copyright, but I have not seen very many people independently arrive at this conclusion, despite several people agreeing with me to one extent or another.
It seems that you didn't read my post that carefully, since I explictly stated "by permission or via fair use".
Well a) Fair use is a defense to infringement. In order to claim it you necessarily must have already infringed. b) The GPL does allow you to use existing material by permission. But where some people would only grant permission for a fee, or would grant it as a gift, authors of works released under the GPL grant it on condition that you do the same for your work. You might find the price too high, but the general notion of asking a price for permission is not, I think, being attacked by anyone.
Outside of the cases where 1) there is no infringement, 2) there would be an infringement but permission is given, or 3) there is an infringement but it is defensible -- my point stands. The use of even a small portion of someone else's work is infringement.
Check out the case with Gerald Ford's memoirs.
These fair-use/anti-copyright rants always seem to have a back story that is conveniently glossed over.
Uh... I cited the case with Ford's memoirs to point out just how little need be taken in order to constitute infringement. At no time during my post did I ever argue against copyright. In fact, if it's done properly, I'm very fond of copyright, and I believe that it can be of great benefit.
Let's say that I publish a scholarly essay in which I quote from another work without permission (under fair use). Then I later rewrite the essay as a novella, without using the quote. Are you saying that the author of the quote could somehow block publication of my novella? BS
No, because it is defensible. And if you wrote code that intermingled with GPLed code under, RATHER than the GPL, Fair Use instead, the situation would be the same. In fact, you wouldn't even need to remove the included code.
Ah, it seems that you're not really familiar with how we treat derivative works.
If you take even a very small amount of content from someone else and incorporate it into your own work, you cannot publish your work without infringing on the other person's copyright. You _may_ be able to seperate the two in your work, such that the new portion you created can be seperately published, but blocking copyrights can wind up being a significant PITA.
Check out the case with Gerald Ford's memoirs.
Short answer: you're basically wrong, the earlier poster is basically right.
Well, there's a lot of neat stuff in the.sigs, you know. What inspired you to block them? If it's merely bandwidth or something, running in lynx mode with aggressive filtering (e.g. Proxomitron) tends to work for me.
What, you didn't see my.sig? I am not a lawyer. I am deeply interested in law though, and I found myself discussing it enough that it just turned out easier to have it automatically on my posts.
But again -- IANAL. If you really want a legal opinion, go consult a lawyer licensed to practice in your area.
Sorry man, I doubt British rulings still apply to Canada, even if they happened before the BNA.
Heh. The ruling was made almost 80 years after the American Revolution, and yet it is still good law in the US.
You forget: precedent merely means that a case touches on the same subject and can be followed because it is convincing. BINDING precedent is of the type that must be followed because it comes down from a superior court.
In US students are taught mostly US cases, but also cases from other countries that follow the English Common Law tradition. Hell, Hadley itself cites Justice Storey, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Unless Canadian contract law has radically diverged from its roots, which I doubt, the case is still likely to apply. Besides, they likely didn't abandon their law upon the BNA. America did not, and pre-Revolution binding precedents are in fact still good unless since overridden. Property law refers back to a ton of old cases.
Cases involving loss of limb or life would likely fall under different rules....
Well duh. The limitation on remote damages rule from Hadley is from the law of CONTRACTS. The law of TORTS is totally different. But this is not a tort!
As I said, Hadley v. Baxendale, 9 Ex. 341 (1854) is basically the seminal holding on the subject. The plaintiffs had a mill in Gloucester. A crankshaft broke, and in order to get a new one, the millers had to ship the old one back to the engineers in Greenwich so that they could copy it in making the replacement.
The plaintiffs gave the crankshaft to the defendants, who were couriers. They said that it needed to be sent immediately. However, there was a mix-up and it wound up being rather late, obviously reducing the profit of the plaintiffs, since their mill was totally out of commission during this time.
BUT the defendants only had to pay damages as to the speed of the shipping, and not as to the lost profits. This is because while it was obvious to them that they needed to be fast because that's what the customer insisted on, it wasn't obvious WHY. There was no way that they could have known the full extent of the damages that would result, nor is it commonplace for couriers to know that if they are late delivering _a_ package that someone will lose a fortune as a consequence. That's only true with regards to certain _specific_ packages, or a business that _mostly_ carries critically important packages, such as organ couriers.
The case is even more clear cut here. While people _do_ conduct business over email, a very large quantity of email is spam or personal mail that does not harm people if there is a problem with the non-performing party to the service contract.
Unless the ISP was specifically informed that this PARTICULAR email was of the gravest importance BECAUSE it was worth many thousands of dollars, then they should be able to treat it as though it is any generic email and not worth special care. After all, how could they have possibly known? Are they mind-readers? No. It's unfair to punish them for something that's unforeseen.
If we adopted such a rule, then the possible liabilities of entering into a contract would be so high that we would discourage people from ever so doing, or from doing so affordably in the general case. This is because the party subject to the liability has to predict uncertain and perhaps uncontrollable matters, such as the liklihood of outages caused by someone in a different country running a backhoe through a major fiber line, DDOSes, email viruses, etc.
Since we would rather have lots of transactions occur, we default to the general case, and do not make parties subject to unusually high liabilities unless they are specifically forewarned of them, and can opt not to enter into a contract such as that, knowing the risk they're being asked to take.
It also impairs first sale rights. A copyright holder might be allowed to sell a copy to Alice for $10 and to Bob for $20, but there's no reason why Alice shouldn't be allowed to sell her copy to Bob for $15.
Sometimes. But not always. Pretty much everything we did during WW2 is declassified now. Eventually there won't be any danger for releasing secret information regarding what went on today.
Are you worried about people finding out about things fifty years from now? A hundred? Five hundred? A thousand?
There IS a cutoff point. It'll vary depending on the specifics involved, but eventually it happens.
Frankly, I think the government's purchasing requirements across the board should be altered such that they can only purchase public domain software. Having as much money as they do, they will continue to attract contractors willing to accept this as a condition, just as equally as if the government decided all of the software it purchased had to come on 8 inch floppies.
Copyright exists SOLELY to promote the progress of the arts by providing creators with an incentive to create in the form of a limitation on everyone else in what they can do with the work for a certain period, the general idea being that this satisfies quickly the public's desire for new works, and then will later satisfy the public's equal desire for freedom to do stuff with those works, including making new works from them. (phew)
The government needs no such incentive. Their incentive is proper governance. It is improper for them to get copyrights. And as long as they're spending our tax dollars on software, it should be of the greatest public benefit possible. This means the public domain.
Then anyone can use that software to do anything. Some people may create closed software, some open, but that's okay. Because it is FREE TO ALL.
If you want government to promote openess, which I agree with (I am a GPL supporter, though it is wholly inappropriate wrt government), a better way would be to require openess as a prerequisite for copyrighting a work! I.e. that MS could not get a copyright on the next Windows unless the source and enough comments to make it useful to people later, were put on file at the Library of Congress.
You couldn't immediately use that -- it is copyrighted -- but at least you could look at it and learn from it, in the same way that you can look and learn from a novel, or pretty much anything else that is copyrighted.
If even further openess is required, this would require even more significant changes to copyright law, but I think that it is generally acceptable for there to be an area of closedness if it doesn't present too significant an impairment to the promotion of the arts and sciences.
Well, the fact that that code is not released publically is TOTALLY seperate from whether or not it is public domain.
If a CIA spy sends a secret message to Langley, that message is in the public domain. The prohibition on its dissemination arises not out of copyright, but out of a need for national security in a First Amendment context.
No one is arguing against that, although I hope that eventually this stuff will get declassified when it's no longer important to keep it a secret.
Hollywood makes lots of great movies, and a lot of bad ones. But they've only been around for less than 100 years. They may simply be a short-lived 20th century phenomena, with other forms of entertainment eventually taking over.
Exactly -- But bear baiting will be around forever!
Sure, but the problem is that the design requirements of even that underlying code will need to be driven by UI demands. If you write a technically sweet filesystem that ignores UI concerns, it will tend to either suck for the user, require even more code to be added in to get it to work usably, or have to be scrapped and redone. E.g. having a filesystem that supports filenames instead of just having inodes that are GUID'd is a filesystem that has been at least in part written to accomodate interface.
Me, I find UI to be king. No one cares if good code or magical elves are making things work; it has to have a good UI. The best UIs appear to be those crafted by skilled UI designers that outrank the developers; they can give the developers an idea of what they want to be able to do, and let the latter group decide precisely how to best implement the UI group's wishes. They don't have autonomy, though.
Computers, and software, have to be developed from the outside in, is what it boils down to.
Actually, there was multitasking to a ridiculously limited extent in System 1.0, if you consider DA's.
But more realistically, there was _still_ multitasking earlier. MultiFinder was present in System 5.0 (remember that Apple's versioning was stupid until about 7.5.5), and Switcher was even earlier, though pretty poorly thought out in terms of UI.
Slashdot Mirror
Software piracy is a way to make an honest living. Piracy isn't inherently wrong. The US only granted copyrights to US authors for an exceptionally long time -- thus we wound up pirating the works of Dickens, who was really pissed off about this state of affairs.
Copyrights should only be granted if the country granting them, or recognizing those granted elsewhere, finds it to be in the best interests of THAT country.
Thus there is a very strong argument that developing nations should not have copyrights or patents -- it allows them to rapidly improve their state of living to the point where they can afford such luxuries as IP law.
Why should someone in Asia give a rat's ass about Americans? What's in it for _them_?
Hell, that's the fundemental copyright question right there -- why should the public of any country give a rat's ass about even their local authors and inventors? What's in it for the _public_?
How I wish that were so. But the 2600 Court didn't stop for a moment amid concerns that the DMCA impaired if not blocked decryption of works where no infringement would occur (as with classical examples of fair use, or public domain works).
There is much concern that the DMCA is effectively providing for copyright on uncopyrighted/able works, and in situations where copyright yields for various reasons. It is a law very much in need of challenging, if not repeal.
By which I absolutely do not mean to say that Windows is the best possible OS, or even tolerably good. I hate Windows with the burning passion of a hundred suns. I find MS's business practices deplorable. I don't even care for the poor values in the Windows developer culture.
The problem is a lack of superior alternatives. I'm only using this thing by default, after all.
I used to use MacOS until pretty recently. It had a lot of heart. But it was also a very old design and was honestly at its peak in the early 90's. Apple should have pursued Taligent and replaced it by 1994 with something heads and shoulders better.
OS X is the devil. While it masquerades as a Mac, it embodies none of the values or design goals that were responsible for the Mac being as well-crafted as it was. Without this, OS X is turning out to be very poor indeed. It isn't significantly advancing the state of UI. In fact, in many areas it is regressing. Where there are Mac carryovers they are usually half-assed; they are the result of a cargo cult of imitators, just as happens with Windows and Unix. Largely they are dominated by NeXT, which was also never any good. (I speak from experience here -- looking slick isn't the same as actually being good, and NeXT is a master of form without substance)
Linux, and other Unices are popular here, but again, there's no dedication towards designing the entire OS and its attendant software around well-conceived and tested UI purposes. Without that, it's doomed to be bad. No one has ever delivered a good desktop Unix -- I don't think that it's really possible without so much work as to make it harder than it would've been to start from scratch with lessons learned and brand-new ideas to try.
I DESPERATELY want something new and better. But at this point in time, no one is interested in doing so. I'd switch to something else in a heartbeat if there were only something to switch to.
Ah yes, like the two Harrison Fords. (really -- one was rather well known in the 20's)
Now, on the other hand, I seem to recall a copyright restriction about the loss of copyright by the owner after x years. Now, x may be 20 or so, so the only roms that might fall under this category may be those from Atari (think the 2600), but seeing how a lot of the companies that made the 8-bit Nintendo games are now out of business, this particular clause may come in handy in finding "legal" roms, now or a few years down the road. But alas, IANAL.... :(
I also am not a lawyer.
What you're thinking of is (in the US anyway) the constitutionally mandated copyright expiration date. Really the mandate is just that there is one -- there's some dispute as to if it also goes to when it happens.
Right now for a typical video game it'll probably be 95 years after it was published + any time needed to get to the nearest following New Year's. (I assume they're works for hire)
So for Pong, which was built in 1972 IIRC, we ought to be getting it into the public domain on Jan 1, 2068, if it was indeed copyrighted.
This is certainly a few years down the road. I wasn't born when Pong came out... and I'll be pretty impressed if I live long enough to play it in the public domain. This doesn't really sit well with me.
While we wait, let's all join in calling for a significant reduction in copyright's length and scope!
Ah -- actually we're both right.
The statute of limitations on CRIMINAL copyright infringement is 5 years; the statute of limitations on CIVIL copyright infringement is 3 years. 17 U.S.C. 507 (2002).
(I.e. the gov't has 5 years to get you, the actual copyright holder has only 3)
Thus, assuming there is no discovery rule (too lazy to check) you need only get away with it for a while. Once the clock runs out, welcome to The Perfect Crime. Population: you.
I don't recommend it. But this is almost exactly how adverse posession (aka squatter's rights) works.
No. U.S. Const. is the United States Constitution. U.S.C. is the United States Code, i.e. the main body of federal statutory law passed by Congress. The Law School at Cornell has an excellent web site with a copy of the U.S.C. there. Of course, a somewhat better resource is the U.S.C.A. (U.S.C. Annotated) which has various refrences to decisions interpreting the statutes.
Sure there is. Unless there's a discovery rule in play, the statute of limitations on copyright infringement is something like what, 2 years? 3?
It won't give you good title like adverse possession will, but it's basically the same thing if you don't plan to redistribute.
Incidentally, adverse possession also applies to physical objects, although then there typically is a discovery rule in play, IIRC.
I see you like to argue semantics
Well, to me there is a big difference between an element of the prima face case, and a defense. Besides, what's wrong with semantics? If we're talking about law, bigger issues than this have hinged on finer points. Lawyers love arguing semantics.
In other words:
- It is possible for a copyright owner to grant permission to cite a work on the condition of viral licensing, however this is not typical.
- GPL'ed work is copyrighted and must be licensed virally.
So you see: the two cases are different. One is a subset of the other.
That one is a subset of the other doesn't make them different in a meaningful way for this analysis, however. Particularly as it should be noted that GPLed works are atypical anyway, and thus neatly fall within your 'not typical' language above.
Remember -- you said that using a work under the GPL was different than using the work "by permission or fair use." You have just admitted that that prior statement was wrong, by agreeing that the GPL is within the set of works used where "a copyright owner [grants] permission."
Whatever other differences there may be, I think we've resolved this point given how you offered it originally.
The point is that, just as in all the fair-use and anti-copyright rants on slashdot, the example you cite is an edge case rather than a typical one. The ethics of quoting a stolen manuscript are questionable to say the least.
No, that case is a typical one. Hell, it regularly appears in IP textbooks. Furthermore, it is a case that is AGAINST fair use -- Time was found to have infringed and was unable to offer a defense. Time _lost_.
As for ethics, this is a rare case where I would agree that ethical concerns are implicated. You're right; it was unethical. However in almost all copyright matters I find that infringers are acting ethically. This doesn't mean that I think they should uniformly get away with it, only that I base my position on utility, and not on ethics.
No, it's not the same. The difference is that when I publish an essay that quotes a copyrighted work, I still retain control of what others can do with the 90% of the essay that I still own. When I am forced to release my code under the GPL, I may be able to assemble a non-GPL'ed version, but the genie is already out of the bottle and I can't control what others do with my code anymore. This makes a huge difference to anyone who is still pursuing traditional software business models.
No, no....
When you publish an essay that quotes a copyrighted work, you have comitted infringement. If that infringement is not judicially resolvable, with permission, or defensible e.g. under fair use, then you're fine. If it is not, then you are liable for having done so and may wind up not being able to publish your work at all, depending on the precise specifics.
LIKEWISE, if you use GPLed code under, say, the auspices of fair use, you do not have to agree to the GPL in order to do so. If you can manage to do so in a way that cannot be pursued, you can avoid the GPL. If you do so with permission via a source other than the GPL e.g. parallel licensing from the copyright holder, you can avoid the GPL.
Only where you resort to obtaining permission VIA the GPL are you bound by the GPL.
Perhaps we need to strengthen fair use, or shorten copyright terms or something so that more alternatives to the GPL for any given GPLed work are available. I would not especially be against this if the proposal were well-crafted.
However, remember: no one made you have to seek out _that_ particular work, nor infringe upon it in the first place.
If GPLed software is that dangerous to you, and you are unable to use it by any other means, then I suggest that you simply don't use it.
Hardly anyone* runs around and says that they want to write their own version of Windows and that MS should be compelled to give them the source code so as to do this. No one would complain if MS required a huge cash payment to do so, or refused outright.
Why is GPLed software considered to be so special?
* n.b. that I actually think that we need to mandate source disclosure as a condition of copyright, but I have not seen very many people independently arrive at this conclusion, despite several people agreeing with me to one extent or another.
It seems that you didn't read my post that carefully, since I explictly stated "by permission or via fair use".
Well a) Fair use is a defense to infringement. In order to claim it you necessarily must have already infringed. b) The GPL does allow you to use existing material by permission. But where some people would only grant permission for a fee, or would grant it as a gift, authors of works released under the GPL grant it on condition that you do the same for your work. You might find the price too high, but the general notion of asking a price for permission is not, I think, being attacked by anyone.
Outside of the cases where 1) there is no infringement, 2) there would be an infringement but permission is given, or 3) there is an infringement but it is defensible -- my point stands. The use of even a small portion of someone else's work is infringement.
Check out the case with Gerald Ford's memoirs.
These fair-use/anti-copyright rants always seem to have a back story that is conveniently glossed over.
Uh... I cited the case with Ford's memoirs to point out just how little need be taken in order to constitute infringement. At no time during my post did I ever argue against copyright. In fact, if it's done properly, I'm very fond of copyright, and I believe that it can be of great benefit.
Let's say that I publish a scholarly essay in which I quote from another work without permission (under fair use). Then I later rewrite the essay as a novella, without using the quote. Are you saying that the author of the quote could somehow block publication of my novella? BS
No, because it is defensible. And if you wrote code that intermingled with GPLed code under, RATHER than the GPL, Fair Use instead, the situation would be the same. In fact, you wouldn't even need to remove the included code.
Ah, it seems that you're not really familiar with how we treat derivative works.
If you take even a very small amount of content from someone else and incorporate it into your own work, you cannot publish your work without infringing on the other person's copyright. You _may_ be able to seperate the two in your work, such that the new portion you created can be seperately published, but blocking copyrights can wind up being a significant PITA.
Check out the case with Gerald Ford's memoirs.
Short answer: you're basically wrong, the earlier poster is basically right.
Well, there's a lot of neat stuff in the .sigs, you know. What inspired you to block them? If it's merely bandwidth or something, running in lynx mode with aggressive filtering (e.g. Proxomitron) tends to work for me.
What, you didn't see my .sig? I am not a lawyer. I am deeply interested in law though, and I found myself discussing it enough that it just turned out easier to have it automatically on my posts.
But again -- IANAL. If you really want a legal opinion, go consult a lawyer licensed to practice in your area.
Don't sweat it. Torts are a part of civil law. They might've been mentioned in criminology, but I'd imagine that's mostly concerned with criminal law.
Sorry man, I doubt British rulings still apply to Canada, even if they happened before the BNA.
Heh. The ruling was made almost 80 years after the American Revolution, and yet it is still good law in the US.
You forget: precedent merely means that a case touches on the same subject and can be followed because it is convincing. BINDING precedent is of the type that must be followed because it comes down from a superior court.
In US students are taught mostly US cases, but also cases from other countries that follow the English Common Law tradition. Hell, Hadley itself cites Justice Storey, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Unless Canadian contract law has radically diverged from its roots, which I doubt, the case is still likely to apply. Besides, they likely didn't abandon their law upon the BNA. America did not, and pre-Revolution binding precedents are in fact still good unless since overridden. Property law refers back to a ton of old cases.
Cases involving loss of limb or life would likely fall under different rules....
Well duh. The limitation on remote damages rule from Hadley is from the law of CONTRACTS. The law of TORTS is totally different. But this is not a tort!
No, it is.
As I said, Hadley v. Baxendale, 9 Ex. 341 (1854) is basically the seminal holding on the subject. The plaintiffs had a mill in Gloucester. A crankshaft broke, and in order to get a new one, the millers had to ship the old one back to the engineers in Greenwich so that they could copy it in making the replacement.
The plaintiffs gave the crankshaft to the defendants, who were couriers. They said that it needed to be sent immediately. However, there was a mix-up and it wound up being rather late, obviously reducing the profit of the plaintiffs, since their mill was totally out of commission during this time.
BUT the defendants only had to pay damages as to the speed of the shipping, and not as to the lost profits. This is because while it was obvious to them that they needed to be fast because that's what the customer insisted on, it wasn't obvious WHY. There was no way that they could have known the full extent of the damages that would result, nor is it commonplace for couriers to know that if they are late delivering _a_ package that someone will lose a fortune as a consequence. That's only true with regards to certain _specific_ packages, or a business that _mostly_ carries critically important packages, such as organ couriers.
The case is even more clear cut here. While people _do_ conduct business over email, a very large quantity of email is spam or personal mail that does not harm people if there is a problem with the non-performing party to the service contract.
Unless the ISP was specifically informed that this PARTICULAR email was of the gravest importance BECAUSE it was worth many thousands of dollars, then they should be able to treat it as though it is any generic email and not worth special care. After all, how could they have possibly known? Are they mind-readers? No. It's unfair to punish them for something that's unforeseen.
If we adopted such a rule, then the possible liabilities of entering into a contract would be so high that we would discourage people from ever so doing, or from doing so affordably in the general case. This is because the party subject to the liability has to predict uncertain and perhaps uncontrollable matters, such as the liklihood of outages caused by someone in a different country running a backhoe through a major fiber line, DDOSes, email viruses, etc.
Since we would rather have lots of transactions occur, we default to the general case, and do not make parties subject to unusually high liabilities unless they are specifically forewarned of them, and can opt not to enter into a contract such as that, knowing the risk they're being asked to take.
Christ. Aren't you forgetting Hadley v. Baxendale? Even if you breach, you do not owe unforeseeable damages.
This amply qualifies. The ISP owes here whatever the cost of a replacement ISP would've been. That's it.
That IS NOT a EULA. It is merely a quick and not wholly accurate restatement of applicable copyright law.
Of course, even software EULA's are of debatable enforcability.
It also impairs first sale rights. A copyright holder might be allowed to sell a copy to Alice for $10 and to Bob for $20, but there's no reason why Alice shouldn't be allowed to sell her copy to Bob for $15.
Sometimes. But not always. Pretty much everything we did during WW2 is declassified now. Eventually there won't be any danger for releasing secret information regarding what went on today.
Are you worried about people finding out about things fifty years from now? A hundred? Five hundred? A thousand?
There IS a cutoff point. It'll vary depending on the specifics involved, but eventually it happens.
Frankly, I think the government's purchasing requirements across the board should be altered such that they can only purchase public domain software. Having as much money as they do, they will continue to attract contractors willing to accept this as a condition, just as equally as if the government decided all of the software it purchased had to come on 8 inch floppies.
Copyright exists SOLELY to promote the progress of the arts by providing creators with an incentive to create in the form of a limitation on everyone else in what they can do with the work for a certain period, the general idea being that this satisfies quickly the public's desire for new works, and then will later satisfy the public's equal desire for freedom to do stuff with those works, including making new works from them. (phew)
The government needs no such incentive. Their incentive is proper governance. It is improper for them to get copyrights. And as long as they're spending our tax dollars on software, it should be of the greatest public benefit possible. This means the public domain.
Then anyone can use that software to do anything. Some people may create closed software, some open, but that's okay. Because it is FREE TO ALL.
If you want government to promote openess, which I agree with (I am a GPL supporter, though it is wholly inappropriate wrt government), a better way would be to require openess as a prerequisite for copyrighting a work! I.e. that MS could not get a copyright on the next Windows unless the source and enough comments to make it useful to people later, were put on file at the Library of Congress.
You couldn't immediately use that -- it is copyrighted -- but at least you could look at it and learn from it, in the same way that you can look and learn from a novel, or pretty much anything else that is copyrighted.
If even further openess is required, this would require even more significant changes to copyright law, but I think that it is generally acceptable for there to be an area of closedness if it doesn't present too significant an impairment to the promotion of the arts and sciences.
Well, the fact that that code is not released publically is TOTALLY seperate from whether or not it is public domain.
If a CIA spy sends a secret message to Langley, that message is in the public domain. The prohibition on its dissemination arises not out of copyright, but out of a need for national security in a First Amendment context.
No one is arguing against that, although I hope that eventually this stuff will get declassified when it's no longer important to keep it a secret.
Exactly -- But bear baiting will be around forever!
Sure, but the problem is that the design requirements of even that underlying code will need to be driven by UI demands. If you write a technically sweet filesystem that ignores UI concerns, it will tend to either suck for the user, require even more code to be added in to get it to work usably, or have to be scrapped and redone. E.g. having a filesystem that supports filenames instead of just having inodes that are GUID'd is a filesystem that has been at least in part written to accomodate interface.
Me, I find UI to be king. No one cares if good code or magical elves are making things work; it has to have a good UI. The best UIs appear to be those crafted by skilled UI designers that outrank the developers; they can give the developers an idea of what they want to be able to do, and let the latter group decide precisely how to best implement the UI group's wishes. They don't have autonomy, though.
Computers, and software, have to be developed from the outside in, is what it boils down to.
Actually, there was multitasking to a ridiculously limited extent in System 1.0, if you consider DA's.
But more realistically, there was _still_ multitasking earlier. MultiFinder was present in System 5.0 (remember that Apple's versioning was stupid until about 7.5.5), and Switcher was even earlier, though pretty poorly thought out in terms of UI.