> So you've seen people spending major investment to find an alternative solution to an already-solved problem, instead of actually working on something that hasn't been done yet, and you act like that's a good thing??
No, but I think it's a good thing when they find a _better_ solution. The recent example in the OSS community is OpenBSD PF/CARP: because the cisco VRRP protocol was locked by patents, the OpenBSD team had to find another solution: they found a solution that is actually better than the cisco one. If they'd simply used the VRRP protocol, we wouldn't have the better solution.
There are other examples like this too.
> (I'll be by later to smash the windows in your home so you can research new and innovative glassmaking techniques...)
That example doesn't fit.
I see that you can't actually contribute anything useful to the debate, either. Why did you bother responding ?
> The problem is that a hell of a lot of works that ought to be in the public domain are not.
I'd like to know what works being out of the public domain are hindering the progress of society. On the other hand, by being protected, the authors are making money (and, arguably, only making money because they are good at what they do, otherwise why would people pay money for works that are not good?) and using their talents to create new works. This seems to be a better social bargain than allowing their works to be ripped off by the untalented masses, and forcing the talented guy to serve fries to support his writing habit.
> Well, as to the first point, I suppose that the author will know better the next time, although typically it's not as though they'd be likely to get compensation anyhow, since the expenses of working with authors tends to drive people towards having to do things independently.
These are poor excuses and arguments.
> As to the second, I personally favor 5 year copyrights that at most could be renewed so as to last a total of 25 years. So it's not as though such an author would be missing much.
So when a work is written as a 20 year old, and found that it is not discovered until they are 40 years old, then it's tough for them that they don't get any recompense for it? So a creative writer across the course of their career has to bet on a 25 year window of viability for their work? That's a great incentive to attract people into creative pursuits.
> Terms got much longer, that "moral rights" bullshit made a tiny bit of headway, international copyright treaties didn't end up in the trash where they belong, formalities were largely forgotten, the utility doctrine has been gutted, etc.
Your "argument" has no substance: you just rattle off big words and provide no tangible link to economic or social impact.
> Works are copyrighted regardless of attribution.
Since I have IP training, I know these things.
> Since a copyright is burdensome on the public
How is it burdensome? It's not burdensome to the creators of works, it's burdensome to the people that want to use the works. Sounds fair enough to me: if the work is valuable enough that someone would want to use it, then it seems fair that the creator of the work should receive some compensation.
> Formalities help by making it clear what is in fact copyrighted, by preserving those works despite the author, and by weeding out authors who want something for nothing.
Formalities just introduce a hurdle that's easier for those with greater resources, and what's this about authors "want something for nothing" - garbage - they go starving if their works are not good enough, on other hand, if they are good enough, and demand is their, then sure they can obtain payment/etc.
> Without copyrights, some works are created (we know this from history) and the public can fully enjoy all of them.
History is bunk. Society is different now: you've heard the term "the information society", it means that content is a valuable commodity: and what's valuable is worth protecting. Maybe 200 years there were few people creating intangible works, but a lot of society survives on intangible works, and survives because they have some certainly that their works are protected by rights and they are able to charge money for the use of the works (or, prevent other people from ripping off their hard work unfairly).
> This isn't really subject to debate -- this is how it is, as you'd know if you spent any amount of time studying the issue.
This is up for debate, and since I have a postgraduate degree in IP, I studied the issue, thank you:-). You should read a few journals! The only people that argue over these fundamentals are the small segment of society that think (unrealistically) that everything should be free.
> Yes, and how does it benefit the public for your emails to be copyrighted?
> This is seriously short-sighted. It has caused a gigantic problem.
And those problems are ?
> While in a proper system, people might not initially be aware that they need to register, the vast majority of them likely couldn't care less.
No, not until they find that their works are being used by other people without any compensation. Nor until 20 years later when the work becomes relevant for some other reason.
> The US got along GREAT when it required registration, and yet everything's been going to hell since we foolishly passed the 1976 Act.
Explain the problems to me?
> That might be very true, but who the fuck cares what you want? Just you.
Sure, and every one else who puts content on the web and either puts a "authored by" or "copyright by" does that not because they want attribution but for some other reason. Get real.
> Again, this would be a huge disincentive: why create a work when you don't obtain attribution for it ? > Because it's your job, or hobby, or school assignment, or was comissioned, or it's for art's sake, or any of a hundred reasons.
Then these people can choose to publish their works without attribution or release them to the public domain. Other people can choose the opposite. Under your system, we're all forced to once choice.
> Copyright is only _one_ incentive.
Wrong: copyright isn't an incentive - it just ensures that protection is in place, irrespective of the motivation. Incentive is typically for other reasons: enjoyment, fame, career, money, hobby, family reasons, etc.
Default coypright ensures that my emails are default protected at no cost automatically from someone compiling a commercial publication. Of course, if I felt the other way, I could just mark them as "released to the public domain".
In an "automatic" system, the default power leans towards the creator of the work, not towards those who want to appropriate the work. I think you have a deeply flawed and misplaced understanding of the situation control to most of the people in the world who if given the choice would say they'd prefer to have this right over things they've created.
In return. You seem to have no experience or evidence to back up your assertion. On the contrary, I've spoken to mature (40-50+) career patent attorney's who tell me that contrary to what you would think, a lot of innovation actually comes from people trying to work _around_ existing patents. In doing so, they discover new and novel ways and so on - something that would not happen if they were able to (commercially) use existing technology.
Come back when you have more than just a loud-mouthed and ill-informed opinion to work from.
I don't think that is a workable model. The idea behind automatic copyright of works is that it protects works created by average citizens. In a system that requires registration, all that happens is that large organisations with financial ability will ensure that all of their works are registered, and all the average citizens won't - finding out that their mass of web content (as per Pew study) gets ripped off and used by someone else. The rest of the world survived for much longer than the US with automatic copyright attracting works and it caused no problems.
Secondly, regarding putting things into the public domain. I don't think so. If I create a noteworthy paper, then I'm pleased that people can read it and use it, but the last thing I want is for other people to strip off the attribution and distribute the work - leaving me without any recognition. Again, this would be a huge disincentive: why create a work when you don't obtain attribution for it ? Sure there are some people that are happy just to release their works to the world, but some of us actually need to make a living and build a reputation with our works.
Well, the figures I've seen from customs activities border enforcement show that detected counterfeit computer software and music and related multimedia have increased 400% in the last couple of years, and piracy rates in this area are 40%.
When you have _actual evidence_ of this level of lost income, which for the government translates into lost taxes, then you understand why the government is stepping in and helping.
I'm sure if the figures were much lower, the government couldn't care less.
What a load of garbage: you want to tax people for merely having copyrighted works? Not only would be virtually impossible to implement, but would create a huge disincentive to create copyright works (I'd stop writing informal papers, people would stop creating open source software - all for fear that the tax department levy bills on them).
As it stands, (a) if you make money out of the works you have to pay tax anyway, and (b) if you are a business, the accounting rules are increasingly requiring that valuable intangibles are accounted for as assets anyway.
> I'm talking about the fundamentals of economics, the ridiculousness of enforcing scarcity on a resource that demands otherwise, and the need to acknowledge that.
You are confused. The fundamentals of economics are about supply, demand and scarcity: but you failed to differentiate properly between those fundamentals applied to the "expression" and the "medium".
The digital bits may be abundant, easily copied, at zero code; but the _expression_ put into those digital bits by the artists and so on isn't - it costs them time, effort and money to make their works, and so they should have the right to choose how they want to restrict the availability of the work.
Furthermore, you forgot about "choice" and "freedom", in that abolishing protection for works that artists creates is to _force_ them to place their works into the public domain. I think the world is a better place when they have the choice over how to exercise their rights in their works.
In your world, all the artists will be making tunes in the evening while serving fries during the day: never able to make money from their tunes because the rest of society forced the works to be free.
Interesting People 2004/05:
I know for a FACT they passed 100,000 last November. One thing the Louis
calculation may have missed is Google's obsession with low cost. For example
read the company's technical white paper on the Google file system. It was
designed so that Google could purchase the cheapest disks possible,
expecting them to have a high failure rate. What happens when you factor
cost obsession into his equation?
> Look at Linux. Who would ever write a huge undertaking like an operating system only to give it away for free;
Umm, all the people that are confident that their efforts are _protected_ by copyright (via. the GPL) from being secretly used and leveraged for commercial purposes. Just look at the recent Germany case regarding injunction to enforce GPL.
> I know, from several years of working in the radio and music industries, more than a few musicians who could give a shit about their music being copied; as long as people are listening to it, they're happy.
No thanks. If my music were really good, I'd prefer some nice income to buy a large house, provide for my children, continue my creatively unhindered by the need to earn money, and other things. What's the name of these musicians, I think I'll pirate their works.
> But we need to acknowledge that our IP laws are broken in the modern era, and rather than trying to nudge and tweak and suspender up their sagging morass, we need to figure out a sensible approach.
Wow, you must be the first person to have thought of this.
Perhaps people should read the submissions to the UK Patent Office consultation regarding patentability of software. One of the key submissions states that (I paraphrase) "it is observed that there are multiple methods used in the EU for the development of software, including open source and commercial models, all of which seem to work, and at present there seems no specific reason to favour one over the other".
OpenBSD is only a cisco killer in SOHO and SME type environments. Even then, part of the problem is that it still requires expertise to setup - there are a lot of CCIE/CCNE out there, and no so many pf/carp/openbsd experts.
The thing for the OpenBSD guys to do is make OpenBSD an attractive platform to OEM's who will build more user friendly solutions onto it.
I would rather the OpenBSD team concentrated on things other than SMP. For the large proportion of cost-effective routing/firewall systems, SMP isn't a priority.
What is a priority is (a) continual stripping out of GNU licensed artifacts, (b) continual code "securisation", (c) continual security features (i.e. CARP, etc).
SMP sounds like a nice bit of candy: but I'd prefer the healthy food first.
I am confident that this is where technology is going, and in several years time we will be there. The others posters mention freenet: which I didn't know about but really just validates the idea. I'm not sure if freenet is up to the task, I suspect that a good solution would require substantially well thought out engineering effort (aka. W3C or IETF style), and these grassroots open source efforts like freenet just don't have the appropriate input to produce a long term sustaintable solution.
HTML/HTTP/TCP was nice for a first-generation approach, but like many other first generations (e.g. simplistic routing protocols, now we have OSPF, BGP, etc) they just have scalability problems that are only overcome by a new generation of technology.
BBC Technology is increasingly less funded by licenses payers money, it is actually up for sale to private interests, expected to be completed by end of year.
They are just trying to use open source as a viable part of business strategy like everyone else.
I, but probably others, realised not long ago that it's rapidly approaching the point at which the characteristics of "Internet V2 (post WWW)" can be ascertained, and certainly apart from high speed, one of them as the death of unidirectional WWW.
The problem with HTTP is (as you see with the slashdot effect) that there is no inherent mass-distribution/replication in it. What will be the next big technology will be some sort of fluid merge between HTTP, P2P (BT, etc), FTP, to bring a real massively distributed content layer. Built into this protocol would be multicast as well (in a way, P2P is inherently multicast).
This means that when you browse the web, your browsers transport layer is really acting as real-time P2P, and your network ISP would install seamless "content caching" (e.g. akamani style) as part of the network. Effectively, there needs to be a replacement of HTTP/TCP as a new "DTP" (distributed transport protocol).
What I would say to you is if you are going to enter into a debate that involves law, you should understand how it works. Come back when you have legal training, otherwise most of what you say is irrelevant and useless.
> And that license is displaying in the summary information of the content.
Not in all cases. Look at the one referred to in this article, and look at a number of others. In fact, I was previously confused, I thought that kde-look showed no licenses for any content, now I realise that it only shows licenses for some content. This is even worse because now it suggests something different: what's the assumption for a user if there is no specific license? It's suggesting that user (given a choice at upload time) didn't care to restrict the way in which the work could be used.
''Given the preponderance of wallpapers at kde-look that are licensed under "not for commercial use" terms''
That argument doesn't work because kde-look simply doesn't present the licenses with the works, so anyone using the work has nothing to go by. You only see license if you try to Upload, and what you see is that there are a wide variety of licenses include "Other", this gives no basis for a reasonable assumption that the works are typically non-commercial.
Like I said: you should do some reading, that's only one limited reference that I provided, why don't you survey the topic from multiple perspectives to get a proper in-depth understanding.
The DMCA splits the rights into two "right to access" and "right to copy"; you need to be an authorised user to have a "right to access" a work before you can then have any other rights, such as the "right to copy".
In terms of reverse engineering, at least in the UK under the CDPA 1988, it only applies if you are already a legitimate right holder of the work in question. In other words, you cannot steal a program and reverse engineer it, but you can purchase and reverse engineer. Also, in the UK, the provisions _specifically_ state that any EULA clauses that attempt to prohibit reverse engineering are null and void. So the software license cannot stop you from the right to reverse engineer.
"Also, to be clear, I don't consider reverse engineering to be "a right" as the poster does."
If you look at statutory copyright law, e.g. the UK CDPA 1988, you will see that it is "a right". So if you believe something that's different to the reality of the law (and the cases that have been decided upon it), then good luck to you, and say hello to the fairies for me.
All opinions are reserved until more is known about from Linspire, but you are right that in terms of "good faith", Linspire are on the backfoot and now they have to prove their case (not in a court of law, but to the general public).
"You say there's an established legal precedent. I'm calling your bluff."
You are just wrong. Not only that, you can't be bothered to do your own research once you've been given the hint. Poor attitude. Google would have provided you with the following to start. Then try some basic reading on law to get a clue.
http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/license.html#imp li ed
Slashdot Mirror
Did they check for any inband compression? They data they're sending isn't randomised.
> So you've seen people spending major investment to find an alternative solution to an already-solved problem, instead of actually working on something that hasn't been done yet, and you act like that's a good thing??
No, but I think it's a good thing when they find a _better_ solution. The recent example in the OSS community is OpenBSD PF/CARP: because the cisco VRRP protocol was locked by patents, the OpenBSD team had to find another solution: they found a solution that is actually better than the cisco one. If they'd simply used the VRRP protocol, we wouldn't have the better solution.
There are other examples like this too.
> (I'll be by later to smash the windows in your home so you can research new and innovative glassmaking techniques...)
That example doesn't fit.
I see that you can't actually contribute anything useful to the debate, either. Why did you bother responding ?
> The problem is that a hell of a lot of works that ought to be in the public domain are not.
I'd like to know what works being out of the public domain are hindering the progress of society. On the other hand, by being protected, the authors are making money (and, arguably, only making money because they are good at what they do, otherwise why would people pay money for works that are not good?) and using their talents to create new works. This seems to be a better social bargain than allowing their works to be ripped off by the untalented masses, and forcing the talented guy to serve fries to support his writing habit.
> Well, as to the first point, I suppose that the author will know better the next time, although typically it's not as though they'd be likely to get compensation anyhow, since the expenses of working with authors tends to drive people towards having to do things independently.
These are poor excuses and arguments.
> As to the second, I personally favor 5 year copyrights that at most could be renewed so as to last a total of 25 years. So it's not as though such an author would be missing much.
So when a work is written as a 20 year old, and found that it is not discovered until they are 40 years old, then it's tough for them that they don't get any recompense for it? So a creative writer across the course of their career has to bet on a 25 year window of viability for their work? That's a great incentive to attract people into creative pursuits.
> Terms got much longer, that "moral rights" bullshit made a tiny bit of headway, international copyright treaties didn't end up in the trash where they belong, formalities were largely forgotten, the utility doctrine has been gutted, etc.
Your "argument" has no substance: you just rattle off big words and provide no tangible link to economic or social impact.
> Works are copyrighted regardless of attribution.
Since I have IP training, I know these things.
> Since a copyright is burdensome on the public
How is it burdensome? It's not burdensome to the creators of works, it's burdensome to the people that want to use the works. Sounds fair enough to me: if the work is valuable enough that someone would want to use it, then it seems fair that the creator of the work should receive some compensation.
> Formalities help by making it clear what is in fact copyrighted, by preserving those works despite the author, and by weeding out authors who want something for nothing.
Formalities just introduce a hurdle that's easier for those with greater resources, and what's this about authors "want something for nothing" - garbage - they go starving if their works are not good enough, on other hand, if they are good enough, and demand is their, then sure they can obtain payment/etc.
> Without copyrights, some works are created (we know this from history) and the public can fully enjoy all of them.
History is bunk. Society is different now: you've heard the term "the information society", it means that content is a valuable commodity: and what's valuable is worth protecting. Maybe 200 years there were few people creating intangible works, but a lot of society survives on intangible works, and survives because they have some certainly that their works are protected by rights and they are able to charge money for the use of the works (or, prevent other people from ripping off their hard work unfairly).
> This isn't really subject to debate -- this is how it is, as you'd know if you spent any amount of time studying the issue.
This is up for debate, and since I have a postgraduate degree in IP, I studied the issue, thank you
> Yes, and how does it benefit the public for your emails to be copyrighted?
B
> This is seriously short-sighted. It has caused a gigantic problem.
And those problems are ?
> While in a proper system, people might not initially be aware that they need to register, the vast majority of them likely couldn't care less.
No, not until they find that their works are being used by other people without any compensation. Nor until 20 years later when the work becomes relevant for some other reason.
> The US got along GREAT when it required registration, and yet everything's been going to hell since we foolishly passed the 1976 Act.
Explain the problems to me?
> That might be very true, but who the fuck cares what you want? Just you.
Sure, and every one else who puts content on the web and either puts a "authored by" or "copyright by" does that not because they want attribution but for some other reason. Get real.
> Again, this would be a huge disincentive: why create a work when you don't obtain attribution for it ?
> Because it's your job, or hobby, or school assignment, or was comissioned, or it's for art's sake, or any of a hundred reasons.
Then these people can choose to publish their works without attribution or release them to the public domain. Other people can choose the opposite. Under your system, we're all forced to once choice.
> Copyright is only _one_ incentive.
Wrong: copyright isn't an incentive - it just ensures that protection is in place, irrespective of the motivation. Incentive is typically for other reasons: enjoyment, fame, career, money, hobby, family reasons, etc.
Default coypright ensures that my emails are default protected at no cost automatically from someone compiling a commercial publication. Of course, if I felt the other way, I could just mark them as "released to the public domain".
In an "automatic" system, the default power leans towards the creator of the work, not towards those who want to appropriate the work. I think you have a deeply flawed and misplaced understanding of the situation control to most of the people in the world who if given the choice would say they'd prefer to have this right over things they've created.
> I say bullshit.
In return. You seem to have no experience or evidence to back up your assertion. On the contrary, I've spoken to mature (40-50+) career patent attorney's who tell me that contrary to what you would think, a lot of innovation actually comes from people trying to work _around_ existing patents. In doing so, they discover new and novel ways and so on - something that would not happen if they were able to (commercially) use existing technology.
Come back when you have more than just a loud-mouthed and ill-informed opinion to work from.
I don't think that is a workable model. The idea behind automatic copyright of works is that it protects works created by average citizens. In a system that requires registration, all that happens is that large organisations with financial ability will ensure that all of their works are registered, and all the average citizens won't - finding out that their mass of web content (as per Pew study) gets ripped off and used by someone else. The rest of the world survived for much longer than the US with automatic copyright attracting works and it caused no problems.
Secondly, regarding putting things into the public domain. I don't think so. If I create a noteworthy paper, then I'm pleased that people can read it and use it, but the last thing I want is for other people to strip off the attribution and distribute the work - leaving me without any recognition. Again, this would be a huge disincentive: why create a work when you don't obtain attribution for it ? Sure there are some people that are happy just to release their works to the world, but some of us actually need to make a living and build a reputation with our works.
Your idea is deeply flawed.
Well, the figures I've seen from customs activities border enforcement show that detected counterfeit computer software and music and related multimedia have increased 400% in the last couple of years, and piracy rates in this area are 40%.
When you have _actual evidence_ of this level of lost income, which for the government translates into lost taxes, then you understand why the government is stepping in and helping.
I'm sure if the figures were much lower, the government couldn't care less.
What a load of garbage: you want to tax people for merely having copyrighted works? Not only would be virtually impossible to implement, but would create a huge disincentive to create copyright works (I'd stop writing informal papers, people would stop creating open source software - all for fear that the tax department levy bills on them).
As it stands, (a) if you make money out of the works you have to pay tax anyway, and (b) if you are a business, the accounting rules are increasingly requiring that valuable intangibles are accounted for as assets anyway.
> I'm talking about the fundamentals of economics, the ridiculousness of enforcing scarcity on a resource that demands otherwise, and the need to acknowledge that.
You are confused. The fundamentals of economics are about supply, demand and scarcity: but you failed to differentiate properly between those fundamentals applied to the "expression" and the "medium".
The digital bits may be abundant, easily copied, at zero code; but the _expression_ put into those digital bits by the artists and so on isn't - it costs them time, effort and money to make their works, and so they should have the right to choose how they want to restrict the availability of the work.
Furthermore, you forgot about "choice" and "freedom", in that abolishing protection for works that artists creates is to _force_ them to place their works into the public domain. I think the world is a better place when they have the choice over how to exercise their rights in their works.
In your world, all the artists will be making tunes in the evening while serving fries during the day: never able to make money from their tunes because the rest of society forced the works to be free.
Nice one.
Interesting People 2004/05:
I know for a FACT they passed 100,000 last November. One thing the Louis calculation may have missed is Google's obsession with low cost. For example read the company's technical white paper on the Google file system. It was designed so that Google could purchase the cheapest disks possible, expecting them to have a high failure rate. What happens when you factor cost obsession into his equation?
> Look at Linux. Who would ever write a huge undertaking like an operating system only to give it away for free;
Umm, all the people that are confident that their efforts are _protected_ by copyright (via. the GPL) from being secretly used and leveraged for commercial purposes. Just look at the recent Germany case regarding injunction to enforce GPL.
> I know, from several years of working in the radio and music industries, more than a few musicians who could give a shit about their music being copied; as long as people are listening to it, they're happy.
No thanks. If my music were really good, I'd prefer some nice income to buy a large house, provide for my children, continue my creatively unhindered by the need to earn money, and other things. What's the name of these musicians, I think I'll pirate their works.
> But we need to acknowledge that our IP laws are broken in the modern era, and rather than trying to nudge and tweak and suspender up their sagging morass, we need to figure out a sensible approach.
Wow, you must be the first person to have thought of this.
Perhaps people should read the submissions to the UK Patent Office consultation regarding patentability of software. One of the key submissions states that (I paraphrase) "it is observed that there are multiple methods used in the EU for the development of software, including open source and commercial models, all of which seem to work, and at present there seems no specific reason to favour one over the other".
Teach your children to produce rather than consume.
Using Symantec AV, I LiveUpdate'd signatures, only to find that it decared System32/w32sup.exe as a trojan and quarantined it.
OpenBSD is only a cisco killer in SOHO and SME type environments. Even then, part of the problem is that it still requires expertise to setup - there are a lot of CCIE/CCNE out there, and no so many pf/carp/openbsd experts.
The thing for the OpenBSD guys to do is make OpenBSD an attractive platform to OEM's who will build more user friendly solutions onto it.
> I can't wait for SMP support to be working.
I would rather the OpenBSD team concentrated on things other than SMP. For the large proportion of cost-effective routing/firewall systems, SMP isn't a priority.
What is a priority is (a) continual stripping out of GNU licensed artifacts, (b) continual code "securisation", (c) continual security features (i.e. CARP, etc).
SMP sounds like a nice bit of candy: but I'd prefer the healthy food first.
I am confident that this is where technology is going, and in several years time we will be there. The others posters mention freenet: which I didn't know about but really just validates the idea. I'm not sure if freenet is up to the task, I suspect that a good solution would require substantially well thought out engineering effort (aka. W3C or IETF style), and these grassroots open source efforts like freenet just don't have the appropriate input to produce a long term sustaintable solution.
HTML/HTTP/TCP was nice for a first-generation approach, but like many other first generations (e.g. simplistic routing protocols, now we have OSPF, BGP, etc) they just have scalability problems that are only overcome by a new generation of technology.
> license payers money
BBC Technology is increasingly less funded by licenses payers money, it is actually up for sale to private interests, expected to be completed by end of year.
They are just trying to use open source as a viable part of business strategy like everyone else.
I, but probably others, realised not long ago that it's rapidly approaching the point at which the characteristics of "Internet V2 (post WWW)" can be ascertained, and certainly apart from high speed, one of them as the death of unidirectional WWW.
The problem with HTTP is (as you see with the slashdot effect) that there is no inherent mass-distribution/replication in it. What will be the next big technology will be some sort of fluid merge between HTTP, P2P (BT, etc), FTP, to bring a real massively distributed content layer. Built into this protocol would be multicast as well (in a way, P2P is inherently multicast).
This means that when you browse the web, your browsers transport layer is really acting as real-time P2P, and your network ISP would install seamless "content caching" (e.g. akamani style) as part of the network. Effectively, there needs to be a replacement of HTTP/TCP as a new "DTP" (distributed transport protocol).
Try s50B.
What I would say to you is if you are going to enter into a debate that involves law, you should understand how it works. Come back when you have legal training, otherwise most of what you say is irrelevant and useless.
> And that license is displaying in the summary information of the content.
Not in all cases. Look at the one referred to in this article, and look at a number of others. In fact, I was previously confused, I thought that kde-look showed no licenses for any content, now I realise that it only shows licenses for some content. This is even worse because now it suggests something different: what's the assumption for a user if there is no specific license? It's suggesting that user (given a choice at upload time) didn't care to restrict the way in which the work could be used.
''Given the preponderance of wallpapers at kde-look that are licensed under "not for commercial use" terms''
That argument doesn't work because kde-look simply doesn't present the licenses with the works, so anyone using the work has nothing to go by. You only see license if you try to Upload, and what you see is that there are a wide variety of licenses include "Other", this gives no basis for a reasonable assumption that the works are typically non-commercial.
Like I said: you should do some reading, that's only one limited reference that I provided, why don't you survey the topic from multiple perspectives to get a proper in-depth understanding.
Have you been trained in critical thinking?
The DMCA splits the rights into two "right to access" and "right to copy"; you need to be an authorised user to have a "right to access" a work before you can then have any other rights, such as the "right to copy".
In terms of reverse engineering, at least in the UK under the CDPA 1988, it only applies if you are already a legitimate right holder of the work in question. In other words, you cannot steal a program and reverse engineer it, but you can purchase and reverse engineer. Also, in the UK, the provisions _specifically_ state that any EULA clauses that attempt to prohibit reverse engineering are null and void. So the software license cannot stop you from the right to reverse engineer.
"Also, to be clear, I don't consider reverse engineering to be "a right" as the poster does."
If you look at statutory copyright law, e.g. the UK CDPA 1988, you will see that it is "a right". So if you believe something that's different to the reality of the law (and the cases that have been decided upon it), then good luck to you, and say hello to the fairies for me.
All opinions are reserved until more is known about from Linspire, but you are right that in terms of "good faith", Linspire are on the backfoot and now they have to prove their case (not in a court of law, but to the general public).
"You say there's an established legal precedent. I'm calling your bluff."
You are just wrong. Not only that, you can't be bothered to do your own research once you've been given the hint. Poor attitude. Google would have provided you with the following to start. Then try some basic reading on law to get a clue.
http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/license.html#im