Verisign doesn't manage.com addresses. That is the job of the various Registrars, e.g. Network Solutions, Register.com, Go Daddy, etc. Verisign's responsibility is managing the.com Registry. And they manage the.com TLD name servers.
The.com Registry is the central database the holds all of the.com domains registered via the various Registrars. Verisign is the caretaker of the database. IIRC, they get $6US per year per domain. (A nice, and almost guaranteed, stream of annual revenue.)
Now let's see who where else can I go to get the.com database managed? Uhm... I can't go anywhere else. Verisign doesn't have any competitors. That sounds like a monopoly to me.
Now what was the SiteFinder fuss all about? Verisign added wildcard DNS records to it's.com Registry to redirect traffic to it's SiteFinder web site. They were using their monopoly position as the.com Registry to be competitive in Internet Web Search market.
(Note: I'm not against Verisign trying to build their SiteFinder server. Now power to them. What I and others object to is how Verisign chose to implent their service (the wildcard records in the TLD name server). They need to choose another method to implement SiteFinder.)
That scenario sound familiar? Well it sound. Microsoft was taken to task recently by the US Department of Justice over similar actions. Abusing a monopoly position in one area to leverage it's position in market. It's called anti-trust. And Verisign is suing ICANN for being anti-competitive?
Digium for the cards you need to connect the PSTN and hard phones. Asterisk.org for your PBX/VoIP server.
The Digium cards seem a mght expensive, but there are definately cheaper then channel banks. But don't worry the Asterisk software can handle H.323, SIP and IAX (asterisk's own VoIP protocol). So you can use hard phone, soft phones and hard soft phones?!? (e.g. Cisco VoIP phone)
I've installed two of the PSTN (FXO) cards, and phone (TDM) card in a spare server with Asterisk. The cards sound and work great. No hint that the call is travelling via my computer. I'm going to be spending this week-end configuring asterisk as my Dual Line/3 Extension Home PBX.
The GIF file format isn't patented. You can't have a patent on file formats, the order of fields in a sector, etc.
Au contre. You can have a patent on that stuff and Microsoft has at least one of them. It's been several years since I read about it. But M$ has a patent on on older version of a Media Player file format.
A shareware software author figured out the format of the sound file and added into his sound file edit/conveter software. M$ found out about it,and they sent him a C&D letter. He removed support for that patented Media Player format even though he was in the right. He didn't have the money to fight it out in court.
I smell something very fishy going on. And I don't the Linux Gazette volunterrs. I wondered who had the trademark to "Linux Gazette". I ran the TM search and guess what I found.
Word Mark LINUX GAZETTE Goods and Services IC 041. US 100 101 107. G & S: Publication of Journal. FIRST USE: 19950701. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 19960801 Mark Drawing Code (1) TYPED DRAWING Serial Number 78319880 Filing Date October 28, 2003 Current Filing Basis 1A Original Filing Basis 1A Owner (APPLICANT) Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc. CORPORATION 2208 NW Market St Suite 407 Seattle WASHINGTON 98107 Type of Mark SERVICE MARK Register PRINCIPAL Live/Dead Indicator LIVE
There is a trademark registered to SSC. But the application date was Oct 28,2003. The very same day that Rick Moen notified Phil Hugh that they were moving the magazine accord to the LWN article.
I've gone though two Canon Rebel camera bodies. I had them for a number of years. But I stopped using them as film costs where getting to be too much (more later).
I've had two consumer digital camera - Canon Powershoot S110 and S400. I bought the S400 last year (wanting more the 2 MegaPixels of the S110). Same form factor as the S110 (the reason I bought the S110 in the first place).
The S400 has ever bell and whistle that a power user could want. Fully automatic, or manual mode (ISO speed 50-400, exposure control, etc.) and movie mode limited by only memory card size.
But during while at Niagra Falls, I found myself wanting my Rebel SLR camera. There were times I wanted a wider angle to take in the lanscape, I wanted aperature control so I could get a deeper depth of view, and one shoot that I though that would look good slightly out of focus. I couldn't do any of the with my S400. The kicker was that I was trying to frame a shot of sea gulls flying around in the gorge. The zoom of the S400 kept overshooting. By the time I got it set right, the shot was lost.
So after I got back home, I went out hunting for a Digital Rebel body. I absolutely love it. It couldn't suit me better. I like to a lot of exposures when I shoot photos. (I burn a lot of film.) I got the Battery Grip which allows two batteries. So I should be able to full up my 2 1Gb Microdrives before I exhaust the battery. That should be around 600 shots using JPG. And with a laptop and an AC inverter handle the only limitation of the amount of free space on the hard disk.
The biggest difference/annoyance is the cropping factor. The CMOS sensor isn't as big as a normal 35mm film frame. So you wind up with a 1.6 cropping factor. So the 18mm-55mm kit lens that comes with the Digital Rebel turns into a roughly a 25mm-90mm lens. It a big factor when shooting ultrawide shots. With the smaller sensors, you can't match the angel of view you can achive with a film camera.
And of course licenses are revokable (unlike some people here seem to believe). Even if the license is fully paid, it can still be revoked if you are found in breach of the contract....
That would normally be the case of more normal boilerplate license agreements. Unless both parties come to an agreement to make the license irrevocable. That is what happened in the IBM case.
SCO has even kindly posted the addendums to the IBM software agreement. It is labeled as Exhibit D on SCO web page about the case. I'll even quote the relevent paragraph.
1.
No Addition Royalty. Upon payment to SCO of the consideration in the section entitled "Consideration", IBM will have the irrevocable, fully paid-up, perpetual right to exercise all of its rights under the Related Agreements beginning January 1, 1995 at no additional royalty fee.
(The emphasis in the paragaph is mine) The "Consideration" section is a schedule of payments of several millions dollars.
So it appears that the (old) SCO and IBM agreed to make IBMs rights to develop and distribute AIX irrevocable. The SCO Group has to live with the contract. No amount of sabre rattling or public whining can change it.
If SCO miraculously wins their laysuit against IBM, they will get a number of remedies and reliefs. But revoking IBM's license isn't one of them, even if IBM gwas iving away System V and AIX source code with every system that they sold.
OMG! This has to be a troll! SCO would never let somebody as clueless as you speak up in public on behalf of their company. But I'm going to feed the troll anyway.
Let me tell you a little about the GPL and copyright law. I've spend a lot of time studying copyright law and talking with lawyers, because I've been an independent developer under contract and consults. I made damn sure of my contracts were clear and clients knew who owned what and the terms of licenses. So I know that the hell I'm talking about, rather than shooting off my mouth with the very wrong company line.
US Copyright law spells out creator rights in detail. I'm sure you know what those are. And the law also spells out a minimum rights a consumer receives, for having a legimate copy of a copyrighted work, to do things without the permission of the copyright holder (i.e. making one copy for archival purposes, incidental copies of a program made fur the purpose of running and using the software is not infrigement, etc.). Notice I said a MIMIMUM set of rights.
US Copyright law says that the copyright holder can has control over copies, creating derivated works, distributions, etc. They may do so however they please under whatever terms they set. And the law state that the permission must be given in writing.
The GPL (GNU Public License) is a written grant of permission to create unlimited copies, create derivative works, and unlimited distribution under the terms given by the GNU Public License. Notice in my description I didn't say that any copyrights are given up by the copyright holders. The code and programs are NOT given up to the public domain. The copyright holders RETAIN off other their copyrights.
Now if SCO is officially saying that the GPL invalid, I think that its pretty certain that also means that they choose not to accept the terms of the GNU Public License. That means that SCO does NOT have permission to create copies, create derivative works, nor to distribute any GPL licensed software.
Now what does this mean? I'll assume that you haven't put 1 and 1 together, so I'll spell out for you. It means that SCO is committing massive, willful (that's very bad) copyright infringement. That's right time you everytime you make a production run of CD's with GPL software on them, you are commiting copyright infringement. Every time that SCO or one of their VAR's sells (i.e. distributes) CD's with GNU software on them, SCO (and their VARs) are comitting copyright infringement. Everytime one of your developers changes a single line of code in a GPL licensed program, your are committing copyright infringement by creating a derivative work.
Now what are the penalties? Injunctions against SCO doing any more infrigement. All stocks (i.e. CDs) that have infringing material can be confiscated. And since it's willfull infrigement (remember I previously said it very bad), statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringement. And in addition any profits you've made go bye bye as well.
If SCO continues this lunacy about GPL, SCO will facing copyright lawsuits on the scale of their lawsuit against IBM. After the copyright lawsuits are done, there won't be enough left on SCO's husk to sell as penny stocks.
If they know what's good for them, they will take down the sites. If the ISP's don't take down or remove access to the infringing material, then the safe harbor if removed. The ISP can now be sued for contributory copyright as well.
There is also another aspect of this, and other things SCO did during SCO Forum, which greatly undermine their case vs IBM. SCO's legal team and management are now saying part of their legal strategey will the assetion that the GPL is not valid. Hold that thought for a little bit.
SCO announced at SCO Forum that new products, currently under development, will be incorporating parts or all of GPL'ed Samba. I've read that an SCO employee has a session about the GNU Tools shipped in Openserver. And I see that Apache, OpenSSH, and GNU development utilities are shipped with SCO's Openserver OS. All of this, seemingly, in acceptance of the GPL and other Free Software licenses.
Now back to the held thought. How can SCO be claiming that the GPL is invalid, and at the same time be distributing and using GPL licensed software? If the GPL is invalid as they claim, SCO is is commiting willful copyright infringement with every copy of Openserver that SCO, and their VARs, sell.
I can see it now, SCO and every VAR, and Channel Partner sued by the FSF for massive, willful copyright infringement. RMS out in front leading the FSF to victory...
-- Mr. Johnson please get down off of the table. It's time for your medication.
It's interesting that SCO is taking such drastic measures such as the license termination and licensing linux to end users... I can't believe that the court system is allowing this to occur, but I am willing to bet that IBM will not honor SCO's license termination and there will likely be either an addition to the current IBM suit against SCO, or a new one regarding thies termination.
I don't thing a court would issue an injunction against IBM, as that would effectively nullify IBM's contract. I can't see that happening. And IBM doesn't have to worry about SCO's termination their license. SCO can't terminate the license, period. It's written in contracts.
From SCO's Exhibit D
1
No Additional Royalties. Upon payment to SCO of the consideration in the section entitled "Consideration", IBM will have the irrevocable, fully paid-up, perpetual right to exercise all of its rights under the Related Agreements beginning Jan 1, 1996 at no additional royalty fee....
Note the terms irrevocable and perpetual. I don't think it can be made any plainer.
Last I checked this was a PROPOSESD law, which is far different than being an ACTUAL law. Maybe we should start teaching our children how the American government works?
I totally agree. Let's show our children that they can tell their Congressman to vote down this propoded bill. Make sure the Bill neven see the light of day. Show the children they should fight draconian laws such as this one.
The reach and aim of the bill will be whittled down over the coming months, even then it has a very slim chance of even making it out of committee in both chambers. On the off hand chance it makes it out of both the house and the senate, the versions of the bill will be quite different.. requiring even more whittling and compromise in conference.
Or maybe this Bill will sail through committee and both Houses intact like the PATRIOT Act. The PARTRIOT Act was ramrodded through Congress. No congressman nor their staffers knew what they were voting for. A complete copy of the bill was never made avaliable for review. Only one lone, brave congressman (Senator Russ Feingold) voted against it.
Why even take the chance? Kill this thing before it gets loose.
If people didn't already know, there are already laws on the books that handle this stuff. One always could, and can, bring a lawsuit for copyright infringemnet. It's a civil tort. In the 90's President Clinton signed the NET bill (No Electronic Theft) into law. The NET bill made copyright infringement into a federal crime. What more due you want?
Then, after it breezes past our sitting 'I'll sign anything for business' president.. it will almost definitely be challenged in court. The final result will be A) nothing or B) a law that is quite a bit less dranconian and far reaching than this one.
Ah, the old "Challenge it in Court" trick...
But you strategy has a slight flaw. Other laws that were peremptory challenged in court (Library/School mandated filtering, Child Online Protection Act (COPA), etc, were done on First Amendment grounds. Unlike other those other laws , this law can't be challenged until some material harm has been done.
The reason for this is that First Amendment freedoms are cherished. The Federal Courts recognize that fact by allowing premptory challenges for any potential harms the law could cause.
Which means ACCOPS couldn't be challenged in court until somebody has criminal charges filed against them, are arraigned, and the case brought to trial. Along the way the perons defense costs will likely be 10 of thousands of dollars or more irregardless of the findings of guilt.
If the usual course of events happens, the lower court will be reluctent to strike down the law. So the case has to be appealed to the Court of Appeals. This take thousands of dollars as well. And all along you might be setting in jail wait for the case to make it's through the courts.
Would you like to be the sacrificial lamb, er, volunteer?
This is the system and the process that MAKES America a pretty darn good country. So, go soak your knee (it probably hurts from the big jerking motion you just made) and let our process do its work.
The really good thing about about this country, is that we can speak out and stop laws like this from ever being signed into law. Once a bill is signed into law, it is darn hard to get it revoked. The only ways to get rid of it is to get a Federal Court to strike it down. Or get Congress to repeal the law. No Congress has repealed laws from any previous Congress.
the "copy protection" is not "encryption." It's a big CORBIS watermark that can be removed in photoshop. Essentially "removing copy porotection" means, at worse, retouching the photos using any easily obtained, commercial or GPL'd, image editing application.
The watermark also doesn't constitude a DCMA protection measure that "...effectively controls access to a work...". I can access (i.e. view) the image with or without the authorization of Corbis. They are barking up the wrong tree on that claim. Although they might get a lenient trial judge that might allow the claim to start with, but I think it would be overturned on appeal.
They have a better claim with copyright infringement. The modified image w/o the watermark is a derivative work. Creating a derivative work without the copyright holder is a no-no.
That is why Eric said "effectively" lost propietary claim to the code. And I totally agree with him.
If SCO accuses anyone of copyright infrigement concerning System V code, their claims on the included BSD code in is very weak. The accused can claim that the alledged infringing code came from 4.1BSD Lite.
I think if the legal situation warrents it, the USL vs UC case will be unsealed. Maybe not unsealed to the public, but definately unsealed to the litigants. Why retry a case?
And not all of System V would be affected (open sourced), only the code that was in common to both System V and BSD.
Open Source itself isn't a bad thing, it's the viral nature of the GPL that lots of companies don't like. They like to be able to give a little and still release a "Enterprise" or "Enahnced" version that's closed up tight.
Now here a prime example of the biggest mis-conception about the GPL. A company can release a version of their product under the GPL. That code for everyone else in the world, irregardless of how it's distributed, will always remain under the GPL.
But the company's original code it is not under the GPL. They can use that code to create an Enterprise or Enhanced version of the product and sell it as they will. The Enterprise/Enhanced version of the code is NOT under the GPL.
Code that is under GPL ensures that everyone has the same rights to any changes to the code base that are distributed. The is the entire idea behind the GPL. A company can't make change that make to GPL code proprietary. In an sense, stealing the GPL code.
If you don't like the GPL license, use another one.
I don't know too much about what SCO is battling over, but I think the only safe Unix's out there are ones based off the BSD Lite tree. As far as I know, FreeBSD and NetBSD are totally free of System V source code right? So SCO couldn't even in their wildest dreams touch them with their sue happy plans could they? I'm not a *BSD advocate, but is this not true? I know BSD Lite wasn't a complete OS, but after the court battles in the early 90's with ATT and BSD, I'm under the impression that BSD did indeed purge ALL System V code from their tree. The kernel is totally free of ATT code as I understand it.
No that isn't quite right. Unix System Laboratories (USL) and Novell brough a suit against several parties including Univ. of Calif. Berkeley and Berkely System Design, Inc. over large portions of 4.4BSD. The lawsuit was for trademark violations, copyright infringement and disclosing trade secrets. (Sound familiar?)
The case was settled after it was found that USL and Novell incorporated large swathes of BSD code going back to before 1985. This included code was in violation of the BSD license because the BSD copyrights and license attributions where removed. BSD threaten to countersue, and the judge indicationed that BSD was very likely to win.
The settlement terms were sealed, but depending on who you ask, the settlement only affected 3 or 4 BSD files out of 16,000+ source files. That code base went to become 4.1BSD Lite. The common code base that today BSDs derive.
According to Eric Raymond (from 6/10 TheLinxShow.com, 1:00:00 timemark), AT&T and Novell effectively lost propriatary claim to a large part of the System V code. The code that was common to the System VR4 and 4.1BSD releases. This is due to the 1993 lawsuit settlement. SCO is contrained by that settlement as well.
Re:Nice turnabout for SCO, but...
on
Settling SCOres
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Mea Culpa...
D*mn it. I can't spell anything right tonight.
Re:Nice turnabout for SCO, but...
on
Settling SCOres
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Au Contre. The DMCA does apply. The anti-circumvention and technology section (USC Section 1201) is just one of the many provisions in the DMCA
The provision I'm talking about is the ISP safe harbor which protects them from copyright infrigement liability. The ISP gets a takedown notice, they remove access to the material for a minimum of 10 business days, the owner of the web site can send a counter-notice to have the material put back. The ISP is now protected against any lawsuit.
I ought to know. I get several of those d*mned notices every month.
Re:Nice turnabout for SCO, but...
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Settling SCOres
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· Score: 1
Argh. Mea Culha. My bad. I know better.
At least I was consistantly wrong.
Re:Nice turnabout for SCO, but...
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Settling SCOres
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· Score: 1
It's certainly funny about this kernel developer giving notice to SCO about copyright infringement, even if he doesn't take it any further.
Heh, heh, heh. That Kenel developer has a very powerful legal mechanism to use against SCO for violating his copyright. The DCMA. He can send a DCMA takedown notice to get his copyrighted work removed from SCO's internet sites. If they don't comply, he can send the notice to SCO's upstream ISP to get the entire web/ftp site taken down.
Slashdot Mirror
The .com Registry is the central database the holds all of the .com domains registered via the various Registrars. Verisign is the caretaker of the database. IIRC, they get $6US per year per domain. (A nice, and almost guaranteed, stream of annual revenue.)
Now let's see who where else can I go to get the .com database managed? Uhm... I can't go anywhere else. Verisign doesn't have any competitors. That sounds like a monopoly to me.
Now what was the SiteFinder fuss all about? Verisign added wildcard DNS records to it's .com Registry to redirect traffic to it's SiteFinder web site. They were using their monopoly position as the .com Registry to be competitive in Internet Web Search market.
(Note: I'm not against Verisign trying to build their SiteFinder server. Now power to them. What I and others object to is how Verisign chose to implent their service (the wildcard records in the TLD name server). They need to choose another method to implement SiteFinder.)
That scenario sound familiar? Well it sound. Microsoft was taken to task recently by the US Department of Justice over similar actions. Abusing a monopoly position in one area to leverage it's position in market. It's called anti-trust. And Verisign is suing ICANN for being anti-competitive?
It's media that can be only written to once. Yet it can be read from with limits. CD-Rs are one example of this type of media.
The Digium cards seem a mght expensive, but there are definately cheaper then channel banks. But don't worry the Asterisk software can handle H.323, SIP and IAX (asterisk's own VoIP protocol). So you can use hard phone, soft phones and hard soft phones?!? (e.g. Cisco VoIP phone)
I've installed two of the PSTN (FXO) cards, and phone (TDM) card in a spare server with Asterisk. The cards sound and work great. No hint that the call is travelling via my computer. I'm going to be spending this week-end configuring asterisk as my Dual Line/3 Extension Home PBX.
"Litigate. Litigate! LITIGATE!"
Au contre. You can have a patent on that stuff and Microsoft has at least one of them. It's been several years since I read about it. But M$ has a patent on on older version of a Media Player file format.
A shareware software author figured out the format of the sound file and added into his sound file edit/conveter software. M$ found out about it ,and they sent him a C&D letter. He removed support for that patented Media Player format even though he was in the right. He didn't have the money to fight it out in court.
There is a trademark registered to SSC. But the application date was Oct 28,2003. The very same day that Rick Moen notified Phil Hugh that they were moving the magazine accord to the LWN article.
SSC is playing dirty pool not the other around.
The problem with the buttons that control zoom is that they are terribly imprecise. You are always over- or under- your target.
I've had two consumer digital camera - Canon Powershoot S110 and S400. I bought the S400 last year (wanting more the 2 MegaPixels of the S110). Same form factor as the S110 (the reason I bought the S110 in the first place).
The S400 has ever bell and whistle that a power user could want. Fully automatic, or manual mode (ISO speed 50-400, exposure control, etc.) and movie mode limited by only memory card size.
But during while at Niagra Falls, I found myself wanting my Rebel SLR camera. There were times I wanted a wider angle to take in the lanscape, I wanted aperature control so I could get a deeper depth of view, and one shoot that I though that would look good slightly out of focus. I couldn't do any of the with my S400. The kicker was that I was trying to frame a shot of sea gulls flying around in the gorge. The zoom of the S400 kept overshooting. By the time I got it set right, the shot was lost.
So after I got back home, I went out hunting for a Digital Rebel body. I absolutely love it. It couldn't suit me better. I like to a lot of exposures when I shoot photos. (I burn a lot of film.) I got the Battery Grip which allows two batteries. So I should be able to full up my 2 1Gb Microdrives before I exhaust the battery. That should be around 600 shots using JPG. And with a laptop and an AC inverter handle the only limitation of the amount of free space on the hard disk.
The biggest difference/annoyance is the cropping factor. The CMOS sensor isn't as big as a normal 35mm film frame. So you wind up with a 1.6 cropping factor. So the 18mm-55mm kit lens that comes with the Digital Rebel turns into a roughly a 25mm-90mm lens. It a big factor when shooting ultrawide shots. With the smaller sensors, you can't match the angel of view you can achive with a film camera.
That would normally be the case of more normal boilerplate license agreements. Unless both parties come to an agreement to make the license irrevocable. That is what happened in the IBM case.
SCO has even kindly posted the addendums to the IBM software agreement. It is labeled as Exhibit D on SCO web page about the case. I'll even quote the relevent paragraph.
(The emphasis in the paragaph is mine) The "Consideration" section is a schedule of payments of several millions dollars.
So it appears that the (old) SCO and IBM agreed to make IBMs rights to develop and distribute AIX irrevocable. The SCO Group has to live with the contract. No amount of sabre rattling or public whining can change it.
If SCO miraculously wins their laysuit against IBM, they will get a number of remedies and reliefs. But revoking IBM's license isn't one of them, even if IBM gwas iving away System V and AIX source code with every system that they sold.
Let me tell you a little about the GPL and copyright law. I've spend a lot of time studying copyright law and talking with lawyers, because I've been an independent developer under contract and consults. I made damn sure of my contracts were clear and clients knew who owned what and the terms of licenses. So I know that the hell I'm talking about, rather than shooting off my mouth with the very wrong company line.
US Copyright law spells out creator rights in detail. I'm sure you know what those are. And the law also spells out a minimum rights a consumer receives, for having a legimate copy of a copyrighted work, to do things without the permission of the copyright holder (i.e. making one copy for archival purposes, incidental copies of a program made fur the purpose of running and using the software is not infrigement, etc.). Notice I said a MIMIMUM set of rights.
US Copyright law says that the copyright holder can has control over copies, creating derivated works, distributions, etc. They may do so however they please under whatever terms they set. And the law state that the permission must be given in writing.
The GPL (GNU Public License) is a written grant of permission to create unlimited copies, create derivative works, and unlimited distribution under the terms given by the GNU Public License. Notice in my description I didn't say that any copyrights are given up by the copyright holders. The code and programs are NOT given up to the public domain. The copyright holders RETAIN off other their copyrights.
Now if SCO is officially saying that the GPL invalid, I think that its pretty certain that also means that they choose not to accept the terms of the GNU Public License. That means that SCO does NOT have permission to create copies, create derivative works, nor to distribute any GPL licensed software.
Now what does this mean? I'll assume that you haven't put 1 and 1 together, so I'll spell out for you. It means that SCO is committing massive, willful (that's very bad) copyright infringement. That's right time you everytime you make a production run of CD's with GPL software on them, you are commiting copyright infringement. Every time that SCO or one of their VAR's sells (i.e. distributes) CD's with GNU software on them, SCO (and their VARs) are comitting copyright infringement. Everytime one of your developers changes a single line of code in a GPL licensed program, your are committing copyright infringement by creating a derivative work.
Now what are the penalties? Injunctions against SCO doing any more infrigement. All stocks (i.e. CDs) that have infringing material can be confiscated. And since it's willfull infrigement (remember I previously said it very bad), statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringement. And in addition any profits you've made go bye bye as well.
If SCO continues this lunacy about GPL, SCO will facing copyright lawsuits on the scale of their lawsuit against IBM. After the copyright lawsuits are done, there won't be enough left on SCO's husk to sell as penny stocks.
If they know what's good for them, they will take down the sites. If the ISP's don't take down or remove access to the infringing material, then the safe harbor if removed. The ISP can now be sued for contributory copyright as well.
SCO announced at SCO Forum that new products, currently under development, will be incorporating parts or all of GPL'ed Samba. I've read that an SCO employee has a session about the GNU Tools shipped in Openserver. And I see that Apache, OpenSSH, and GNU development utilities are shipped with SCO's Openserver OS. All of this, seemingly, in acceptance of the GPL and other Free Software licenses.
Now back to the held thought. How can SCO be claiming that the GPL is invalid, and at the same time be distributing and using GPL licensed software? If the GPL is invalid as they claim, SCO is is commiting willful copyright infringement with every copy of Openserver that SCO, and their VARs, sell.
I can see it now, SCO and every VAR, and Channel Partner sued by the FSF for massive, willful copyright infringement. RMS out in front leading the FSF to victory...
--
Mr. Johnson please get down off of the table. It's time for your medication.
I don't thing a court would issue an injunction against IBM, as that would effectively nullify IBM's contract. I can't see that happening. And IBM doesn't have to worry about SCO's termination their license. SCO can't terminate the license, period. It's written in contracts.
From SCO's Exhibit D
Note the terms irrevocable and perpetual. I don't think it can be made any plainer.
"A _lawyer_ who represents himself has a fool for a client"
I totally agree. Let's show our children that they can tell their Congressman to vote down this propoded bill. Make sure the Bill neven see the light of day. Show the children they should fight draconian laws such as this one.
The reach and aim of the bill will be whittled down over the coming months, even then it has a very slim chance of even making it out of committee in both chambers. On the off hand chance it makes it out of both the house and the senate, the versions of the bill will be quite different.. requiring even more whittling and compromise in conference. Or maybe this Bill will sail through committee and both Houses intact like the PATRIOT Act. The PARTRIOT Act was ramrodded through Congress. No congressman nor their staffers knew what they were voting for. A complete copy of the bill was never made avaliable for review. Only one lone, brave congressman (Senator Russ Feingold) voted against it.
Why even take the chance? Kill this thing before it gets loose.
If people didn't already know, there are already laws on the books that handle this stuff. One always could, and can, bring a lawsuit for copyright infringemnet. It's a civil tort. In the 90's President Clinton signed the NET bill (No Electronic Theft) into law. The NET bill made copyright infringement into a federal crime. What more due you want?
Then, after it breezes past our sitting 'I'll sign anything for business' president.. it will almost definitely be challenged in court. The final result will be A) nothing or B) a law that is quite a bit less dranconian and far reaching than this one.
Ah, the old "Challenge it in Court" trick...
But you strategy has a slight flaw. Other laws that were peremptory challenged in court (Library/School mandated filtering, Child Online Protection Act (COPA), etc, were done on First Amendment grounds. Unlike other those other laws , this law can't be challenged until some material harm has been done.
The reason for this is that First Amendment freedoms are cherished. The Federal Courts recognize that fact by allowing premptory challenges for any potential harms the law could cause.
Which means ACCOPS couldn't be challenged in court until somebody has criminal charges filed against them, are arraigned, and the case brought to trial. Along the way the perons defense costs will likely be 10 of thousands of dollars or more irregardless of the findings of guilt.
If the usual course of events happens, the lower court will be reluctent to strike down the law. So the case has to be appealed to the Court of Appeals. This take thousands of dollars as well. And all along you might be setting in jail wait for the case to make it's through the courts.
Would you like to be the sacrificial lamb, er, volunteer?
This is the system and the process that MAKES America a pretty darn good country. So, go soak your knee (it probably hurts from the big jerking motion you just made) and let our process do its work.
The really good thing about about this country, is that we can speak out and stop laws like this from ever being signed into law. Once a bill is signed into law, it is darn hard to get it revoked. The only ways to get rid of it is to get a Federal Court to strike it down. Or get Congress to repeal the law. No Congress has repealed laws from any previous Congress.
The watermark also doesn't constitude a DCMA protection measure that "...effectively controls access to a work...". I can access (i.e. view) the image with or without the authorization of Corbis. They are barking up the wrong tree on that claim. Although they might get a lenient trial judge that might allow the claim to start with, but I think it would be overturned on appeal.
They have a better claim with copyright infringement. The modified image w/o the watermark is a derivative work. Creating a derivative work without the copyright holder is a no-no.
Must have been fat finger syndrome the first time and I continued it from there.
The lawsuit was settled on February 4, 1994.
I thought for sure the case settlement was in '93. I guess I was remembering the judge's ruling instead of the settlement.
If SCO accuses anyone of copyright infrigement concerning System V code, their claims on the included BSD code in is very weak. The accused can claim that the alledged infringing code came from 4.1BSD Lite.
I think if the legal situation warrents it, the USL vs UC case will be unsealed. Maybe not unsealed to the public, but definately unsealed to the litigants. Why retry a case?
And not all of System V would be affected (open sourced), only the code that was in common to both System V and BSD.
Now here a prime example of the biggest mis-conception about the GPL. A company can release a version of their product under the GPL. That code for everyone else in the world, irregardless of how it's distributed, will always remain under the GPL.
But the company's original code it is not under the GPL. They can use that code to create an Enterprise or Enhanced version of the product and sell it as they will. The Enterprise/Enhanced version of the code is NOT under the GPL.
Code that is under GPL ensures that everyone has the same rights to any changes to the code base that are distributed. The is the entire idea behind the GPL. A company can't make change that make to GPL code proprietary. In an sense, stealing the GPL code.
If you don't like the GPL license, use another one.
So, good show!
No that isn't quite right. Unix System Laboratories (USL) and Novell brough a suit against several parties including Univ. of Calif. Berkeley and Berkely System Design, Inc. over large portions of 4.4BSD. The lawsuit was for trademark violations, copyright infringement and disclosing trade secrets. (Sound familiar?)
The case was settled after it was found that USL and Novell incorporated large swathes of BSD code going back to before 1985. This included code was in violation of the BSD license because the BSD copyrights and license attributions where removed. BSD threaten to countersue, and the judge indicationed that BSD was very likely to win.
The settlement terms were sealed, but depending on who you ask, the settlement only affected 3 or 4 BSD files out of 16,000+ source files. That code base went to become 4.1BSD Lite. The common code base that today BSDs derive.
According to Eric Raymond (from 6/10 TheLinxShow.com, 1:00:00 timemark), AT&T and Novell effectively lost propriatary claim to a large part of the System V code. The code that was common to the System VR4 and 4.1BSD releases. This is due to the 1993 lawsuit settlement. SCO is contrained by that settlement as well.
D*mn it. I can't spell anything right tonight.
The provision I'm talking about is the ISP safe harbor which protects them from copyright infrigement liability. The ISP gets a takedown notice, they remove access to the material for a minimum of 10 business days, the owner of the web site can send a counter-notice to have the material put back. The ISP is now protected against any lawsuit.
I ought to know. I get several of those d*mned notices every month.
At least I was consistantly wrong.
Heh, heh, heh. That Kenel developer has a very powerful legal mechanism to use against SCO for violating his copyright. The DCMA. He can send a DCMA takedown notice to get his copyrighted work removed from SCO's internet sites. If they don't comply, he can send the notice to SCO's upstream ISP to get the entire web/ftp site taken down.
I just love the irony.