Agree. Somebody buzzing crowds with a styrofoam plane certainly should be subject to public nuisance laws and such, but it really isn't in the same category as somebody who orbits a drone at 10k feet over a major city without a transponder.
There is also a matter of proportionality. If somebody tosses a styrofoam plane into the air and it bonks a passerby, it is very unlikely to cause significant physical harm. Tossing it into a crowd is irresponsible, but if a gust of wind or something comes along then accidents happen. If somebody's vase tips over then they should replace it.
The FAA would require a licensed pilot to operate a drone flying 50' over a concert taking photos (even if it wasn't directly over the crowd). The irony is that FAA certification is of fairly little value in operating a drone, and vice-versa. Typically you program a GPS course into them and they fly it - if something goes wrong it crashes. The safety comes from the fact that they typically have very little weight and are of course unmanned.
This is square-peg-round-hold thinking. If it flies, it must make sense to regulate it like an airliner. Even recreational pilots are dying out due to heavy-handedness - regulating quad-copters in the same way just makes no sense at all.
His videos show eye-level flights along public streets dodging cars. He shows himself flying directly over an active hospital heliport. He shows people having to duck low-level passes in public spaces....He is the worst possible example of someone doing business in this area.
Sure, but doesn't the fact that people have to duck the plane speak to this really being outside of FAA jurisdiction?
If I throw a rock at you, clearly you will have to duck. Clearly I've broken the law. And yet, this isn't considered something appropriate for the FAA to deal with. It just doesn't make sense to regulate stuff that happens within 100' of the ground in the same way as you'd regulate aircraft flying thousands of feet up.
Now, the bit about the helipad alone does start to encroach into FAA territory, but I'd say they would only have a case there if a helicopter were attempting to operate in the area and the guy kept flying his plane. It isn't like somebody operating a plane isn't going to notice a helicopter landing 50 feet away.
Sure, the FAA's rules might be written broadly, but they probably shouldn't be.
Its a nice concept, in theory. But in practice it probably creates (or at least enhances) the same one of the problems we already have in our "justice" system here in the US. It creates overly broad laws that can be interpreted any number of ways.
I understand the concern, but I don't think you can have laws that are resistant to loopholes unless you basically make them so vague that nobody can be really sure what the law is.
I think the Finnish system is more about risk management. You define something that is outright illegal and will definitely get you in trouble. That then creates legal risk that absolutely any activity whatsoever might be found as violating the rule, but the probability of that goes up as you get closer to the line.
The US system basically encourages companies to dance right up to the line without going over. The Finnish system would encourage companies to stay well away from the line, because you can never tell how close is too close.
Both have their pros/cons. However, at least the prosecutors who abuse the Finnish system are elected, unlike the lawyers and corporations who abuse the US system.
They're only breaking the spirit of the law, not the letter.
True. They are 'getting around' the law against exporting crude, by not exporting crude. It seems the law needs to be amended to define better what is considered exportable if they want to stop this.
I doubt that is even possible. There is no law that you can write that somebody else won't find a way to bend. Just look at wall street.
Would suck to be one of those few people who needs to work.... better question is WHY would they bother to work if everyone else don't have to?
They find it interesting? I don't just sit around and watch TV on the weekends, despite the fact that I'm not paid to do anything.
Also, I'm not suggesting that people who work shouldn't be given more than those who don't.
The biggest problem we have is that we are paying people so much to NOT work, that its better for them not to work.
Why is that bad? Why must we use starvation as a motivation to accept a job paying $8/hr as a cashier at Walmart? The US has a per-capita GDP of $52k/yr, so clearly there is enough money going around to feed people despite high unemployment.
Even for those who want to work are finding it hard to find work because of the huge taxes on businesses and government makes it hard to even start and run a business with too many regulations you have to follow.
The issue of regulations/etc is orthogonal to the issue of basic income. Also, starting a business is nice, but it has little to do with employing 99% of the population. Relatively few people are employed by start-ups in any case (50% of people work for companies with more than 500 employees, with 2/3rds of those working for companies employing more than 5k).
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for making it easier to start new businesses, because they're vital for growing the economy. They're just not very effective for creating jobs. That isn't a problem if you decouple having a job with being able to survive - the purpose of new businesses is to grow the economy, not to put food on the table.
You would rather have some eureka moments such as penicillin coming out of useless studies such as an empirical study of why sandwiches grow mould, than a person without goals.
I agree, and so is stuff like maintaining basic infrastructure (doesn't take much skill to fill in potholes, and yet they're EVERYWHERE around where I live right now).
The problem with research is that many simply aren't cut out for it. Anybody can do one task on an assembly line (which is why the assembly line was invented). Most people just don't care enough about science to make real contributions in research/etc.
Honestly, I'm not sure how mail works, but mail has a long tradition of being duty/control-free, and I think there are various treaties involved.
However, "mail" is limited to pieces of paper in an envelope. If that is all you're sending I'm pretty sure nobody will interfere with it.
I certainly see your line of argument. The real problem for larger FOSS organizations is risk. Big governments have no mechanism to ask for permission to do activities like this - you basically have to just do it, wait for them to potentially prosecute you for it, and then win in court. That entails a lot of risk, so anybody with something to lose avoids this stuff.
So, if you're some FOSS project with three contributors and $50/yr in donations and some contributor from Iran comes along, you're probably more likely to go along with it than if you're Apache or Mozilla or Redhat.
"Microsoft needs to spend its resources building something cool (that isn't a phone) and a separate brand for it. "
IMHO they did exactly that with xbox.
But they still managed to mess it up in the long run.
Ironically some of that pressure isn't just from their missteps on the console, but from their missteps on Windows.
Why does the Steambox exist? Metro. MS is killing the OS that Valve depends on to run the games they distribute, and they're making noises about wanting 30% of all the revenue of anything sold on Windows.
Driving their business partners out of business seems to be a trend with MS of late (not that this is entirely a new thing). People only tolerated them because Windows was ubiquitous, but that is no longer the case.
I think one of the reasons that you don't see an "ultimate Nexus device" from Google is that they're trying to avoid gobbling up the whole hardware marketplace. They are positioning Android as the OEM-friendly mobile OS which is basically how MS gobbled up the entire desktop market. The OEMs don't have to do much work - they can just load the OS and watch their phones sell or not based on the merits of the hardware, which is what they're supposed to be good at.
MS is basically trying to define a market where every dollar that is to be made is made by them, but they're looking for other companies to do some of the heavy lifting, and nobody else wants to play in that game. Apple can make all the money on their ecosystem because they basically take all the risk - the only thing any other vendor does is takes orders for device components and ship them. Samsung can't lose money on iPhone screens because they get paid before the first completed phone even ships out to stores.
Agree, but I think part of the problem is that we're stuck on jobs as the means to obtain basic income.
If you have a strong economic base, then you shouldn't really need jobs. Just tax the economic activity, and distribute the money to the population (either directly, or in the form of services/subsidies/etc). Of course there will still be jobs as well, but not everybody will need one.
Paying to employ people who aren't actually necessary to the economy is just creating busywork and is wasteful. It would be more productive to just pay them to stay home, and let companies focus on whatever it is that they excel at.
The problem is that we're stuck on an economic system that is based on the need for human labor, and that need has been declining (or to the extent that it is needed, it is only able to be performed by fairly few people).
Your responsibility for an export doesn't end once it leaves your hands if you didn't do due diligence to ensure that the ultimate recipient wasn't a denied party.
And exactly how the Law expects that the exporter manages that? That's impossible! It's the USA Government that have armed troops to enforce policies, not the civilian exporters!
The Law can expect anything it wants to - quite a few laws are unreasonable. The anti-smartphone-while-driving law in California appears to ban having a powered-on smartphone in the front passenger's purse, which is obviously unreasonable. That is why they're all selectively enforced.
Generally if you show due diligence you're fine. That's why big corporations require all their sub-contractors to screen their own shipments/payments against export control lists as a condition for getting business.
Just look at how many businesses do nothing but deal with imports and exports as a sole source of income. The laws in this space are incredibly complex. I'm sure lots of companies bend/break them, however.
So, if you buy one box of RHEL from Red Hat, then turn around and sell it for $100 more on Ebay, there is nothing they can legally do to stop you. Now, if you modify the software then it no longer is RHEL and they can certainly shut you down.
Psystar v. Apple seems to suggest that, but in every other form of sale you can modify stuff and then sell it. If Psystar had actually installed every machine with a legally-purchased OSX install disk, and applied a patch to every machine, they might still be with us today.
It probably depends on the degree to which it is made clear that the product has been modified.
When somebody buys a car and then gives it to a shop to modify, it is pretty obvious that they don't intend to get back the stock car.
I would think that Debian or such could try backporting patches to Firefox and make that argument in court, but it is probably something that they'd prefer to avoid. Even if they clearly mark the browser as being modified, you can sue anybody for anything in the US and cost them a lot of money even if you only have a glimmer of a case.
I don't know the intricacies of U.S. law, but I was under the impression that the law regarding ecryption algorithms as munitions was no longer in place.
Correct. Software is not export-controlled specifically at all.
Unless there's something else restricting software specifically, there's no economic value to restrict unless you have paid developers in restricted/embargoed territtories who are receiving money across the border.
The problem is that the prohibitions are blanket ones against money, goods, and services moving in either way across the border with a few named countries like Iran (these kinds of laws exist in many countries, the specific targets vary, but Iran is a pretty common one so I just use that as an example). You actually need an exception to the law to ship anything at all in either direction, and those exceptions usually require specific licenses from the government (you're allowed to ship n kg of wheat into Iran or whatever).
Sure, it doesn't make as much sense when applied to FOSS, but the laws were written broadly without FOSS in mind. So, companies and non-profits aren't terribly eager to test them. It is entirely possible that a court would find accepting free contributions is non-infringing, but it is also possible that a court would treat you like somebody shipping crates full of missiles.
It is a big mess, and different FOSS organizations are handling it in different ways. Some try to have organizations in various jurisdictions so that they can keep different activities in different areas. Some just ban it. Some don't think it is a problem. Since nobody has gone to court yet, it is hard to say what the outcome would be the first time this happens.
You hit the nail on the head. I've seen discussion between a few FOSS projects around this, and they all would love to have contributors from countries like Iran, but the legalities around this are pretty muddy, so nobody with anything to lose wants to touch this.
The laws are written pretty broadly. It is hard to see how the regime in Iran benefits if an Iranian citizen can donate code to a project usable by anybody. I could see the argument against being allowed to pay them, or even donate to them or reimburse their expenses. However, the laws weren't written with FOSS in mind - code leaving Iran is no different from oil leaving Iran as far as it is concerned, and generally when goods are leaving a country, there is money going back in someplace else.
Presumably because it would not be possible for such a contribution to be made without the import ban first being broken.
So don't export to them. Export to someone's else, and then they export to them.
That is expressly forbidden with physical exports under US law. Your responsibility for an export doesn't end once it leaves your hands if you didn't do due diligence to ensure that the ultimate recipient wasn't a denied party. This is a fairly obvious loophole otherwise.
Now, how all of this applies to software is anybody's guess.
If you aren't paying, and you aren't taking ownership of something, is it really a violation of import restrictions? I mean, how does that hurt the sanctions against Cuba, for example?
I've been involved in this discussion on another open source project where we have a potential contributor from a fairly-heavily-embargoed nation. The issue is that the wording of the laws is very broad. There isn't much question that we couldn't send money to the developer in question, but the problem is that the law would seem to cover even receiving donations from them (in goods, services, or money).
I suspect the reason is that the laws were written to be fairly loophole-proof. If you spot somebody sailing out of Iran with a tanker full of oil, the ship captain would just tell you that it was a gift and no money was exchanged. Unless you caught the money going in you might not have a case against him, even though he was obviously violating the embargo. So, the law presumes that nobody does something without getting SOMETHING for it, and thus anything moving in or out is forbidden.
I'm not sure if don't ask don't tell would work or not. I know that best practice in corporations is to screen any payee or shipment recipient daily against the various export control lists, and to place writing in contracts requiring their business partners to do the same. However, most corporations are not the beneficiaries of donations of code, so it is a bit of an untested area.
Honestly, I don't see the problem here. The only reason people get so touchy about privacy is because we're accustomed to having it.
If everything everybody does or says is public, then society will just have to evolve to deal with it. Employers who want to fire employees who are recorded having sex will have to fire all their employees. Churches who kick out anybody who has an affair won't have any members.
The only reason we set the standards of behavior that we do is that we can all pretend that we actually follow them...
It looks Mozilla made a deal with Dell to sell Firefox.
Where is such a deal announced? The only people who think such a deal exists are those who somehow think you need permission to sell a company's products.
If I go buy a shrink-wrapped copy of MS Windows for $100 at a local store, and post online that I'll install it on your PC for $200, there isn't anything that MS can do to stop me. Their rights to their product were exhausted when I paid $100 for it, as long as I only install it on a single PC.
If Dell downloads 1 copy of the Firefox installer and runs it on one PC, then I don't see how there is anything Mozilla can do about it. Maybe they can argue copyright issues if they deploy it via imaging of hard drives/etc, but I don't see how trademark applies unless what they install isn't actually genuine Mozilla Firefox.
Given Mozilla is dependent on the goodwill of the free software movement, there are actual damages from that false implication of affiliation. Because "likelihood of consumer confusion" figures prominently in trademark law, that's one reasonably strong legal argument.
If they're installing genuine Mozilla Firefox on the computer, then there is no confusion. The consumer thinks it comes with Mozilla Firefox, and it in fact does. The affiliation is that they can download it from Mozilla's website just like everybody else.
In this case, the first thing the reporter did was contact MOZILLA to ask about the deal they had with Dell. The reporter figured the Mozilla had made a deal to sell Firefox through Dell. That sounds like an implication of affiliation, and a false one. It arguably makes Firefox look bad, as though they are doing something that many of their users and developers would object to. Almost like a false flag operation, making it look like Mozilla is involved. That's not allowed.
You don't need a deal with a company to sell their products. Do you think that every store in the country that sells Brand X Widgets has a contract with company X allowing them to do so?
That isn't how trademark law works. The fact that some people don't understand how trademark law works doesn't change it.
what first sale? Mozilla is licenced. like it or not thems the IP rules.
Citation? That is, citation to a law passed by a legislature, not to something written by a random corporate lawyer?
The whole point of the first-sale doctrine is that you can't control what people do with your copyrighted work once they've obtained it from you legally, other than prevent them from making copies of it.
You are misinformed. It is completely enforceable under copywrite law. Firefox may be effectively a "$0 priced browser" but the logo and trademark are not licenced under any open source or creative commons licence. Your rights to have it or redistribute Firefox using it are, in fact, completely up to the discretion of the Mozilla Foundation.
Sure, they can restrict copying the logo itself under copyright law, though I'm not sure if this wouldn't qualify as fair use (they're not using it to make copies of anything they aren't already entitled to make copies of other than the logo itself, so this is a bit like nominative use). Also, if they just download the logo from Mozilla every time they install it I'm not sure it would even qualify as copying at all.
No matter now many of your down-modding astro-turfing sockpuppet accounts mod me down for saying it, that won't change the fact its true. You can lie all you want, you can deny it all you want, but something very similar has happened in the past.
Not sure what makes you think I'm a sock-puppet - I've been posting here for ages.
Debian patches Mozilla, which is why they avoid using their trademark. Trademark law certainly allows companies to restrict the use of their trademark when a product is modified, which makes perfect sense. If I take a Ford Focus, strip it down, and turn it into a dishwasher, then it isn't a Ford Focus any longer, even if it is much more reliable.
Which is against Mozilla's TOS. Not allowed to charge for installing FireFox.
How hard is that to understand, and why do you keep trying to weasel out of it?
Because it isn't enforceable? What legal theory allows a company to prevent somebody from reselling one of their products? Their rights were exhausted in the first sale, which they made for $0. As long as what they're installing is genuine Firefox without modification, I don't see how they can keep them from calling it Firefox, since that is what it is.
OTOH Mozilla might have the right to limit use of their icons.
Only if the icon isn't covered by an FOSS copyright. They can limit the use of their trademark if you modify the product, but not if you simply resell it.
I'm not sure they can do anything about your icon either if you download it from them every time you image a PC. That would be an interesting argument.
Consider how Red Hat works, Red Hat doesn't sell Linux, they sell services surrounding their own version of Linux, RHEL. If someone else tries to distribute RHEL they get in trouble with Red Hat so you get things like CentOS that remove the trademarks.
Actually, it isn't illegal to sell RHEL at all, even without permission. It is illegal to make copies of it, however.
So, if you buy one box of RHEL from Red Hat, then turn around and sell it for $100 more on Ebay, there is nothing they can legally do to stop you. Now, if you modify the software then it no longer is RHEL and they can certainly shut you down. If you make a copy of it then you're violating their copyright license and they can also shut you down (but that is copyright law, not trademark law).
Trademark law generally centers around the genuineness of products, not how they are used/sold/etc.
CentOS strips out the non-free components of RHEL so that it is no longer illegal to copy/redistribute them. It also strips out the trademarks, which is necessary because it isn't identical to what Redhat distributes.
And how can a trademark policy prevent you from selling a product? If I buy something from you that you have a trademark on, I can sell it to somebody else legally and you have no right to keep me from doing so, and you also can't prevent me from advertising that I got it from you, using your trademark.
You can claim that you have those rights, but that doesn't make it so.
Now, what you can do is tell me that if I distribute a modified version of your product that I can't use your trademark, because it no longer is the product I'm claiming it to be.
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Agree. Somebody buzzing crowds with a styrofoam plane certainly should be subject to public nuisance laws and such, but it really isn't in the same category as somebody who orbits a drone at 10k feet over a major city without a transponder.
There is also a matter of proportionality. If somebody tosses a styrofoam plane into the air and it bonks a passerby, it is very unlikely to cause significant physical harm. Tossing it into a crowd is irresponsible, but if a gust of wind or something comes along then accidents happen. If somebody's vase tips over then they should replace it.
The FAA would require a licensed pilot to operate a drone flying 50' over a concert taking photos (even if it wasn't directly over the crowd). The irony is that FAA certification is of fairly little value in operating a drone, and vice-versa. Typically you program a GPS course into them and they fly it - if something goes wrong it crashes. The safety comes from the fact that they typically have very little weight and are of course unmanned.
This is square-peg-round-hold thinking. If it flies, it must make sense to regulate it like an airliner. Even recreational pilots are dying out due to heavy-handedness - regulating quad-copters in the same way just makes no sense at all.
His videos show eye-level flights along public streets dodging cars. He shows himself flying directly over an active hospital heliport. He shows people having to duck low-level passes in public spaces....He is the worst possible example of someone doing business in this area.
Sure, but doesn't the fact that people have to duck the plane speak to this really being outside of FAA jurisdiction?
If I throw a rock at you, clearly you will have to duck. Clearly I've broken the law. And yet, this isn't considered something appropriate for the FAA to deal with. It just doesn't make sense to regulate stuff that happens within 100' of the ground in the same way as you'd regulate aircraft flying thousands of feet up.
Now, the bit about the helipad alone does start to encroach into FAA territory, but I'd say they would only have a case there if a helicopter were attempting to operate in the area and the guy kept flying his plane. It isn't like somebody operating a plane isn't going to notice a helicopter landing 50 feet away.
Sure, the FAA's rules might be written broadly, but they probably shouldn't be.
Its a nice concept, in theory. But in practice it probably creates (or at least enhances) the same one of the problems we already have in our "justice" system here in the US. It creates overly broad laws that can be interpreted any number of ways.
I understand the concern, but I don't think you can have laws that are resistant to loopholes unless you basically make them so vague that nobody can be really sure what the law is.
I think the Finnish system is more about risk management. You define something that is outright illegal and will definitely get you in trouble. That then creates legal risk that absolutely any activity whatsoever might be found as violating the rule, but the probability of that goes up as you get closer to the line.
The US system basically encourages companies to dance right up to the line without going over. The Finnish system would encourage companies to stay well away from the line, because you can never tell how close is too close.
Both have their pros/cons. However, at least the prosecutors who abuse the Finnish system are elected, unlike the lawyers and corporations who abuse the US system.
They're only breaking the spirit of the law, not the letter.
True. They are 'getting around' the law against exporting crude, by not exporting crude. It seems the law needs to be amended to define better what is considered exportable if they want to stop this.
I doubt that is even possible. There is no law that you can write that somebody else won't find a way to bend. Just look at wall street.
Would suck to be one of those few people who needs to work.... better question is WHY would they bother to work if everyone else don't have to?
They find it interesting? I don't just sit around and watch TV on the weekends, despite the fact that I'm not paid to do anything.
Also, I'm not suggesting that people who work shouldn't be given more than those who don't.
The biggest problem we have is that we are paying people so much to NOT work, that its better for them not to work.
Why is that bad? Why must we use starvation as a motivation to accept a job paying $8/hr as a cashier at Walmart? The US has a per-capita GDP of $52k/yr, so clearly there is enough money going around to feed people despite high unemployment.
Even for those who want to work are finding it hard to find work because of the huge taxes on businesses and government makes it hard to even start and run a business with too many regulations you have to follow.
The issue of regulations/etc is orthogonal to the issue of basic income. Also, starting a business is nice, but it has little to do with employing 99% of the population. Relatively few people are employed by start-ups in any case (50% of people work for companies with more than 500 employees, with 2/3rds of those working for companies employing more than 5k).
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for making it easier to start new businesses, because they're vital for growing the economy. They're just not very effective for creating jobs. That isn't a problem if you decouple having a job with being able to survive - the purpose of new businesses is to grow the economy, not to put food on the table.
Education and research is productive busy work.
You would rather have some eureka moments such as penicillin coming out of useless studies such as an empirical study of why sandwiches grow mould, than a person without goals.
I agree, and so is stuff like maintaining basic infrastructure (doesn't take much skill to fill in potholes, and yet they're EVERYWHERE around where I live right now).
The problem with research is that many simply aren't cut out for it. Anybody can do one task on an assembly line (which is why the assembly line was invented). Most people just don't care enough about science to make real contributions in research/etc.
Honestly, I'm not sure how mail works, but mail has a long tradition of being duty/control-free, and I think there are various treaties involved.
However, "mail" is limited to pieces of paper in an envelope. If that is all you're sending I'm pretty sure nobody will interfere with it.
I certainly see your line of argument. The real problem for larger FOSS organizations is risk. Big governments have no mechanism to ask for permission to do activities like this - you basically have to just do it, wait for them to potentially prosecute you for it, and then win in court. That entails a lot of risk, so anybody with something to lose avoids this stuff.
So, if you're some FOSS project with three contributors and $50/yr in donations and some contributor from Iran comes along, you're probably more likely to go along with it than if you're Apache or Mozilla or Redhat.
"Microsoft needs to spend its resources building something cool (that isn't a phone) and a separate brand for it. "
IMHO they did exactly that with xbox.
But they still managed to mess it up in the long run.
Ironically some of that pressure isn't just from their missteps on the console, but from their missteps on Windows.
Why does the Steambox exist? Metro. MS is killing the OS that Valve depends on to run the games they distribute, and they're making noises about wanting 30% of all the revenue of anything sold on Windows.
Driving their business partners out of business seems to be a trend with MS of late (not that this is entirely a new thing). People only tolerated them because Windows was ubiquitous, but that is no longer the case.
I think one of the reasons that you don't see an "ultimate Nexus device" from Google is that they're trying to avoid gobbling up the whole hardware marketplace. They are positioning Android as the OEM-friendly mobile OS which is basically how MS gobbled up the entire desktop market. The OEMs don't have to do much work - they can just load the OS and watch their phones sell or not based on the merits of the hardware, which is what they're supposed to be good at.
MS is basically trying to define a market where every dollar that is to be made is made by them, but they're looking for other companies to do some of the heavy lifting, and nobody else wants to play in that game. Apple can make all the money on their ecosystem because they basically take all the risk - the only thing any other vendor does is takes orders for device components and ship them. Samsung can't lose money on iPhone screens because they get paid before the first completed phone even ships out to stores.
Agree, but I think part of the problem is that we're stuck on jobs as the means to obtain basic income.
If you have a strong economic base, then you shouldn't really need jobs. Just tax the economic activity, and distribute the money to the population (either directly, or in the form of services/subsidies/etc). Of course there will still be jobs as well, but not everybody will need one.
Paying to employ people who aren't actually necessary to the economy is just creating busywork and is wasteful. It would be more productive to just pay them to stay home, and let companies focus on whatever it is that they excel at.
The problem is that we're stuck on an economic system that is based on the need for human labor, and that need has been declining (or to the extent that it is needed, it is only able to be performed by fairly few people).
Couldn't agree more, but we're long past the point in the US where everybody is already a criminal...
Your responsibility for an export doesn't end once it leaves your hands if you didn't do due diligence to ensure that the ultimate recipient wasn't a denied party.
And exactly how the Law expects that the exporter manages that? That's impossible! It's the USA Government that have armed troops to enforce policies, not the civilian exporters!
The Law can expect anything it wants to - quite a few laws are unreasonable. The anti-smartphone-while-driving law in California appears to ban having a powered-on smartphone in the front passenger's purse, which is obviously unreasonable. That is why they're all selectively enforced.
Generally if you show due diligence you're fine. That's why big corporations require all their sub-contractors to screen their own shipments/payments against export control lists as a condition for getting business.
Just look at how many businesses do nothing but deal with imports and exports as a sole source of income. The laws in this space are incredibly complex. I'm sure lots of companies bend/break them, however.
So, if you buy one box of RHEL from Red Hat, then turn around and sell it for $100 more on Ebay, there is nothing they can legally do to stop you. Now, if you modify the software then it no longer is RHEL and they can certainly shut you down.
Psystar v. Apple seems to suggest that, but in every other form of sale you can modify stuff and then sell it. If Psystar had actually installed every machine with a legally-purchased OSX install disk, and applied a patch to every machine, they might still be with us today.
It probably depends on the degree to which it is made clear that the product has been modified.
When somebody buys a car and then gives it to a shop to modify, it is pretty obvious that they don't intend to get back the stock car.
I would think that Debian or such could try backporting patches to Firefox and make that argument in court, but it is probably something that they'd prefer to avoid. Even if they clearly mark the browser as being modified, you can sue anybody for anything in the US and cost them a lot of money even if you only have a glimmer of a case.
I don't know the intricacies of U.S. law, but I was under the impression that the law regarding ecryption algorithms as munitions was no longer in place.
Correct. Software is not export-controlled specifically at all.
Unless there's something else restricting software specifically, there's no economic value to restrict unless you have paid developers in restricted/embargoed territtories who are receiving money across the border.
The problem is that the prohibitions are blanket ones against money, goods, and services moving in either way across the border with a few named countries like Iran (these kinds of laws exist in many countries, the specific targets vary, but Iran is a pretty common one so I just use that as an example). You actually need an exception to the law to ship anything at all in either direction, and those exceptions usually require specific licenses from the government (you're allowed to ship n kg of wheat into Iran or whatever).
Sure, it doesn't make as much sense when applied to FOSS, but the laws were written broadly without FOSS in mind. So, companies and non-profits aren't terribly eager to test them. It is entirely possible that a court would find accepting free contributions is non-infringing, but it is also possible that a court would treat you like somebody shipping crates full of missiles.
It is a big mess, and different FOSS organizations are handling it in different ways. Some try to have organizations in various jurisdictions so that they can keep different activities in different areas. Some just ban it. Some don't think it is a problem. Since nobody has gone to court yet, it is hard to say what the outcome would be the first time this happens.
You hit the nail on the head. I've seen discussion between a few FOSS projects around this, and they all would love to have contributors from countries like Iran, but the legalities around this are pretty muddy, so nobody with anything to lose wants to touch this.
The laws are written pretty broadly. It is hard to see how the regime in Iran benefits if an Iranian citizen can donate code to a project usable by anybody. I could see the argument against being allowed to pay them, or even donate to them or reimburse their expenses. However, the laws weren't written with FOSS in mind - code leaving Iran is no different from oil leaving Iran as far as it is concerned, and generally when goods are leaving a country, there is money going back in someplace else.
Presumably because it would not be possible for such a contribution to be made without the import ban first being broken.
So don't export to them. Export to someone's else, and then they export to them.
That is expressly forbidden with physical exports under US law. Your responsibility for an export doesn't end once it leaves your hands if you didn't do due diligence to ensure that the ultimate recipient wasn't a denied party. This is a fairly obvious loophole otherwise.
Now, how all of this applies to software is anybody's guess.
If you aren't paying, and you aren't taking ownership of something, is it really a violation of import restrictions? I mean, how does that hurt the sanctions against Cuba, for example?
I've been involved in this discussion on another open source project where we have a potential contributor from a fairly-heavily-embargoed nation. The issue is that the wording of the laws is very broad. There isn't much question that we couldn't send money to the developer in question, but the problem is that the law would seem to cover even receiving donations from them (in goods, services, or money).
I suspect the reason is that the laws were written to be fairly loophole-proof. If you spot somebody sailing out of Iran with a tanker full of oil, the ship captain would just tell you that it was a gift and no money was exchanged. Unless you caught the money going in you might not have a case against him, even though he was obviously violating the embargo. So, the law presumes that nobody does something without getting SOMETHING for it, and thus anything moving in or out is forbidden.
I'm not sure if don't ask don't tell would work or not. I know that best practice in corporations is to screen any payee or shipment recipient daily against the various export control lists, and to place writing in contracts requiring their business partners to do the same. However, most corporations are not the beneficiaries of donations of code, so it is a bit of an untested area.
That, and facial recognition data.
Honestly, I don't see the problem here. The only reason people get so touchy about privacy is because we're accustomed to having it.
If everything everybody does or says is public, then society will just have to evolve to deal with it. Employers who want to fire employees who are recorded having sex will have to fire all their employees. Churches who kick out anybody who has an affair won't have any members.
The only reason we set the standards of behavior that we do is that we can all pretend that we actually follow them...
It looks Mozilla made a deal with Dell to sell Firefox.
Where is such a deal announced? The only people who think such a deal exists are those who somehow think you need permission to sell a company's products.
If I go buy a shrink-wrapped copy of MS Windows for $100 at a local store, and post online that I'll install it on your PC for $200, there isn't anything that MS can do to stop me. Their rights to their product were exhausted when I paid $100 for it, as long as I only install it on a single PC.
If Dell downloads 1 copy of the Firefox installer and runs it on one PC, then I don't see how there is anything Mozilla can do about it. Maybe they can argue copyright issues if they deploy it via imaging of hard drives/etc, but I don't see how trademark applies unless what they install isn't actually genuine Mozilla Firefox.
Given Mozilla is dependent on the goodwill of the free software movement, there are actual damages from that false implication of affiliation. Because "likelihood of consumer confusion" figures prominently in trademark law, that's one reasonably strong legal argument.
If they're installing genuine Mozilla Firefox on the computer, then there is no confusion. The consumer thinks it comes with Mozilla Firefox, and it in fact does. The affiliation is that they can download it from Mozilla's website just like everybody else.
In this case, the first thing the reporter did was contact MOZILLA to ask about the deal they had with Dell. The reporter figured the Mozilla had made a deal to sell Firefox through Dell. That sounds like an implication of affiliation, and a false one. It arguably makes Firefox look bad, as though they are doing something that many of their users and developers would object to. Almost like a false flag operation, making it look like Mozilla is involved. That's not allowed.
You don't need a deal with a company to sell their products. Do you think that every store in the country that sells Brand X Widgets has a contract with company X allowing them to do so?
That isn't how trademark law works. The fact that some people don't understand how trademark law works doesn't change it.
what first sale? Mozilla is licenced. like it or not thems the IP rules.
Citation? That is, citation to a law passed by a legislature, not to something written by a random corporate lawyer?
The whole point of the first-sale doctrine is that you can't control what people do with your copyrighted work once they've obtained it from you legally, other than prevent them from making copies of it.
You are misinformed. It is completely enforceable under copywrite law. Firefox may be effectively a "$0 priced browser" but the logo and trademark are not licenced under any open source or creative commons licence. Your rights to have it or redistribute Firefox using it are, in fact, completely up to the discretion of the Mozilla Foundation.
Sure, they can restrict copying the logo itself under copyright law, though I'm not sure if this wouldn't qualify as fair use (they're not using it to make copies of anything they aren't already entitled to make copies of other than the logo itself, so this is a bit like nominative use). Also, if they just download the logo from Mozilla every time they install it I'm not sure it would even qualify as copying at all.
No matter now many of your down-modding astro-turfing sockpuppet accounts mod me down for saying it, that won't change the fact its true. You can lie all you want, you can deny it all you want, but something very similar has happened in the past.
Not sure what makes you think I'm a sock-puppet - I've been posting here for ages.
Debian patches Mozilla, which is why they avoid using their trademark. Trademark law certainly allows companies to restrict the use of their trademark when a product is modified, which makes perfect sense. If I take a Ford Focus, strip it down, and turn it into a dishwasher, then it isn't a Ford Focus any longer, even if it is much more reliable.
I guess we'll see what happens.
Which is against Mozilla's TOS. Not allowed to charge for installing FireFox.
How hard is that to understand, and why do you keep trying to weasel out of it?
Because it isn't enforceable? What legal theory allows a company to prevent somebody from reselling one of their products? Their rights were exhausted in the first sale, which they made for $0. As long as what they're installing is genuine Firefox without modification, I don't see how they can keep them from calling it Firefox, since that is what it is.
OTOH Mozilla might have the right to limit use of their icons.
Only if the icon isn't covered by an FOSS copyright. They can limit the use of their trademark if you modify the product, but not if you simply resell it.
I'm not sure they can do anything about your icon either if you download it from them every time you image a PC. That would be an interesting argument.
Consider how Red Hat works, Red Hat doesn't sell Linux, they sell services surrounding their own version of Linux, RHEL. If someone else tries to distribute RHEL they get in trouble with Red Hat so you get things like CentOS that remove the trademarks.
Actually, it isn't illegal to sell RHEL at all, even without permission. It is illegal to make copies of it, however.
So, if you buy one box of RHEL from Red Hat, then turn around and sell it for $100 more on Ebay, there is nothing they can legally do to stop you. Now, if you modify the software then it no longer is RHEL and they can certainly shut you down. If you make a copy of it then you're violating their copyright license and they can also shut you down (but that is copyright law, not trademark law).
Trademark law generally centers around the genuineness of products, not how they are used/sold/etc.
CentOS strips out the non-free components of RHEL so that it is no longer illegal to copy/redistribute them. It also strips out the trademarks, which is necessary because it isn't identical to what Redhat distributes.
And how can a trademark policy prevent you from selling a product? If I buy something from you that you have a trademark on, I can sell it to somebody else legally and you have no right to keep me from doing so, and you also can't prevent me from advertising that I got it from you, using your trademark.
You can claim that you have those rights, but that doesn't make it so.
Now, what you can do is tell me that if I distribute a modified version of your product that I can't use your trademark, because it no longer is the product I'm claiming it to be.