Folks at Project Gutenberg are obviously aware of the potential for a lawsuit. They would like to have one, so that the decision on the copyright status of these works is made concrete.
I was one of a series strategic consultants hired when Symbian was considering conversion to an Open Source project. Unfortunately, what I told them was not what they wanted to hear. One element I pushed was that nobody was going to be interested in their kernel, regardless of what they did, and that conversion to Linux would eventually be necessary if they were not to continue to expend millions on re-inventing the wheel. Another element was licensing and strategy so that the project would continue to make money, which, amazingly, was rejected as Symbian's customers were also its owners and didn't care for it to continue as a for-profit project. Rather than the direction they took, I would have preferred to see them continue to operate as a profitable proprietary software company, because they very obviously weren't going to make it in Open Source.
But in truth, this project started too late to have much hope.
Wow, an examiner actually found prior art! Of course, that's what they're supposed to do... I'll have time to decompose the claims next week. If anyone wants to do it this week, go ahead.
I am busy this week and have not been able to look at the patent. However, if IBM referenced this person's work in the prior art section of the patent, they are admitting that his work IS prior art, and is not subject of the patent. The issue then becomes, do any of the PATENT CLAIMS (not the summary) claim art that is exercised in his program.
Electric Fence is listed as prior art in two ATT patents. When they saw it, they refrained from including two claims they otherwise would have, because I had precedence. The ATT patents should have expired by now.
I doubt there's anything to worry about in this specific case. However, software patents in general present a severe problem.
[Oops - previously submitted this as AC. Sorry]
That's not what I am talking about. When a company brought suit against an OIN member, or against Linux in general, OIN had the option of bringing suit against that same company using a patent belonging to one of its members. That is the capability that is probably being lost - as far as Novell's patents are concerned.
There is a threat here, but it has nothing to do with the Unix copyrights. We have already established really, really well that the Unix copyrights are irrelevant at this late date. They can't be used like patents to enforce against other similar works. They were released under an unterminating BSD license and covered by a government standard. Forget them.
What they got was 481 patents that were part of a portfolio that Open Invention Network had previously used to defend Linux against patent suits. So, this is escalation in the patent war they are running against Linux, because they just removed one of our defensive weapons.
The Seattle link you pointed to hardly establishes that trains are more dangerous if the forecast is for 8 deaths in 10 years. Seattle is the sort of urban area that approaches one traffic fatality per day. However, I'm not that great a fan of "light rail". It's generally a compromise system that shares its right-of-way with automobile and pedestrian traffic, and thus the deaths. Good rail systems have isolated right-of-way, and four tracks rather than two so that they can get on the speed for express trains or can shut down tracks for repair without killing the system. They have closed platforms with automated doors so that people aren't able to get in front of the train. They have standard gauge, and they can run "light" or "heavy" railcars as needed. They drive themselves.
IMO, most other things are glorified buses. If you look at the failures of urban mass transit systems, most of them can be attributed to missing one of the things I listed above. BART ran 20 years before its first death, but that death was due to the open platform. It's a two-track system so it can't run express trains and has to shut down every night for maintenance. It has its own one-of-a-kind track gauge and platform height, so they have no access to a rail car market. They got one thing right, though: Although they don't trumpet the fact, BART has always been a driverless system. The operator runs the doors and sits where a train engineer would be. Too bad, though, they didn't build it to be an operator-less system. They could do that today.
Well, part of the reason I CARE about this stuff is that I've been to other parts of the world where it works. I've worked abroad. And frankly, the U.S. has a lot of catching up to other countries to do.
In most of Europe, every agricultural town has its train station. And they have foreign agricultural workers too, from Poland and so on, and those folks come by train. And in the more urban parts, the stations are more close together, but they are everywhere.
They also have a higher standard of living, and heath care is a right rather than a privilege, and people aren't living on the street.
I am willing to pay for stuff like that.
Irrelevant to the point regarding HOW they got to the fields in the first place.
I can assure you that rather than ride in the back of a truck with no seat belts, they'd rather take mass transit. Indeed, if we had 1) efficient means for them to travel and 2) a guest-worker program, the _social_ cost of your getting your food would be lower. You are, you know, getting it on the backs of those folks. Or, we could always bus unemployed U.S. citizens out from the city except for one problem - they don't want to go.
The owner's TCO for a motor vehicle is not the societal cost. The societal cost includes highways and other infrastructure (not paid for entirely with that gas tax), the wars we go to so that Americans can have gasoline at 1/5 the price of much of the world, the unnecessary deaths and injuries, the time cost to the individual who can't do any activity but drive while in transit, the environmental impact, the various issues that automobile transit heaps upon both cities and suburbs - sprawl, traffic, etc. So, I don't think most automobile owners are paying a fraction of the actual cost of their vehicles.
Before you are so sure about the energy cost of mass transit, you need to consider apples and apples. For any automobile, even a Tesla, to be considered against a train, it would have to have "catenary power". A wire or rail with infrastructure power on it. This is a dedicated infrastructure that conveys power from an economical and efficient (compared to the I.C. engine) electric power source with reasonable efficiency, avoiding the problem of getting vehicle power to homes, charging times, and the loss of the charge-discharge cycle in the battery.
Even if with all that we pay a higher energy cost than an automobile for mass transit, it's worth it because of the reduction in other social costs.
No, sorry. Right-wingers just don't THINK about what things really cost. You pay perhaps a fifth of the cost of driving your car. You don't pay the cost of all of the roads and infrastructure, the cost of the wars our country goes to so that you can have cheap gasoline, the cost of the environmental damage and the cost to our quality of life because cities and suburbs are both covered with automotive infrastructure and its fallout. You whine up a storm when asked to pay for it though! No Kyoto treaty! Yes to another war!
We're getting SICK of supporting the right-wing lifestyle!
Why would mass transit have to be self sufficient??? Its duty is to get cars off of the road and to get people to work so that the econonomy works. Nobody insists that your car support itself, you pay for it from your salary just as if it were a tax. Nobody insists that the roads turn a profit. Why can automobiles run at a constant deficit 100 times greater than mass transit, and that's no problem?
Oh, but the right believes that Public Transportation is "big government that can't support itself". So, instead, we're going to implement fine control of individual's actions, which is "being tough on crime".
So, a politician thinks that it's important for both your next automobile and phone to be DRM-locked, so that your phone will only work when the passenger is operating it (verified by some sort of computer vision, eh), or your phone will disable itself when it senses it's moving at vehicle speed, but only in a passenger automobile, not a train or bus.
Right.
Right after that, we'll get DRM-locked homes to protect us from all sorts of bad stuff: the wrong people having sex, etc.
I really don't think so. If the Secretary of Transportation wants to work on something good for safety, self-driving automobiles are much more likely to 1) work and 2) save lives.
Well, if your favorite is a live action long take, there's nothing to beat Gene Kelly's dance in "Singin' in the Rain", which has exactly ONE cut in the whole scene, quite far into it." In more modern work there's the Old Spice ad "I'm on a horse!", which has CGI at one point but it's still one take.
I'll happily ignore your art criticism. Although I was not involved with the Kahn CGI, I consider it one of the high moments in CGI film art. Certainly there is lots of art in the Pixar films in which I was involved, which contain no live action at all, and no rotoscoping.
My favorite long take is the Genesis Effect scene in Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn. It's a long zoom toward the Genesis planet and a descent around it, flying between mountain peaks, while it morphs from a lifeless planet to something covered with fractal plant scenery. All in one very long CGI take. This was made at Pixar really long ago when CGI was much more difficult because computers were so much slower. The computer involved was a VAX 780 (I still have the front panel from that VAX in my office) and it ran with the diagnostic command "SET CLOCK FAST" for over a month to do that scene. At one point they realized that they were flying THROUGH a mountain, and they backed up a few frames and had a notch grow in the mountain range as they approached it. It's clearly visible in slow motion - they just didn't have enough time to redo many frames of the scene and it goes by too fast to notice in real time if you don't know about it.
Alvy Ray Smith said that he hadn't met George Lucas (who is famously reclusive) and that after seeing the rush of that scene, George knocked on Alvy's office door and said "Good Take!". And that's all the interaction with George that Alvy said he had.
But aside from this old and not very realistic looking scene, a lot of modern long takes are CGI, and you can't tell!
So, the problem here is that Red Hat is hiding something. The only way to get at it is to work it out logically. I have done so as far as I can. What you are asking me is to refrain from trying to work it out at all.
If you read the article there are lots of "as far as I can tell" statements.
I have investigated! I talked with a lot of folks, including Red Hat's VP and General Counsel and another attorney there, Brad Kuhn who drives prosecution of most GPL cases (and supports my effort), and some attorneys. If there were a leak I'd be the first to hear, generally. People know I go after this stuff from my protest of the Novell-Microsoft agreement, etc.
It's a common attorney tactic to say what will win the argument - and sometimes the truth suffers.
Whatever you call it, Red Hat has agreed to keep the settlement secret - and I discussed this with a really good attorney who had no problem with my referring to the settlement as sealed, and I discussed it with Red Hat. Their VP and General Counsel was in the loop - I wasn't supposed to know that, but he made a mistake with email.
All Free Software licenses of that age are of poor legal language. This has not kept us from enforcing the Artistic License 1.0, which I feel is the absolute worst of them. I was expert in that case too.
LGPL 2.1 paragraph 11 is written to apply to the distributor of the LGPL software. It may be that there are some forms of patent covenant that it would not catch, too bad we don't know what the actual covenant is.
If anything, the LGPL 3 language regarding patents is stronger.
Slashdot Mirror
People fear what they don't understand. Ignorant people fear more, and are manipulated by their fear en masse.
But they fear typographical errors much more :-)
Folks at Project Gutenberg are obviously aware of the potential for a lawsuit. They would like to have one, so that the decision on the copyright status of these works is made concrete.
I was one of a series strategic consultants hired when Symbian was considering conversion to an Open Source project. Unfortunately, what I told them was not what they wanted to hear. One element I pushed was that nobody was going to be interested in their kernel, regardless of what they did, and that conversion to Linux would eventually be necessary if they were not to continue to expend millions on re-inventing the wheel. Another element was licensing and strategy so that the project would continue to make money, which, amazingly, was rejected as Symbian's customers were also its owners and didn't care for it to continue as a for-profit project. Rather than the direction they took, I would have preferred to see them continue to operate as a profitable proprietary software company, because they very obviously weren't going to make it in Open Source.
But in truth, this project started too late to have much hope.
Wow, an examiner actually found prior art! Of course, that's what they're supposed to do... I'll have time to decompose the claims next week. If anyone wants to do it this week, go ahead.
I am busy this week and have not been able to look at the patent. However, if IBM referenced this person's work in the prior art section of the patent, they are admitting that his work IS prior art, and is not subject of the patent. The issue then becomes, do any of the PATENT CLAIMS (not the summary) claim art that is exercised in his program.
Electric Fence is listed as prior art in two ATT patents. When they saw it, they refrained from including two claims they otherwise would have, because I had precedence. The ATT patents should have expired by now.
I doubt there's anything to worry about in this specific case. However, software patents in general present a severe problem. [Oops - previously submitted this as AC. Sorry]
I have always felt that OIN was a plan to protect the patent system from Open Source, rather than what it should have been.
That's not what I am talking about. When a company brought suit against an OIN member, or against Linux in general, OIN had the option of bringing suit against that same company using a patent belonging to one of its members. That is the capability that is probably being lost - as far as Novell's patents are concerned.
Let's just say that there are other "lifestyle issues" that could be resolved through neural stimulation.
But I remember that disconnected nerves are said to atrophy or die, so this might work better for new injuries than old ones.
882 patents, not 481. Sorry.
There is a threat here, but it has nothing to do with the Unix copyrights. We have already established really, really well that the Unix copyrights are irrelevant at this late date. They can't be used like patents to enforce against other similar works. They were released under an unterminating BSD license and covered by a government standard. Forget them.
What they got was 481 patents that were part of a portfolio that Open Invention Network had previously used to defend Linux against patent suits. So, this is escalation in the patent war they are running against Linux, because they just removed one of our defensive weapons.
The Seattle link you pointed to hardly establishes that trains are more dangerous if the forecast is for 8 deaths in 10 years. Seattle is the sort of urban area that approaches one traffic fatality per day. However, I'm not that great a fan of "light rail". It's generally a compromise system that shares its right-of-way with automobile and pedestrian traffic, and thus the deaths. Good rail systems have isolated right-of-way, and four tracks rather than two so that they can get on the speed for express trains or can shut down tracks for repair without killing the system. They have closed platforms with automated doors so that people aren't able to get in front of the train. They have standard gauge, and they can run "light" or "heavy" railcars as needed. They drive themselves.
IMO, most other things are glorified buses. If you look at the failures of urban mass transit systems, most of them can be attributed to missing one of the things I listed above. BART ran 20 years before its first death, but that death was due to the open platform. It's a two-track system so it can't run express trains and has to shut down every night for maintenance. It has its own one-of-a-kind track gauge and platform height, so they have no access to a rail car market. They got one thing right, though: Although they don't trumpet the fact, BART has always been a driverless system. The operator runs the doors and sits where a train engineer would be. Too bad, though, they didn't build it to be an operator-less system. They could do that today.
Well, part of the reason I CARE about this stuff is that I've been to other parts of the world where it works. I've worked abroad. And frankly, the U.S. has a lot of catching up to other countries to do. In most of Europe, every agricultural town has its train station. And they have foreign agricultural workers too, from Poland and so on, and those folks come by train. And in the more urban parts, the stations are more close together, but they are everywhere. They also have a higher standard of living, and heath care is a right rather than a privilege, and people aren't living on the street. I am willing to pay for stuff like that.
I can assure you that rather than ride in the back of a truck with no seat belts, they'd rather take mass transit. Indeed, if we had 1) efficient means for them to travel and 2) a guest-worker program, the _social_ cost of your getting your food would be lower. You are, you know, getting it on the backs of those folks. Or, we could always bus unemployed U.S. citizens out from the city except for one problem - they don't want to go.
THAT WILL BE ACCEPTABLE!
Actually, the folks who harvested your food don't own automobiles. Or much of anything, including citizenship.
Me too. They'd be lower if we had more mass transit and fewer automobiles.
Mostly via freight rail, at 500+ ton-miles per gallon of less-refined diesel fuel.
The owner's TCO for a motor vehicle is not the societal cost. The societal cost includes highways and other infrastructure (not paid for entirely with that gas tax), the wars we go to so that Americans can have gasoline at 1/5 the price of much of the world, the unnecessary deaths and injuries, the time cost to the individual who can't do any activity but drive while in transit, the environmental impact, the various issues that automobile transit heaps upon both cities and suburbs - sprawl, traffic, etc. So, I don't think most automobile owners are paying a fraction of the actual cost of their vehicles.
Before you are so sure about the energy cost of mass transit, you need to consider apples and apples. For any automobile, even a Tesla, to be considered against a train, it would have to have "catenary power". A wire or rail with infrastructure power on it. This is a dedicated infrastructure that conveys power from an economical and efficient (compared to the I.C. engine) electric power source with reasonable efficiency, avoiding the problem of getting vehicle power to homes, charging times, and the loss of the charge-discharge cycle in the battery.
Even if with all that we pay a higher energy cost than an automobile for mass transit, it's worth it because of the reduction in other social costs.
No, sorry. Right-wingers just don't THINK about what things really cost. You pay perhaps a fifth of the cost of driving your car. You don't pay the cost of all of the roads and infrastructure, the cost of the wars our country goes to so that you can have cheap gasoline, the cost of the environmental damage and the cost to our quality of life because cities and suburbs are both covered with automotive infrastructure and its fallout. You whine up a storm when asked to pay for it though! No Kyoto treaty! Yes to another war!
We're getting SICK of supporting the right-wing lifestyle!
It's just right-wing bullshit.
Oh, but the right believes that Public Transportation is "big government that can't support itself". So, instead, we're going to implement fine control of individual's actions, which is "being tough on crime".
So, a politician thinks that it's important for both your next automobile and phone to be DRM-locked, so that your phone will only work when the passenger is operating it (verified by some sort of computer vision, eh), or your phone will disable itself when it senses it's moving at vehicle speed, but only in a passenger automobile, not a train or bus.
Right.
Right after that, we'll get DRM-locked homes to protect us from all sorts of bad stuff: the wrong people having sex, etc.
I really don't think so. If the Secretary of Transportation wants to work on something good for safety, self-driving automobiles are much more likely to 1) work and 2) save lives.
Well, if your favorite is a live action long take, there's nothing to beat Gene Kelly's dance in "Singin' in the Rain", which has exactly ONE cut in the whole scene, quite far into it." In more modern work there's the Old Spice ad "I'm on a horse!", which has CGI at one point but it's still one take.
I'll happily ignore your art criticism. Although I was not involved with the Kahn CGI, I consider it one of the high moments in CGI film art. Certainly there is lots of art in the Pixar films in which I was involved, which contain no live action at all, and no rotoscoping.
My favorite long take is the Genesis Effect scene in Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn. It's a long zoom toward the Genesis planet and a descent around it, flying between mountain peaks, while it morphs from a lifeless planet to something covered with fractal plant scenery. All in one very long CGI take. This was made at Pixar really long ago when CGI was much more difficult because computers were so much slower. The computer involved was a VAX 780 (I still have the front panel from that VAX in my office) and it ran with the diagnostic command "SET CLOCK FAST" for over a month to do that scene. At one point they realized that they were flying THROUGH a mountain, and they backed up a few frames and had a notch grow in the mountain range as they approached it. It's clearly visible in slow motion - they just didn't have enough time to redo many frames of the scene and it goes by too fast to notice in real time if you don't know about it. Alvy Ray Smith said that he hadn't met George Lucas (who is famously reclusive) and that after seeing the rush of that scene, George knocked on Alvy's office door and said "Good Take!". And that's all the interaction with George that Alvy said he had. But aside from this old and not very realistic looking scene, a lot of modern long takes are CGI, and you can't tell!
So, the problem here is that Red Hat is hiding something. The only way to get at it is to work it out logically. I have done so as far as I can. What you are asking me is to refrain from trying to work it out at all.
If you read the article there are lots of "as far as I can tell" statements.
I have investigated! I talked with a lot of folks, including Red Hat's VP and General Counsel and another attorney there, Brad Kuhn who drives prosecution of most GPL cases (and supports my effort), and some attorneys. If there were a leak I'd be the first to hear, generally. People know I go after this stuff from my protest of the Novell-Microsoft agreement, etc.
It's a common attorney tactic to say what will win the argument - and sometimes the truth suffers.
Whatever you call it, Red Hat has agreed to keep the settlement secret - and I discussed this with a really good attorney who had no problem with my referring to the settlement as sealed, and I discussed it with Red Hat. Their VP and General Counsel was in the loop - I wasn't supposed to know that, but he made a mistake with email.
All Free Software licenses of that age are of poor legal language. This has not kept us from enforcing the Artistic License 1.0, which I feel is the absolute worst of them. I was expert in that case too.
LGPL 2.1 paragraph 11 is written to apply to the distributor of the LGPL software. It may be that there are some forms of patent covenant that it would not catch, too bad we don't know what the actual covenant is.
If anything, the LGPL 3 language regarding patents is stronger.