I've never seen this happen. Almost everyone I know in the GPL camp acknowledges that the BSD license is more free than the GPL license. They believe, however, that loss of some freedoms is necessary to ensure others. They would argue that allowing their changes back into the BSD code would actually result in less freedom because it would allow others to make changes to their code proprietary and they don't wish to assist proprietary efforts.
I am personally a BSD person. I like the BSD license much more than the GPL license because I don't believe in taking some freedoms from some people to grant other freedoms to completely different people. But for any large project, one consistent license (almost no matter what it is) is better than multiple licenses. You have to be able to work on the code as a unit and cut/paste between files, and that requires a consistent license.
If it's not GPL, it can't go in Linux. That's just life.
You really have no idea what you're talking about. I don't know what I can do other than tell you that you don't have enough information to form an opinion. Your comments are based on serious misunderstandings about how digital cryptography works.
You do not need to present someone with a document in order for them to digitally sign it. If you did, the first thing they would do is compute the hash of the document and then throw the document away. The signature is applied to the hash of the document, not the document itself. So your entire analysis is based on a false premise. A cryptographic signature does provide something extra -- it proves that you had the document at a particular precise time. This is the whole point of their service, so how you could argue that it's nothing "extra" is beyond me.
You put a lot of weight in their sending the signatures to the copyright office. Do you know for a fact that the copyright office retains them? (I honestly don't know. Do you know?)
As for the one hour not being a big deal, remember, the whole point of this service is to prove that you had a document at a particular time. The fact that they don't, as far as we can tell, provide an unambiguous way to tell what time a hash was submitted is deeply troubling.
Again, all I had is access to their few web pages describing their service. Who knows what's behind the scenes. That these kinds of glaring errors are visible just from their promotional material is deeply troubling.
They don't seem to have any kind of understanding of modern cryptography. (And you don't seem to either, since you don't understand that a digital signature is always of the hash of a document.)
Can you specifically state what standard Vista is violating here and show us the clause that it violates? Or are you making a vehement argument about a situation about which you have *no* facts?
I disagree with everything you said, except the observation that their description of a hashing algorithm is not that bad.
First, you are completely incorrect about needing a document to sign it. You only need to hash to sign a document, and you send them the hash. There is no reason they couldn't provide you with cryptographic proof of your submission.
Second, as for getting SYD to turn over the information or to subpeona them, they charge a huge amount for that ($1,000/day plus mileage). You should already receive such proof when you submit the hashes in the first place.
As for converting the time stamp to UTC, I think you missed my point. You *cannot* convert a time in Pacific time to UTC. That's the problem. Consider a timestamp at 1:20AM on the day we set our clocks back. Was that the first 1:20AM or the second?
As for their lifetime membership option, they could go out of business next month. It's simply massively defective for them to keep all your timestamps only in their log. The timestamp should be cryptographic, so that it can be exchanged and independently verified.
As for the stamps saved on your computer, that does you no good at all. They are saved without any validation of their time of generation. Printing the stamps from the log would not produce any way to verify *when* you printed them.
If the whole point of this service is to prove when you had a document, why does it contain no simple way to do that even though such ways are well known?
It is not longer true that by blocking porn (or trying to) they become more liable for the data that's transmitted via their service. That was the whole point of this article -- you can block in good faith without incurring liability for false positives or false negatives.
Congress feared that liability for bad blocking might discourage ISPs from providing "more child safe" services. They were concerned about services like AOL that moderate their forums and remove obviously inappropriate messages opting to not moderate at all rather than risk liability for mis-moderation.
I don't think they intended this to apply to spamware/malware software. But I think it's a good thing that it does.
I don't think you can avoid that. The nightmare scenario would be if the Linux kernel contains eight filesystems under eight different licenses. Then if someone adds a new hook that every filesystem should implement, what happens? Suppose they implement an example of that hook in a file that is GPLv2 only. What should maintainers of filesystems with different licenses do?
Whether you like or dislike the BSD and GPL licenses, almost anything is better than a large project with different licenses such that you can't freely migrate code between files.
So what do you suggest? Would you prohibit ISPs from filtering out spam and malware? Or would you hold an ISP liable for damages if it marked an unsolicited job offer as spam and someone lost the job opportunity because of it?
I do agree that some ISPs abuse this privilege. But I don't think the laws or the courts can decide what ISPs should and should not be filtering. The idea that all ISP service should be unfiltered is, unfortunately, just not reasonable. The percentage of customers who are technically qualified to safely use such a service is very small.
By the way, I live in a fairly remote area of northern California. Cable and DSL are impossible. My Internet access is ISDN. Nevertheless, I had my choice of six ISPs. One of them was willing to offer me the right to opt out of any filtering they might want to apply and to notify me as soon as possible of any changes in their filtering policy. They got my business and have had it for many years.
The short answer is that this won't affect you. You only have to respect patents and copyrights. Third parties can basically ignore contractual obligations.
If you look closely, you will see that SCO is making all kinds of allegations. But it's not saying "Linux violates our patent number X,YZT,ABC" or "Linux contains code that we hold copyright to". It's saying, "other companies violated their contracts with us".
These kinds of claims have no effect on innocent third parties, unlike patent and copyright claims.
The intent of this law was to make it possible for ISP's to offer filtered access to those who wanted it. Without this, they could be sued if some site slips through or a legitimate site gets blocked accidentally.
Your ISP has always retained the right to filter your service and most likely does so extensively. Book stores don't have to carry adult books if they don't want to -- you are free to shop elsewhere.
ISPs are providers of interactive computer services. The 'voluntarily' applies to the the ISP's decision to filter something.
Not that it really matters, since they still have to honor and distribute the license, but they did *not* link to them. These are *DLLs*. The linking only happens when the executable actually runs.
In any event, even if they did link to them, it wouldn't matter. Linking does not create a derivative work. With only a few exceptions created by law that don't apply here, it takes creative effort to create a derivative work. Linkers may be smart, but they aren't creative. They can't create a work (for copyright purposes) and hence they cannot create a derivative work.
The FSF takes an opposing position, but their position leads to truly crazy results. (For example, that a work can be a derivative of a work that is created later in time.)
You are correct that you cannot remove the BSD license from the file. However, if you modify the file and do not place your modifications under the BSD license (which the license does not require), the BSD license no longer applies to the contents of the file, just to the file's original contents.
It is most definitely possible to add a new license to a BSD-licensed file if the modified contents of that file are offered under a different license than the BSD license. This has no effect on the BSD license that you still receive to the original contents.
The BSD license can only apply to code when the code's author chooses to place that code under the BSD license. Since the license does not require modified works to be placed under the BSD license, you can place the modified work under any license you like. (However, you still must comply with the BSD license's terms when you distribute it.)
This may seem a bit odd, but it's the way things work in the United States. When you distribute a derivative work, you need both the right to distribute the original work and the right to distribute the derivation, but you can acquire them independently under different licenses.
For example, file A is available under the BSD license. I modify it to create file B that still contains substantial portions of file A. To distribute B, you need two sets of rights, one to the components of A still in B and one to the original elements only in B. The BSD license give you the first part, whatever license I place on B gives you the second part. I cannot remove the BSD license to A from B though, because I still need it to distribute B, since B contains substantial elements from A.
StampYourDocuments.com seems suspiciously snake-oily. For one thing, their technical description contains lots of errors. For example, read their answer to the FAQ question "What is a fingerprint?".
Second, they do not provide you with cryptographic proof of registration. I don't see what the point of such a service is if they don't provide you with that. Even there "registration certificates" don't seem to actually certify anything since they don't contain their own signature.
The only actual service they seem to provide is sending your signatures to the copyright office periodically. This would be great proof if there was some way to access those signatures if needed. They don't say that there is, and I fear that there may not be. If you can't get to it in order to prove it, I don't see how it does any good.
They do a lot of other things that strongly suggest they are relatively clueless. For example, there certification letter contains a timestamp in Pacific time. Because we set our clocks back once a year, a Pacific time stamp is not reliable for determining which of two things occurred first. The either don't know this or don't care, and I'm not particularly happy with either possibility.
Since most of the actual verification exists only on their servers and you pay a yearly fee, it would appear that if you terminate your service, you lose all your timestamps. They don't say otherwise, and that *really* concerns me.
Note: This is based on a fairly quick scan of their web page. If I misunderstood anything or missed any details, I apologize and will make efforts to correct any factual errors upon notification.
1) The definition doesn't say you must not modify content, it says you must pass unmodified content. So interposing ads will still leave umodified content (before and after the ads, elsewhere on the pages, and so on).
2) That is not the only safe harbor in the DMCA. There are others that apply even if you do modify the content. Google has litigated these in their search results.
It seems very unlikely that youtube will be in any legal trouble so long as they follow the DMCA takedown provisions. Of course, you can never be sure.
Is this the same AOL that complained to the FCC that certain cable companies wouldn't give AOL access to their cable lines so they could sell Internet access over them? Is this the same AOL that argued that no matter what cable services you have, you should still be able to buy AOL Internet access?
Of course, the cable companies replied that they invested in the cable infrastructure, including upgrades to support IP and that they were entitled to reap the financial benefits of those upgrades. And, of course, AOL argues that they invested in the IM infrastructure and therefore should be entitled to reap the benefits of it.
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I've never seen this happen. Almost everyone I know in the GPL camp acknowledges that the BSD license is more free than the GPL license. They believe, however, that loss of some freedoms is necessary to ensure others. They would argue that allowing their changes back into the BSD code would actually result in less freedom because it would allow others to make changes to their code proprietary and they don't wish to assist proprietary efforts.
I am personally a BSD person. I like the BSD license much more than the GPL license because I don't believe in taking some freedoms from some people to grant other freedoms to completely different people. But for any large project, one consistent license (almost no matter what it is) is better than multiple licenses. You have to be able to work on the code as a unit and cut/paste between files, and that requires a consistent license.
If it's not GPL, it can't go in Linux. That's just life.
You really have no idea what you're talking about. I don't know what I can do other than tell you that you don't have enough information to form an opinion. Your comments are based on serious misunderstandings about how digital cryptography works.
You do not need to present someone with a document in order for them to digitally sign it. If you did, the first thing they would do is compute the hash of the document and then throw the document away. The signature is applied to the hash of the document, not the document itself. So your entire analysis is based on a false premise. A cryptographic signature does provide something extra -- it proves that you had the document at a particular precise time. This is the whole point of their service, so how you could argue that it's nothing "extra" is beyond me.
You put a lot of weight in their sending the signatures to the copyright office. Do you know for a fact that the copyright office retains them? (I honestly don't know. Do you know?)
As for the one hour not being a big deal, remember, the whole point of this service is to prove that you had a document at a particular time. The fact that they don't, as far as we can tell, provide an unambiguous way to tell what time a hash was submitted is deeply troubling.
Again, all I had is access to their few web pages describing their service. Who knows what's behind the scenes. That these kinds of glaring errors are visible just from their promotional material is deeply troubling.
They don't seem to have any kind of understanding of modern cryptography. (And you don't seem to either, since you don't understand that a digital signature is always of the hash of a document.)
Can you specifically state what standard Vista is violating here and show us the clause that it violates? Or are you making a vehement argument about a situation about which you have *no* facts?
I disagree with everything you said, except the observation that their description of a hashing algorithm is not that bad.
First, you are completely incorrect about needing a document to sign it. You only need to hash to sign a document, and you send them the hash. There is no reason they couldn't provide you with cryptographic proof of your submission.
Second, as for getting SYD to turn over the information or to subpeona them, they charge a huge amount for that ($1,000/day plus mileage). You should already receive such proof when you submit the hashes in the first place.
As for converting the time stamp to UTC, I think you missed my point. You *cannot* convert a time in Pacific time to UTC. That's the problem. Consider a timestamp at 1:20AM on the day we set our clocks back. Was that the first 1:20AM or the second?
As for their lifetime membership option, they could go out of business next month. It's simply massively defective for them to keep all your timestamps only in their log. The timestamp should be cryptographic, so that it can be exchanged and independently verified.
As for the stamps saved on your computer, that does you no good at all. They are saved without any validation of their time of generation. Printing the stamps from the log would not produce any way to verify *when* you printed them.
If the whole point of this service is to prove when you had a document, why does it contain no simple way to do that even though such ways are well known?
It is not longer true that by blocking porn (or trying to) they become more liable for the data that's transmitted via their service. That was the whole point of this article -- you can block in good faith without incurring liability for false positives or false negatives.
Congress feared that liability for bad blocking might discourage ISPs from providing "more child safe" services. They were concerned about services like AOL that moderate their forums and remove obviously inappropriate messages opting to not moderate at all rather than risk liability for mis-moderation.
I don't think they intended this to apply to spamware/malware software. But I think it's a good thing that it does.
I don't think you can avoid that. The nightmare scenario would be if the Linux kernel contains eight filesystems under eight different licenses. Then if someone adds a new hook that every filesystem should implement, what happens? Suppose they implement an example of that hook in a file that is GPLv2 only. What should maintainers of filesystems with different licenses do?
Whether you like or dislike the BSD and GPL licenses, almost anything is better than a large project with different licenses such that you can't freely migrate code between files.
So what do you suggest? Would you prohibit ISPs from filtering out spam and malware? Or would you hold an ISP liable for damages if it marked an unsolicited job offer as spam and someone lost the job opportunity because of it?
I do agree that some ISPs abuse this privilege. But I don't think the laws or the courts can decide what ISPs should and should not be filtering. The idea that all ISP service should be unfiltered is, unfortunately, just not reasonable. The percentage of customers who are technically qualified to safely use such a service is very small.
By the way, I live in a fairly remote area of northern California. Cable and DSL are impossible. My Internet access is ISDN. Nevertheless, I had my choice of six ISPs. One of them was willing to offer me the right to opt out of any filtering they might want to apply and to notify me as soon as possible of any changes in their filtering policy. They got my business and have had it for many years.
The short answer is that this won't affect you. You only have to respect patents and copyrights. Third parties can basically ignore contractual obligations.
If you look closely, you will see that SCO is making all kinds of allegations. But it's not saying "Linux violates our patent number X,YZT,ABC" or "Linux contains code that we hold copyright to". It's saying, "other companies violated their contracts with us".
These kinds of claims have no effect on innocent third parties, unlike patent and copyright claims.
The intent of this law was to make it possible for ISP's to offer filtered access to those who wanted it. Without this, they could be sued if some site slips through or a legitimate site gets blocked accidentally.
Your ISP has always retained the right to filter your service and most likely does so extensively. Book stores don't have to carry adult books if they don't want to -- you are free to shop elsewhere.
ISPs are providers of interactive computer services. The 'voluntarily' applies to the the ISP's decision to filter something.
Not that it really matters, since they still have to honor and distribute the license, but they did *not* link to them. These are *DLLs*. The linking only happens when the executable actually runs.
In any event, even if they did link to them, it wouldn't matter. Linking does not create a derivative work. With only a few exceptions created by law that don't apply here, it takes creative effort to create a derivative work. Linkers may be smart, but they aren't creative. They can't create a work (for copyright purposes) and hence they cannot create a derivative work.
The FSF takes an opposing position, but their position leads to truly crazy results. (For example, that a work can be a derivative of a work that is created later in time.)
You are correct that you cannot remove the BSD license from the file. However, if you modify the file and do not place your modifications under the BSD license (which the license does not require), the BSD license no longer applies to the contents of the file, just to the file's original contents.
It is most definitely possible to add a new license to a BSD-licensed file if the modified contents of that file are offered under a different license than the BSD license. This has no effect on the BSD license that you still receive to the original contents.
The BSD license can only apply to code when the code's author chooses to place that code under the BSD license. Since the license does not require modified works to be placed under the BSD license, you can place the modified work under any license you like. (However, you still must comply with the BSD license's terms when you distribute it.)
This may seem a bit odd, but it's the way things work in the United States. When you distribute a derivative work, you need both the right to distribute the original work and the right to distribute the derivation, but you can acquire them independently under different licenses.
For example, file A is available under the BSD license. I modify it to create file B that still contains substantial portions of file A. To distribute B, you need two sets of rights, one to the components of A still in B and one to the original elements only in B. The BSD license give you the first part, whatever license I place on B gives you the second part. I cannot remove the BSD license to A from B though, because I still need it to distribute B, since B contains substantial elements from A.
StampYourDocuments.com seems suspiciously snake-oily. For one thing, their technical description contains lots of errors. For example, read their answer to the FAQ question "What is a fingerprint?".
Second, they do not provide you with cryptographic proof of registration. I don't see what the point of such a service is if they don't provide you with that. Even there "registration certificates" don't seem to actually certify anything since they don't contain their own signature.
The only actual service they seem to provide is sending your signatures to the copyright office periodically. This would be great proof if there was some way to access those signatures if needed. They don't say that there is, and I fear that there may not be. If you can't get to it in order to prove it, I don't see how it does any good.
They do a lot of other things that strongly suggest they are relatively clueless. For example, there certification letter contains a timestamp in Pacific time. Because we set our clocks back once a year, a Pacific time stamp is not reliable for determining which of two things occurred first. The either don't know this or don't care, and I'm not particularly happy with either possibility.
Since most of the actual verification exists only on their servers and you pay a yearly fee, it would appear that if you terminate your service, you lose all your timestamps. They don't say otherwise, and that *really* concerns me.
Note: This is based on a fairly quick scan of their web page. If I misunderstood anything or missed any details, I apologize and will make efforts to correct any factual errors upon notification.
No, for two reasons:
1) The definition doesn't say you must not modify content, it says you must pass unmodified content. So interposing ads will still leave umodified content (before and after the ads, elsewhere on the pages, and so on).
2) That is not the only safe harbor in the DMCA. There are others that apply even if you do modify the content. Google has litigated these in their search results.
It seems very unlikely that youtube will be in any legal trouble so long as they follow the DMCA takedown provisions. Of course, you can never be sure.
Men! Patent your DNA now! Then impregnate as many women as you can and sue them. It's their responsibility to abort the fetus or pay royalties.
DS
Is this the same AOL that complained to the FCC that certain cable companies wouldn't give AOL access to their cable lines so they could sell Internet access over them? Is this the same AOL that argued that no matter what cable services you have, you should still be able to buy AOL Internet access?
Of course, the cable companies replied that they invested in the cable infrastructure, including upgrades to support IP and that they were entitled to reap the financial benefits of those upgrades. And, of course, AOL argues that they invested in the IM infrastructure and therefore should be entitled to reap the benefits of it.