This is incorrect. Once the infringer stops violating the GPL, they can grab again a copy of the code and redistribute it under the terms of the GPL, just like anyone else. Permission from the copyright holder would only be required to continue distribution without fixing the violation.
Is that your legal opinion as a copyright lawyer?
The lawyers who wrote the GPLv3 seemed to think that the GPLv2 acts exactly as I described it - otherwise they wouldn't have needed to add extra text to give you your license back if you fix the violation before the copyright holder notices in GPLv3.
As long as the infringer corrects the infringement by ceasing to distribute *any* piece of the GPL covered software, you're right. But once the GPL is violated, the violator no longer has a license to distribute that code unless the copyright holder explicitly gives them one - so merely releasing source for some stuff later isn't going to help at all. If the infringer's product relies on the GPLed code at all, the infringer is basically screwed unless the copyright holder decides to be nice about it.
The judge isn't simply going to ignore copyright infringement because the penalties might damage the offender's business.
If the copyright holder isn't willing to settle, the absolute best case the infringer can expect is an injunction against distributing any further copies of the defendant's code and some minor financial penalty. The problem is that injunction - depending on what the product is and how important it is to the infringer's business, it very well may be equivalent to "burning the infringer's business down".
Releasing newly written code with equivalent functionality or even rewriting GPL code and keeping the product closed source is considered enough to cure a license violation.
Considered enough by who? GPL-violators hoping to get away with it, but happy to comply with the license as "punishment" if they get caught?
Sure, in practice copyright holders are frequently nice and decline to sue if the violator quickly comes into compliance. But there's no guarantee of that - if any copyright holder in a GPLed work ever decided not to be nice and sued the violator would almost assuredly have to A.) recall the product containing the GPLed code B.) pay damages for every copy distributed C.) never distribute that open source program for anything again because their license was revoked. That's for any violation at all, even distributing one copy without the the source code or a written offer to provide it included.
I'm a card carrying FSF member, and I fully support this sort of behavior on their part. The issue of file sharing is already threatening software freedom - if they can help to make it clear that the RIAA are just jerks trying to abuse the legal system, the RIAA will have less power to try to outlaw software. That's what this is really about - whether software that allows people to share arbitrary data with each other should be considered to be evidence of criminal activity.
This is largely false. The vast majority of real gamers want to pay a moderate amount for decent performance. Hardcore gamers who are willing to spend $250+ on just their CPU (or video card) are a tiny minority.
With this new Phenom release (and the 38xx video cards last week), AMD has very competitive platform for mainstream gamers. The only thing that really sucks for them is the overhyping of the high end by benchmark sites - many people will buy Intel because "it's faster" even though the products in their price range are actually worse. But that doesn't change the fact that this new Spider platform (with either released Phenom and either released Radeon HD 3800) makes for an excellent gaming computer for the price.
I don't think you can parallelize compilation of a single program.
Where do people come up with this stuff?
It's currently annoying to parallelize the compilation of a single source file, but non-trivail applications have a whole bunch of source files - so parallelizing compilation of applications is really easy. In fact, compiling the Linux kernel was one of the benchmarks that I remember seeing used to demonstrate the advantages of multiprocessor machines back in the 90's.
You seriously need to get a sense of proportion on A.) what energy supply problems our society has and B.) what stuff uses how much energy.
I'll give you a hint - no-one's going to have to give up having a ridiculous gaming computer until long after everyone's replaced their electric ovens. Things are different for servers and workstations, but the only rational reason why power consumption matters in personal gaming machines is the fact that cooling is noisy.
If ATI only came through with the goods that they hyped, such a accelerated video encoding using the cards, then there would be those of us with these on 24/7. I invested in 2xX1800 (while these things where expensive) and I'm still waiting to see a realistic return on that investment.
My guess is that ATI said that "video cards can be used to accelerate video encoding", and you misunderstood it to mean "we are going to magically force the people who make your video encoding to optimize to use our current line of video cards for acceleration". Sorry, buying a bunch of hardware to take advantage of software that doesn't exist isn't an "investment", it's either a waste of money or an excuse to buy high end graphics cards to play video games.
These days I'm recommending Intel/nVidia to anyone interested in gaming - due largely to the fact that AMD and ATI kicked Intel's and nVidia's asses for a while... And I'm sure that eventually AMD/ATI will make a comeback, and I'll wind up using their hardware again. Back and forth...and in the end the one who really wins is the customer...
Given similar price/performance between products, it's always a better consumer choice to buy from the financial underdog. Otherwise you risk healthy competition degrading into a single producer with a crap product. Currently AMD is producing excellent products in the midrange market segment (where almost everyone actually buys stuff), but for some reason everyone's turned into Intel/Nvidia fanboys - which is a horrible market strategy.
Yeah, because I want people to find my videos and the vast majority of the Internet population uses YouTube.
Does YouTube actually help you accomplish that goal, or does the vast volume of videos posted to the sight distract people from ever finding your stuff? Actually a more interesting question is this: Does anyone actually ever find your videos by just searching around YouTube itself?
It seems to be that you'd be better off getting in on the "blog with embedded videos" thing than just getting lost in the noise at YouTube, and if you do that YouTube stops having even an apparent advantage over the other services.
Is there some special reason you continue to use YouTube if the constraints bother you? There are a ton of other sites that have different constraints, and if you're just sending links to friends it shouldn't matter which site you use.
Not only is their prior art in my patent (an oxygen related reaction used to generate energy), but you're infringing on my patent by breathing. So either pay up or stop.
You're focusing on a single symptom and ignoring most of the problem.
Consider this: What if Verizon *is* selling products based on all of these patents, but they're completely different than the products that Vonage is selling? Then the effect that the patents are having is to allow a single company to prevent any sort of innovation in any related field.
Just use a different VoIP provider - preferably one that's small enough that they won't get sued any time soon. SIP service is a commodity market (and one that major corporations use, so it's not going anywhere) - there's nothing special about Vonage except their ad budget.
Vonage sold its service to tons of DSL customers. DSL customers who were using the ILEC wires. This pretty much means the ILEC was supplying their competitor so the competitor could beat them over the head.
DSL service is a general purpose data connection. The customer can use it for whatever they want. If the customer happens to use their data connection so that they no longer need some other service that the DSL provider sells, that sucks for the DSL provider - but you don't get to sell a general purpose data service and then complain when your customer uses it.
Vonage is a good service, their service has gone a little downhill recently, possibly due to the court action and them changing things to try and get around it. Yes there are other VOIP products but none of them 'just work' like Vonage.
What makes you think that none of the other VoIP products 'just work' like Vonage? They just like any other SIP provider.
The non-Vonage provider I use, Galaxy Voice, just sent me a pre-configured ATA box - all I had to do was plug it into power, ethernet, and the phone. If I had asked, they would have sent a technician to even do that for me. I don't see how Vonage could 'just work' any better than that. And that's the sort of thing I'd expect from any residential-targeted SIP provider.
Except you still have the option to hand count, if for some reason the automatic counts don't satisfy the courts. That's why hand counting remains a back up for optical scan.
All you're doing is changing the attack requirement from "make the vote counting machines count wrong" to "make the vote counting machines count wrong and make sure there's no hand recount". If having no hand recount is the standard procedure then you haven't gained much - and the resulting system certainly isn't trustworthy enough to rely on for non-trivial elections.
But how? If the solution is to raise the too-low speed limits, some people will still drive over the limit especially if the limits are reasonable. I mean it's always possible to drive a bit faster, to get quicker to job or home or wherever else one is going. If the limits are raised to much, roads would become unsafe.
The conclusion I draw from that (and other material I've read on the same topic) is that there's no safety justification for setting speed limits such that the majority of drivers are breaking the law.
How do you enforce the strict speed limits for instance?
You can't, especially if the speed limit is so low that everyone breaks it all the time in normal driving. So rather than making everyone a criminal that the cops have an excuse to harass at any time, you fix the law.
The counting machine is not an evil, stop treating it as such.
Did you read my post?
Optical-scan style counting machines as used in practice are contrary to the spirit of democracy, since they prevent layman observers from being able to personally understand if an election they watch is legitimate or fraudulent. It very well may be possible to design procedures that work around this problem, but without such procedures automatically counting paper ballots is only marginally better than electronic-ballots - and completely unacceptable compared to manually counted paper ballots.
Every participant in an election needs to be able to have personal confidence that the procedures being used are legitimate, and complex electronics backed with statistical sampling techniques that election officials can claim ignorance of simply don't meet that requirement. There are just too many ways to alter something just enough to change the outcome or destroy some required mathematical property without altering it enough for even an observer with the proper background to to notice - what hope does some supermarket clerk who's observing the counting process have of noticing a statistical attack?
With a slight change of method reprocessing yields weapons grade plutonium, an ability which most of the world still cannot be trusted to use in good faith. It has been illegal in the US for the past 30 years for this reason. There are only a handful of sites in the world presently performing this operation.
Which reprocessing method? There are a bunch of different methods that have been suggested, with properties / design goals ranging from "produce weapons-grade plutonium as the primary output while retaining some claim to being a nuclear power process" to "produce a horrible mixture of hard to separate isotopes that would be harder to turn into a nuclear weapon than natural Uranium ore, but which works great in a reactor".
Furthermore, reprocessing still produces radioactive waste requiring secure long-term storage. It is not possible to completely close the fuel cycle by recycling (only about 95% reuse is achieved on each cycle). It also requires high security transport for spent nuclear fuel, extensive handling precautions and lots of messy chemistry.
With the better recycling schemes, especially some of the "in plant" schemes, the long term storage that the high level waste requires is on the order of 300 years - so you build a reinforced concrete building on reasonably stable ground and your fine. Note that this is vastly unlike the 100,000 years that once-through spent fuel requires, where you have to worry about questions like "Will the creatures that stumble into this storage area still understand the concept of written language?"
And finally, there is general consensus from economic analyses that the reprocessing method is more expensive than open cycle with direct disposal, so ensuring its widespread use would have to mandated by law.
Yea, and there's an economic consensus that burning Petrol is more efficient than any other plan. Unfortunately, with an "open cycle with direct disposal", we'd run out of Uranium before we ran out of Petrol. Fuel recycling laws aren't just a good idea - they're the only way that nuclear-fission power is even vaguely viable even in the medium term.
Is it cheating, or is it just trade between two related economies? If the game developers don't have a problem with it, that strongly implies the latter to me.
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Is that your legal opinion as a copyright lawyer?
The lawyers who wrote the GPLv3 seemed to think that the GPLv2 acts exactly as I described it - otherwise they wouldn't have needed to add extra text to give you your license back if you fix the violation before the copyright holder notices in GPLv3.
As long as the infringer corrects the infringement by ceasing to distribute *any* piece of the GPL covered software, you're right. But once the GPL is violated, the violator no longer has a license to distribute that code unless the copyright holder explicitly gives them one - so merely releasing source for some stuff later isn't going to help at all. If the infringer's product relies on the GPLed code at all, the infringer is basically screwed unless the copyright holder decides to be nice about it.
The judge isn't simply going to ignore copyright infringement because the penalties might damage the offender's business.
If the copyright holder isn't willing to settle, the absolute best case the infringer can expect is an injunction against distributing any further copies of the defendant's code and some minor financial penalty. The problem is that injunction - depending on what the product is and how important it is to the infringer's business, it very well may be equivalent to "burning the infringer's business down".
Considered enough by who? GPL-violators hoping to get away with it, but happy to comply with the license as "punishment" if they get caught?
Sure, in practice copyright holders are frequently nice and decline to sue if the violator quickly comes into compliance. But there's no guarantee of that - if any copyright holder in a GPLed work ever decided not to be nice and sued the violator would almost assuredly have to A.) recall the product containing the GPLed code B.) pay damages for every copy distributed C.) never distribute that open source program for anything again because their license was revoked. That's for any violation at all, even distributing one copy without the the source code or a written offer to provide it included.
What would you say if I told you that AMD processors were made in Germany?
I'm a card carrying FSF member, and I fully support this sort of behavior on their part. The issue of file sharing is already threatening software freedom - if they can help to make it clear that the RIAA are just jerks trying to abuse the legal system, the RIAA will have less power to try to outlaw software. That's what this is really about - whether software that allows people to share arbitrary data with each other should be considered to be evidence of criminal activity.
This is largely false. The vast majority of real gamers want to pay a moderate amount for decent performance. Hardcore gamers who are willing to spend $250+ on just their CPU (or video card) are a tiny minority.
With this new Phenom release (and the 38xx video cards last week), AMD has very competitive platform for mainstream gamers. The only thing that really sucks for them is the overhyping of the high end by benchmark sites - many people will buy Intel because "it's faster" even though the products in their price range are actually worse. But that doesn't change the fact that this new Spider platform (with either released Phenom and either released Radeon HD 3800) makes for an excellent gaming computer for the price.
Where do people come up with this stuff?
It's currently annoying to parallelize the compilation of a single source file, but non-trivail applications have a whole bunch of source files - so parallelizing compilation of applications is really easy. In fact, compiling the Linux kernel was one of the benchmarks that I remember seeing used to demonstrate the advantages of multiprocessor machines back in the 90's.
You seriously need to get a sense of proportion on A.) what energy supply problems our society has and B.) what stuff uses how much energy.
I'll give you a hint - no-one's going to have to give up having a ridiculous gaming computer until long after everyone's replaced their electric ovens. Things are different for servers and workstations, but the only rational reason why power consumption matters in personal gaming machines is the fact that cooling is noisy.
My guess is that ATI said that "video cards can be used to accelerate video encoding", and you misunderstood it to mean "we are going to magically force the people who make your video encoding to optimize to use our current line of video cards for acceleration". Sorry, buying a bunch of hardware to take advantage of software that doesn't exist isn't an "investment", it's either a waste of money or an excuse to buy high end graphics cards to play video games.
Given similar price/performance between products, it's always a better consumer choice to buy from the financial underdog. Otherwise you risk healthy competition degrading into a single producer with a crap product. Currently AMD is producing excellent products in the midrange market segment (where almost everyone actually buys stuff), but for some reason everyone's turned into Intel/Nvidia fanboys - which is a horrible market strategy.
Does YouTube actually help you accomplish that goal, or does the vast volume of videos posted to the sight distract people from ever finding your stuff? Actually a more interesting question is this: Does anyone actually ever find your videos by just searching around YouTube itself?
It seems to be that you'd be better off getting in on the "blog with embedded videos" thing than just getting lost in the noise at YouTube, and if you do that YouTube stops having even an apparent advantage over the other services.
Is there some special reason you continue to use YouTube if the constraints bother you? There are a ton of other sites that have different constraints, and if you're just sending links to friends it shouldn't matter which site you use.
The implications of that are hilarious.
(The concept of energy, required for all the components involved in making this post, is the property of NinjaTariq, used with permission.)
Not only is their prior art in my patent (an oxygen related reaction used to generate energy), but you're infringing on my patent by breathing. So either pay up or stop.
You're focusing on a single symptom and ignoring most of the problem.
Consider this: What if Verizon *is* selling products based on all of these patents, but they're completely different than the products that Vonage is selling? Then the effect that the patents are having is to allow a single company to prevent any sort of innovation in any related field.
Just use a different VoIP provider - preferably one that's small enough that they won't get sued any time soon. SIP service is a commodity market (and one that major corporations use, so it's not going anywhere) - there's nothing special about Vonage except their ad budget.
DSL service is a general purpose data connection. The customer can use it for whatever they want. If the customer happens to use their data connection so that they no longer need some other service that the DSL provider sells, that sucks for the DSL provider - but you don't get to sell a general purpose data service and then complain when your customer uses it.
What makes you think that none of the other VoIP products 'just work' like Vonage? They just like any other SIP provider.
The non-Vonage provider I use, Galaxy Voice, just sent me a pre-configured ATA box - all I had to do was plug it into power, ethernet, and the phone. If I had asked, they would have sent a technician to even do that for me. I don't see how Vonage could 'just work' any better than that. And that's the sort of thing I'd expect from any residential-targeted SIP provider.
All you're doing is changing the attack requirement from "make the vote counting machines count wrong" to "make the vote counting machines count wrong and make sure there's no hand recount". If having no hand recount is the standard procedure then you haven't gained much - and the resulting system certainly isn't trustworthy enough to rely on for non-trivial elections.
To start, I suggest you read this: http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-irrel.html
The conclusion I draw from that (and other material I've read on the same topic) is that there's no safety justification for setting speed limits such that the majority of drivers are breaking the law.
You can't, especially if the speed limit is so low that everyone breaks it all the time in normal driving. So rather than making everyone a criminal that the cops have an excuse to harass at any time, you fix the law.
Did you read my post?
Optical-scan style counting machines as used in practice are contrary to the spirit of democracy, since they prevent layman observers from being able to personally understand if an election they watch is legitimate or fraudulent. It very well may be possible to design procedures that work around this problem, but without such procedures automatically counting paper ballots is only marginally better than electronic-ballots - and completely unacceptable compared to manually counted paper ballots.
Every participant in an election needs to be able to have personal confidence that the procedures being used are legitimate, and complex electronics backed with statistical sampling techniques that election officials can claim ignorance of simply don't meet that requirement. There are just too many ways to alter something just enough to change the outcome or destroy some required mathematical property without altering it enough for even an observer with the proper background to to notice - what hope does some supermarket clerk who's observing the counting process have of noticing a statistical attack?
Which reprocessing method? There are a bunch of different methods that have been suggested, with properties / design goals ranging from "produce weapons-grade plutonium as the primary output while retaining some claim to being a nuclear power process" to "produce a horrible mixture of hard to separate isotopes that would be harder to turn into a nuclear weapon than natural Uranium ore, but which works great in a reactor".
With the better recycling schemes, especially some of the "in plant" schemes, the long term storage that the high level waste requires is on the order of 300 years - so you build a reinforced concrete building on reasonably stable ground and your fine. Note that this is vastly unlike the 100,000 years that once-through spent fuel requires, where you have to worry about questions like "Will the creatures that stumble into this storage area still understand the concept of written language?"
Yea, and there's an economic consensus that burning Petrol is more efficient than any other plan. Unfortunately, with an "open cycle with direct disposal", we'd run out of Uranium before we ran out of Petrol. Fuel recycling laws aren't just a good idea - they're the only way that nuclear-fission power is even vaguely viable even in the medium term.
Is it cheating, or is it just trade between two related economies? If the game developers don't have a problem with it, that strongly implies the latter to me.