"This is irrevelant. The result is the same : I have access, for free, to code contributed by a big corporation. Wether they opened it by goodwill or a complex set of business decisions, I don't care."
Irrelevant? You're the one that characterized IBM's OS contributions as part of a "gift culture".
If all you care about is getting something for free, that's your decision. But as I see it, when coders give into an attitude like that, they reduce their share of econmoic power within a lager society, and reduce their opportunity to shape that socienty.
"What exactly is so unusual about this business model?"
Well, for starters, have you entirely written off the consumer market?
Your company may indeed benefit by selling services based on work originally done by other developers. IMHO, those developers made a mistake by choosing to give away their work so that your company can profit from it.
"I think you don't get the gift culture. IBM use the little coder's code, the little coder use IBM code, everybody is happy about it ! That's the point of open-Source : sharing. It goes both way."
I think you don't get the corporate culture. You may give away your work with good spirit, but when a publicly-traded multi-national corporation like IBM gives away work, it's as a result of a complex set of business decisions.
In the case of IBM, it's most likely part of a larger anti-Microsoft startegy.
If you believe that IBM is sharing code from some sort of sense of civic good will, you're mistaken...
"I choose to affect change by passing on the money. By devaluing things others charge money for, you affect change by making it harder for the establishment to compete."
The change you affect by passing on money is the marginalization of your voice. If instead you took that money and gave all of it to support some cause that you may believe in, you'd be affecting a lot more change.
And by devaluing things others charge for, you may indeed make it harder for the establishment to compete, but you also make it harder for independents too.
"The trick is to maintain a personal relationship with your customers"
I totally agree. But the ability to do just that is based on time -- the time to interact, listen, and get to know each other. And you have to justify that time financially.
Some in this thread suggest that I should charge for that, but that just doesn't feel right to me, and I don't think it would feel right to my customers.
By charging for software, I can apply that not just to coding time, but also to personal support, improving the docs, and everything else you have to do to make something good.
Some of that stuff is fun, and some is not, and I think that it has the best long-term shot if it can financially sustain itself.
"MySQL has grown from a $0m business to a $0bn business in just a few years!"
Funny, and a good point.
I had assumed that a project like MySQL could pay it's own way, but I don't know if they are. If even hugely popular projects can't make it, then that doesn't bode well for small-time OS coders that hope to earn a living from their efforts...
"Generally, the software and the support is sold as a package -- so yes, people are expected to pay for support before they have their software working.
You are confusing Free expression with Free beer."
Perhaps you have been drinking too much Free beer, I'm not confusing anything.
It seems you might be missing the point. You're a software dev. Do you help people get started for free? If you do, you've lost the main chore that somebody needs support for. And if you refuse to help them get set up for free, they move on to something else.
An up-front support deal might work for huge and famous projects, but it won't work for most...
Charing for support is one of the popular ideas abouthow to make money from free software, but have you ever actually tried it?
The fact is, most support is of the getting-started variety. Do you expect those people to pay for support *before* they have their software working? Or do you help them get set up for free, after which they have little need for support?
And if somebody writes to ask: "hey, quick question" Do you reply, sorry, but that'll be $5 first.
I'd love to spew forth the vitues of Andromeda, but this thread isn't the right place. Take a closer look at the Andromeda site, and if you want send an email and I'd be happy to explain more...
So far, I've not open sourced Andromeda because I'm trying to make a living and I don't really believe in most of the here's-how-to-make-money-from-free-software ideas.
A number of users have suggested that I charge for custom work, but when I ask them if they would ever pay for cutom work, the answer is always no.
"Similarly, it is sharer's responsibility to make sure they are distributing the content they have rights to distribute. It is not downloaders' responsibility to make sure everything they download is legal. There is no legal or reasonable way that it could be enforced.
-snip-
Now, having said all that, and as far as strictly P2P, if it can be argued and proven that a downloader had a reason to know and believe that the content he/she is about to download (without downloading it first) infringes on someone's copyright then the downloader could be proven to have been guilty of contributory infringement."
A great post, and well reasoned, but the 9th Circuit Napster rulling has already stated that the downloaders were indeed violating copyright law. It's also worth noting that your response hinges on an 'ignorace' excuse which, ahem, is no excuse.
Sure ignorance can play a roll in mitigating damages, but you'll have to demonstrate a basis for that ignorance, and in the context of someone downloading music from Kazaa, you'll have a tough time doing so.
"I don't really see it as you do. Even RIAA doesn't argue what you say here. In fact, they have never argued that downloading is illegal. They have always said that sharing was. Calls from RIAA to users of kazaa and others have been to disable sharing. This makes sense since it is the sharer who actually allows others to get a copy of the content that they don't have a right to share, and it is the sharer who makes and sends copies of copyrighted content to others. In the worst case, downloader could be responsible for contributory infringement; in the best case - for nothing at all. But back to the previous argument below."
Respectfully, no. The Napster ruling specifically indicated that users were violating copyright as both uploaders and downloaders.
The RIAA is going after uploaders for some simple reasons:
They're sitting ducks, and it's easy to find them and collect evidence.
It appeals to the selfish instinct that prefers downloading over uploading. The more people that they can convince to turn off the upload feature, the less efficiently other people can download.
You are mistaken if you think that downloading is somehow more legal than uploading within the context of a P2P exchange, just as it is mistaken to characterize copying complete MP3 files as Fair Use.
"IANAL, but it's clear to me that the list of actions - criticism, comment, news reporting, etc. that follow the phrase "such as" are being used as examples and is not an all-inclusive list at all."
But the theme is self-evident: using bits of one work within another. A perfect copy of an MP3 file isn't close.
The point is so simple, I'm suprised that it's at all contriversial. Anybody unfortunate enough to get hit with one of these lawsuits who plans on agruing (in court as opposed to on/.) that downloading MP3s is Fair Use better find a better argument.
btw, it's also easy to shoot holes in arguments that there is no loss of potential market. For example, I have a CD, I never backed it up, and then I scratch it. If I then decide to download another copy, that's a clear loss of potential market.
"I think that the GPL is only in place because of the copyright laws and therefore wouldn't need protection if those laws were more leenient or non existant. The GPL tries to do exactly what I mentioned in the previous post. It gets the code and the software out there to those who could not afford the commercial substitute or want to make their own modificatons on it. This is where new ideas come from and where old ideas get augmented and improved upon."
And importantly, they have chosen to publish their work under the GPL. If the decisions of those who decide otherwise were simply disregarded, then the GPL itself would be rendered somewhat meaningless.
In a world in which some code is GPL and some is not, it is copyright that protects the respective decisions of both sets of authors. And that same logic applies to musicians.
"Do I think that the prosecution of students, (or anyone for that matter) is justified? In some ways, yes I do. But people also have to remember that in most cases people download media as a precusor to actually seeing the movie or going to a live performance/buying the CD."
I'm certainly willing to believe that you bought a CD by a musician that you first found via P2P, however I'm not in the least inclined to buy the argument that free downloads drives increased sales.
Just look inside anybody's MP3 music collection. There are tons of 'keeper' files in there that they'll never buy the corresponding CD for.
Again, if a musician beleives in the advertizing benefit of having his/her work shared over P2P, that should be his/her decision to make.
"This failed only because the Potential Market case turned out not to be applicable."
But more to the point, it failed. And in that case it was a hand-made sculpture that reproduced the photograph. A perfect copy of an MP3 file isn't even close.
It's also fairly simple to shoot holes in any Potential Market argument. But here, I'm mostly addressing people that download music they don't legitmately own and think Fair Use is going to protect them.
As for people that already own a CD, the case is murkier, but quite frankly that's not who the RIAA is going after anyway. But even in such a case, it's easy to argue that there has been a loss of Potential Market -- for example, I just scatched my CD, but I had never backed it up. Downloading a copy is then a loss of Potential Market.
Which is all different from the question of whether it's reasonable. Remember My.MP3.com? They bought hundreds of thousands of CD's, ripped them, and made them available to people who could demonstrate physical poseesion of the corresponding CD's. That seemed perfectly reasonable to me, but My.MP3.com was sued into oblivion.
Fair Use arguments might fly on/., but they won't in court, and it seems best if people better understand how it actually all works...
"Semantics. I was simply using the term that is commonly used in these debates. I will have to ad that my list of incorrect terms along with pirate and stealing."
It's not at all an issue of semantics. A lot of people are genuinely under the misconception that Fair Use applies to copying music.
Fair Use grants us rights to use portions of another work within a new work, and that's certainly a Good Thing.
But if people think that a Fair Use excuse is going to protect them from one of these lawsuits, they'll quickly learn otherwise.
It's not a matter of semantics, it's a matter of being well-informed.
"She states that going after students who illegally download media is not only OK, but is RIGHT. I wouldn't have a problem with this were it not for the reasons she supports it with."
So then it seems that at least you agree that "going after students who illegally download media is not only OK, but is RIGHT" and just take issue with her supporting logic?
Of course protecting copyright is good -- don't forget that the exact same copyright law protects GPL code too.
"Musicians and music labels alike need to come to grips with the fact that their moneymaker, (CD sales) will need to take a back seat to actual performances by the artist. We need to take it back to the old days when music artists actually sang and performed and didn't just sit in a dark room behind some curtain tooling away on their synthesizer."
Spoken like a man that never lugged a Fender Twin Reverb up a flight of stairs. Would you similarly say that a book author should be deprived book sales, and instead be forced to make a living from live readings?
The 'Fair Use' stipulated in US Copyright law has nothing to do with making copies of music.
Fair Use is about the right to quote portions of one work within another, as a means of making commentary, criticism, or parody. See Standford's explanation or Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107 of the Copyright law.
You might argue that it's 'reasonable' to download an MP3 file that corresponds to a track from a CD that you own, but it's simply not 'Fair Use'.
There's really no argument here, quite simply, from the GNU site:
"Under US copyright law, which is the law under which most free software programs have historically been first published, there are very substantial procedural advantages to registration of copyright. And despite the broad right of distribution conveyed by the GPL, enforcement of copyright is generally not possible for distributors: only the copyright holder or someone having assignment of the copyright can enforce the license. If there are multiple authors of a copyrighted work, successful enforcement depends on having the cooperation of all authors.
In order to make sure that all of our copyrights can meet the recordkeeping and other requirements of registration, and in order to be able to enforce the GPL most effectively, FSF requires that each author of code incorporated in FSF projects provide a copyright assignment, and, where appropriate, a disclaimer of any work-for-hire ownership claims by the programmer's employer. That way we can be sure that all the code in FSF projects is free code, whose freedom we can most effectively protect, and therefore on which other developers can completely rely."
"The GPL is completely different than the restrictive copyrights on music.. how can you even compare the two??"
Because when violations of the GPL need to be litigated, the fall-back protection on behalf of the author is based in the copyright held the author.
Put another way, even the FSF advises against putting your code in the pubblic domain:
"The simplest way to make a program free is to put it in the public domain, uncopyrighted. This allows people to share the program and their improvements, if they are so minded. But it also allows uncooperative people to convert the program into proprietary software. They can make changes, many or few, and distribute the result as a proprietary product. People who receive the program in that modified form do not have the freedom that the original author gave them; the middleman has stripped it away."
No serious interpretation of fair use extends it to include unlimited anonymous unauthorized copying, and it's just this sort of "but it's fair use" thinking that is going to get more people sued.
TITLE 17 > CHAPTER 1 > Sec. 106.: "Subject to sections 107 through 121, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission"
...and...
TITLE 17 > CHAPTER 1 > Sec. 107.: "Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright."
Arguing that unlimited anonymous copying over Kazaa is fair use isn't ever going to go anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Irrelevant? You're the one that characterized IBM's OS contributions as part of a "gift culture".
If all you care about is getting something for free, that's your decision. But as I see it, when coders give into an attitude like that, they reduce their share of econmoic power within a lager society, and reduce their opportunity to shape that socienty.
I'd prefer for the coders to get more.
I think art makes the world a better place, and I think that the people making it should benefit.
For that matter, I'd also prefer to see artists getting more of the pie, rather than less.
Well, for starters, have you entirely written off the consumer market?
Your company may indeed benefit by selling services based on work originally done by other developers. IMHO, those developers made a mistake by choosing to give away their work so that your company can profit from it.
I think you don't get the corporate culture. You may give away your work with good spirit, but when a publicly-traded multi-national corporation like IBM gives away work, it's as a result of a complex set of business decisions.
In the case of IBM, it's most likely part of a larger anti-Microsoft startegy.
If you believe that IBM is sharing code from some sort of sense of civic good will, you're mistaken...
The change you affect by passing on money is the marginalization of your voice. If instead you took that money and gave all of it to support some cause that you may believe in, you'd be affecting a lot more change.
And by devaluing things others charge for, you may indeed make it harder for the establishment to compete, but you also make it harder for independents too.
I totally agree. But the ability to do just that is based on time -- the time to interact, listen, and get to know each other. And you have to justify that time financially.
Some in this thread suggest that I should charge for that, but that just doesn't feel right to me, and I don't think it would feel right to my customers.
By charging for software, I can apply that not just to coding time, but also to personal support, improving the docs, and everything else you have to do to make something good.
Some of that stuff is fun, and some is not, and I think that it has the best long-term shot if it can financially sustain itself.
Funny, and a good point.
I had assumed that a project like MySQL could pay it's own way, but I don't know if they are. If even hugely popular projects can't make it, then that doesn't bode well for small-time OS coders that hope to earn a living from their efforts...
You are confusing Free expression with Free beer."
Perhaps you have been drinking too much Free beer, I'm not confusing anything.
It seems you might be missing the point. You're a software dev. Do you help people get started for free? If you do, you've lost the main chore that somebody needs support for. And if you refuse to help them get set up for free, they move on to something else.
An up-front support deal might work for huge and famous projects, but it won't work for most...
The fact is, most support is of the getting-started variety. Do you expect those people to pay for support *before* they have their software working? Or do you help them get set up for free, after which they have little need for support?
And if somebody writes to ask: "hey, quick question" Do you reply, sorry, but that'll be $5 first.
I'd love to spew forth the vitues of Andromeda, but this thread isn't the right place. Take a closer look at the Andromeda site, and if you want send an email and I'd be happy to explain more...
Hey, I'm totally open to it -- but so far most of the arguments that I've heard haven't passed the 'real world' test.
A lot of people look to mega projects like MySQL as success stories, but that's not a likely outcome for most projects...
Money can help affect political change, and when coders pass on the chance to make money, they also pass on the chance to affect political change.
Obviously you can still make a change without money, but it's quite a lot easier if you have some.
As I see it, when coders are giving their work away for free for professional use by international companies, they are being had.
A number of users have suggested that I charge for custom work, but when I ask them if they would ever pay for cutom work, the answer is always no.
Too bad, now they're all missing the pleasure of being slashdotted...
-snip-
Now, having said all that, and as far as strictly P2P, if it can be argued and proven that a downloader had a reason to know and believe that the content he/she is about to download (without downloading it first) infringes on someone's copyright then the downloader could be proven to have been guilty of contributory infringement."
A great post, and well reasoned, but the 9th Circuit Napster rulling has already stated that the downloaders were indeed violating copyright law. It's also worth noting that your response hinges on an 'ignorace' excuse which, ahem, is no excuse.
Sure ignorance can play a roll in mitigating damages, but you'll have to demonstrate a basis for that ignorance, and in the context of someone downloading music from Kazaa, you'll have a tough time doing so.
Respectfully, no. The Napster ruling specifically indicated that users were violating copyright as both uploaders and downloaders.
The RIAA is going after uploaders for some simple reasons:
They're sitting ducks, and it's easy to find them and collect evidence.
It appeals to the selfish instinct that prefers downloading over uploading. The more people that they can convince to turn off the upload feature, the less efficiently other people can download.
You are mistaken if you think that downloading is somehow more legal than uploading within the context of a P2P exchange, just as it is mistaken to characterize copying complete MP3 files as Fair Use.
But the theme is self-evident: using bits of one work within another. A perfect copy of an MP3 file isn't close.
The point is so simple, I'm suprised that it's at all contriversial. Anybody unfortunate enough to get hit with one of these lawsuits who plans on agruing (in court as opposed to on /.) that downloading MP3s is Fair Use better find a better argument.
btw, it's also easy to shoot holes in arguments that there is no loss of potential market. For example, I have a CD, I never backed it up, and then I scratch it. If I then decide to download another copy, that's a clear loss of potential market.
And importantly, they have chosen to publish their work under the GPL. If the decisions of those who decide otherwise were simply disregarded, then the GPL itself would be rendered somewhat meaningless.
In a world in which some code is GPL and some is not, it is copyright that protects the respective decisions of both sets of authors. And that same logic applies to musicians.
"Do I think that the prosecution of students, (or anyone for that matter) is justified? In some ways, yes I do. But people also have to remember that in most cases people download media as a precusor to actually seeing the movie or going to a live performance/buying the CD."
I'm certainly willing to believe that you bought a CD by a musician that you first found via P2P, however I'm not in the least inclined to buy the argument that free downloads drives increased sales.
Just look inside anybody's MP3 music collection. There are tons of 'keeper' files in there that they'll never buy the corresponding CD for.
Again, if a musician beleives in the advertizing benefit of having his/her work shared over P2P, that should be his/her decision to make.
But more to the point, it failed. And in that case it was a hand-made sculpture that reproduced the photograph. A perfect copy of an MP3 file isn't even close.
It's also fairly simple to shoot holes in any Potential Market argument. But here, I'm mostly addressing people that download music they don't legitmately own and think Fair Use is going to protect them.
As for people that already own a CD, the case is murkier, but quite frankly that's not who the RIAA is going after anyway. But even in such a case, it's easy to argue that there has been a loss of Potential Market -- for example, I just scatched my CD, but I had never backed it up. Downloading a copy is then a loss of Potential Market.
Which is all different from the question of whether it's reasonable. Remember My.MP3.com? They bought hundreds of thousands of CD's, ripped them, and made them available to people who could demonstrate physical poseesion of the corresponding CD's. That seemed perfectly reasonable to me, but My.MP3.com was sued into oblivion.
Fair Use arguments might fly on /., but they won't in court, and it seems best if people better understand how it actually all works...
It's not at all an issue of semantics. A lot of people are genuinely under the misconception that Fair Use applies to copying music.
Fair Use grants us rights to use portions of another work within a new work, and that's certainly a Good Thing.
But if people think that a Fair Use excuse is going to protect them from one of these lawsuits, they'll quickly learn otherwise.
It's not a matter of semantics, it's a matter of being well-informed.
So then it seems that at least you agree that "going after students who illegally download media is not only OK, but is RIGHT" and just take issue with her supporting logic?
Of course protecting copyright is good -- don't forget that the exact same copyright law protects GPL code too.
"Musicians and music labels alike need to come to grips with the fact that their moneymaker, (CD sales) will need to take a back seat to actual performances by the artist. We need to take it back to the old days when music artists actually sang and performed and didn't just sit in a dark room behind some curtain tooling away on their synthesizer."
Spoken like a man that never lugged a Fender Twin Reverb up a flight of stairs. Would you similarly say that a book author should be deprived book sales, and instead be forced to make a living from live readings?
Fair Use is about the right to quote portions of one work within another, as a means of making commentary, criticism, or parody. See Standford's explanation or Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107 of the Copyright law.
You might argue that it's 'reasonable' to download an MP3 file that corresponds to a track from a CD that you own, but it's simply not 'Fair Use'.
"Under US copyright law, which is the law under which most free software programs have historically been first published, there are very substantial procedural advantages to registration of copyright. And despite the broad right of distribution conveyed by the GPL, enforcement of copyright is generally not possible for distributors: only the copyright holder or someone having assignment of the copyright can enforce the license. If there are multiple authors of a copyrighted work, successful enforcement depends on having the cooperation of all authors.
In order to make sure that all of our copyrights can meet the recordkeeping and other requirements of registration, and in order to be able to enforce the GPL most effectively, FSF requires that each author of code incorporated in FSF projects provide a copyright assignment, and, where appropriate, a disclaimer of any work-for-hire ownership claims by the programmer's employer. That way we can be sure that all the code in FSF projects is free code, whose freedom we can most effectively protect, and therefore on which other developers can completely rely."
Because when violations of the GPL need to be litigated, the fall-back protection on behalf of the author is based in the copyright held the author.
Put another way, even the FSF advises against putting your code in the pubblic domain:
"The simplest way to make a program free is to put it in the public domain, uncopyrighted. This allows people to share the program and their improvements, if they are so minded. But it also allows uncooperative people to convert the program into proprietary software. They can make changes, many or few, and distribute the result as a proprietary product. People who receive the program in that modified form do not have the freedom that the original author gave them; the middleman has stripped it away."
For your reading pleasure, TITLE 17 - COPYRIGHTS
TITLE 17 > CHAPTER 1 > Sec. 106.:
"Subject to sections 107 through 121, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission"
TITLE 17 > CHAPTER 1 > Sec. 107.:
"Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright."
Arguing that unlimited anonymous copying over Kazaa is fair use isn't ever going to go anywhere.