An informal C&D then a formal C&D then a threat of actual action then an actual filing of a civil lawsuit is an appropriate escalation of action. You don't get a fair shake out of this type of thing by forcing the host of the data to take action without prior notice that there's a problem.
If the data host that's not part of posting the data finds a problem themselves after you send a friendly letter, they can take it down themselves. If they need a formal C&C from your lawyer, then they're already a bit adversarial. If it takes an actual lawsuit to get the data down, what makes you think they would take it down at your request just because a law says they must? Why wouldn't they just sue you for making a false request under that law?
You see, if there's no escalation and it goes straight to forcing someone to do something like take down data or cancel their customer's accounts or something, then that's what is overly aggressive. Sending a letter that informs them of the problem and going from there is much friendlier than forcing them to do something up front.
So after abuse mail is sent, send a registered letter to their legal department. Then sue them along with the person who posted if that doesn't work, because once they are notified of the problem they are party to it staying on the server.
I know what's mentioned in the article is skipping the C&D. That's why I pointed out that there's already a working mechanism to take care of this sort of thing without a new mechanism.
"ISP" generally includes people who provide your connection, your bandwidth across that connection, web hosting accounts, email services, NNTP news servers, or a number of other services having to do with the Internet. Of course they are talking about a subset of ISPs here known as hosting companies and not about holding last-mile wire owners accountable for moving the data they don't store.
Most ISPs these days reserve that right in their ToS but rarely do anything to enforce it. Allowing a third party to get the ISP to look into such issues would be a good thing. Allowing a third party to force an unconditional action based on a complaint such as taking down the content or cancelling the user's account be terrible, though.
So the difference is in using tunneling through an insulator in some instances and not others rather than conducting through the semiconductor in some instances and not others?
I read the first 35 pages of that thesis so far, and it reads as if, yes, this is an attempt to manufacture a reliable metal oxide point-contact rectifier on a plane to be used in much the same way as the old unreliable iron pyrite crystal radio diodes. Please, if I'm wrong, point me to a correction. Your simple, "No. No." is not at all helpful to point out the differences.
A notice letter is neither very expensive nor very much hassle. If they ignore a notice from a private person, have a lawyer send a notice. If they ignore the lawyer, file an action and have the court send a notice. There's a definite stepwise course that already can be used and makes plenty of sense.
If they ignore you and go all the way to court now, why would they pay any more attention if there was an official process to accept notices and ignore them?
Back in the early days of commercial ISPs, when an ISP was an Internet Service Provider and not a phone company or cable company that drove the ISP specialist companies out of business, and when there weren't "safe harbor" and the DMCA, ISPs cared about the images of their respective companies and tried to do business with customers using the services legitimately.
ISPs would take down obviously scam sites when people complained not because they had to, but because they didn't want those sorts of sites on their servers or using their bandwidth. ISPs responded to complaints about email abuse. ISPs would cooperate openly with law enforcement when they wanted to stop a specific crime and would tell the officers to take a hike until they had a subpoena when their was a fishing expedition for user data.
How do I know this? I worked in the field as an employee and a consultant for a number of ISPs back when an ISP was a service provider like the name implies rather than a utility trying to charge extra for certain data.
Why would we worry about this facilitating attacks on free speech? It is one in itself. Allowing random third parties to censor speech is not free speech. Better is to allow the ISPs at their option to pull content they believe their customers posted in bad faith, which responsible ISPs did with regularity in the US before doing so made them responsible when they missed a case of it. ISPs don't want to be known for hosting BS sites, but several governments have made it easier to take all hands off user content than to enforce reasonable terms of service with meaningful thought and constraint. The US is among those, and I'd bet the UK is as well.
Let someone who reads and writes Chinese develop a programming language with Chinese keywords and syntax, then. Programming in English-like languages has largely been a waste of time, remember. English keywords are great, but using English syntax for a programming language is a nightmare. Everyone uses a syntax that's simpler than English. Even Perl's grammar is simpler than English, and that grammar is massive compared to most programming languages.
You need to look in Black's and not Webster's. You also need to understand an agent/client relationship. You are buying the app from the seller, and Apple only takes a commission just like an auction house or flea market with an absentee booth owner. That appears to be an agency relationship, in which case Apple is only liable as far as they know their client is violating a license, contract, or statute. IANAL, but clearly neither are you.
You can have an open spec with a GPLed implementation. You can also have an open spec with an LGPL implementation which would allow closed source systems to use the LGPLed implementation just fine.
What you can't do with GPLed code is take the implementation and close the code for a proprietary system. That's all you can't do. BSD is more helpful in some ways because of this one issue, but it is not the only license to use for an open spec.
All BSD does is lower the barrier to entry for closed source projects compared to the GPL or lower the barrier to entry compared to the LGPL for people who want to also close their own proprietary non-standard extensions to the implementation.
You explicitly according to the GPL can sell software licensed under the GPL even if you are not the author. The license simply mandates that you must also offer the source code along with any binaries you distribute, and that only a nominal fee to cover the cost of duplication and distribution can be charged for the duplication and distribution of said source.
Furthermore, if Apple is selling something on commission for someone else, they're probably not considered the distributor anyway. There's such a thing as a agency/client relationship, and it seems the distributor in this case would be the client uploading the packages for commission sale.
You are assuming that Apple is the "distributor" and that they are not distributing merely as an agent of whoever uploaded the software to the app store. AAMOF, although I'm no lawyer, I'd say the sale on commission implies an agency relationship and that the seller is the one distributing.
I agree with everything you say about the GPL (because you're right about that, so it'd be silly to disagree). However, I think the party that uploaded VLC to Apple's app store is acting as the distributor with Apple as their agent. It's that party that is responsible for any licensing issues as far as I can tell.
You're not writing the original code if you are "forced" into using the GPL. Your binaries only must be released with source under the GPL if you redistribute someone else's work that you're using and they licensed that work under the GPL.
No, it's not being forced to publish "your" code. It's being forced, upon publishing binaries made from someone else's code with your customizations to publish the sources as well. If you don't use someone else's GPLed code in the first place, they have no say in the license of your binaries. My advice to you is to not use GPLed code as the basis of your binaries if you don't want to publish sources and quit whining about being forced to make a tradeoff you don't have to make.
The BSD establishes restrictions, too. They are different restrictions than the GPL, but they are real restrictions. They also allow you as a developer embracing and extending someone else's work to impose more restrictions on your fork of the code than the GPL would. So which is more free depends on who uses the license and how.
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An informal C&D then a formal C&D then a threat of actual action then an actual filing of a civil lawsuit is an appropriate escalation of action. You don't get a fair shake out of this type of thing by forcing the host of the data to take action without prior notice that there's a problem.
If the data host that's not part of posting the data finds a problem themselves after you send a friendly letter, they can take it down themselves. If they need a formal C&C from your lawyer, then they're already a bit adversarial. If it takes an actual lawsuit to get the data down, what makes you think they would take it down at your request just because a law says they must? Why wouldn't they just sue you for making a false request under that law?
You see, if there's no escalation and it goes straight to forcing someone to do something like take down data or cancel their customer's accounts or something, then that's what is overly aggressive. Sending a letter that informs them of the problem and going from there is much friendlier than forcing them to do something up front.
So after abuse mail is sent, send a registered letter to their legal department. Then sue them along with the person who posted if that doesn't work, because once they are notified of the problem they are party to it staying on the server.
I know what's mentioned in the article is skipping the C&D. That's why I pointed out that there's already a working mechanism to take care of this sort of thing without a new mechanism.
"ISP" generally includes people who provide your connection, your bandwidth across that connection, web hosting accounts, email services, NNTP news servers, or a number of other services having to do with the Internet. Of course they are talking about a subset of ISPs here known as hosting companies and not about holding last-mile wire owners accountable for moving the data they don't store.
Most ISPs these days reserve that right in their ToS but rarely do anything to enforce it. Allowing a third party to get the ISP to look into such issues would be a good thing. Allowing a third party to force an unconditional action based on a complaint such as taking down the content or cancelling the user's account be terrible, though.
So the difference is in using tunneling through an insulator in some instances and not others rather than conducting through the semiconductor in some instances and not others?
I read the first 35 pages of that thesis so far, and it reads as if, yes, this is an attempt to manufacture a reliable metal oxide point-contact rectifier on a plane to be used in much the same way as the old unreliable iron pyrite crystal radio diodes. Please, if I'm wrong, point me to a correction. Your simple, "No. No." is not at all helpful to point out the differences.
A notice letter is neither very expensive nor very much hassle. If they ignore a notice from a private person, have a lawyer send a notice. If they ignore the lawyer, file an action and have the court send a notice. There's a definite stepwise course that already can be used and makes plenty of sense.
If they ignore you and go all the way to court now, why would they pay any more attention if there was an official process to accept notices and ignore them?
Back in the early days of commercial ISPs, when an ISP was an Internet Service Provider and not a phone company or cable company that drove the ISP specialist companies out of business, and when there weren't "safe harbor" and the DMCA, ISPs cared about the images of their respective companies and tried to do business with customers using the services legitimately.
ISPs would take down obviously scam sites when people complained not because they had to, but because they didn't want those sorts of sites on their servers or using their bandwidth. ISPs responded to complaints about email abuse. ISPs would cooperate openly with law enforcement when they wanted to stop a specific crime and would tell the officers to take a hike until they had a subpoena when their was a fishing expedition for user data.
How do I know this? I worked in the field as an employee and a consultant for a number of ISPs back when an ISP was a service provider like the name implies rather than a utility trying to charge extra for certain data.
You mean like a cease and desist letter, or a lawsuit? I thought those existed already.
Why would we worry about this facilitating attacks on free speech? It is one in itself. Allowing random third parties to censor speech is not free speech. Better is to allow the ISPs at their option to pull content they believe their customers posted in bad faith, which responsible ISPs did with regularity in the US before doing so made them responsible when they missed a case of it. ISPs don't want to be known for hosting BS sites, but several governments have made it easier to take all hands off user content than to enforce reasonable terms of service with meaningful thought and constraint. The US is among those, and I'd bet the UK is as well.
You have confounded multiple definitions of "free". Please see a dictionary.
Perl6 has the option, but anything that's Unicode has an ASCII equivalent which is sometimes a digraph or trigraph.
Let someone who reads and writes Chinese develop a programming language with Chinese keywords and syntax, then. Programming in English-like languages has largely been a waste of time, remember. English keywords are great, but using English syntax for a programming language is a nightmare. Everyone uses a syntax that's simpler than English. Even Perl's grammar is simpler than English, and that grammar is massive compared to most programming languages.
Well, then, could you please point to a decent reference where I could educate myself about what you do mean?
You need to look in Black's and not Webster's. You also need to understand an agent/client relationship. You are buying the app from the seller, and Apple only takes a commission just like an auction house or flea market with an absentee booth owner. That appears to be an agency relationship, in which case Apple is only liable as far as they know their client is violating a license, contract, or statute. IANAL, but clearly neither are you.
Is Apple distributing anything of its own accord, or is it providing tools for Applidium to distribute something?
The iPhone was never the only smartphone. They did not introduce the category. RIM and Nokia had smartphones for years before Apple did.
You can have an open spec with a GPLed implementation. You can also have an open spec with an LGPL implementation which would allow closed source systems to use the LGPLed implementation just fine.
What you can't do with GPLed code is take the implementation and close the code for a proprietary system. That's all you can't do. BSD is more helpful in some ways because of this one issue, but it is not the only license to use for an open spec.
All BSD does is lower the barrier to entry for closed source projects compared to the GPL or lower the barrier to entry compared to the LGPL for people who want to also close their own proprietary non-standard extensions to the implementation.
You explicitly according to the GPL can sell software licensed under the GPL even if you are not the author. The license simply mandates that you must also offer the source code along with any binaries you distribute, and that only a nominal fee to cover the cost of duplication and distribution can be charged for the duplication and distribution of said source.
Furthermore, if Apple is selling something on commission for someone else, they're probably not considered the distributor anyway. There's such a thing as a agency/client relationship, and it seems the distributor in this case would be the client uploading the packages for commission sale.
You are assuming that Apple is the "distributor" and that they are not distributing merely as an agent of whoever uploaded the software to the app store. AAMOF, although I'm no lawyer, I'd say the sale on commission implies an agency relationship and that the seller is the one distributing.
I agree with everything you say about the GPL (because you're right about that, so it'd be silly to disagree). However, I think the party that uploaded VLC to Apple's app store is acting as the distributor with Apple as their agent. It's that party that is responsible for any licensing issues as far as I can tell.
Isn't the author and copyright holder of the work you're adding value to entitled to his or her share of the final value?
You're not writing the original code if you are "forced" into using the GPL. Your binaries only must be released with source under the GPL if you redistribute someone else's work that you're using and they licensed that work under the GPL.
No, it's not being forced to publish "your" code. It's being forced, upon publishing binaries made from someone else's code with your customizations to publish the sources as well. If you don't use someone else's GPLed code in the first place, they have no say in the license of your binaries. My advice to you is to not use GPLed code as the basis of your binaries if you don't want to publish sources and quit whining about being forced to make a tradeoff you don't have to make.
The BSD establishes restrictions, too. They are different restrictions than the GPL, but they are real restrictions. They also allow you as a developer embracing and extending someone else's work to impose more restrictions on your fork of the code than the GPL would. So which is more free depends on who uses the license and how.