I read somewhere that copy protection is put on most games not by the developers but by the publishers of the game. One article from a developer I was reading said that the publisher put copy protection on games to help stop or slow down illegal copies during the first like 3-4 weeks that it is out. That everyone knows that copy protection doesn't stop anyone cold from copying software, it is just suppose to slow them down during the most profitable weeks of a game's launch.
Supposedly most games make their biggest income during the first 4-6 weeks from when they are released, which is why they try and slow down the copies during that period.
It has been rumored for years that game companies have privately supported limited pirating of their lesser known titles to help them get promoted.
In fact I know of one business application that a company created and knew it was being pirated and turned a blind eye to it, in hopes that it would get the application more exposure to the corporate types who would actually buy it, so they got the support.
In another case I know of a vertical market application that one of the salesmen gave to a pirate group in order to help it get more exposure and get the company's name out there.
So I know of 2 cases and probably more where this happens.
Isn't this exactly the kind of project that is perfect for Open Source. Its something a lot people (states/countries/etc.) could/would use and its something that would benefit from lots of people working on it to amke sure it is secure and works well? It doesn't seem like once it is made that there needs to be a ton of extra upgrades or features added to it.
Seems this kind of tool/program is exactly the kind of thing that should be done Open Source and stands a lot better chance of being a better program and more secure due to peer review and public scrutiny. Not to mention the amount of public tax dollars it would save since it would free and costs could be shared by all states for any support or maintance that was needed.
I can see you have never really worked with anyone in the criminal system who has commited violent crimes. You must be one of those people who really believes that there is no such thing a true evil, or that people can truely be evil.
Sometimes for the good of society it is better to not have certain people who are by their very nature evil and unredeemable part of that society. Sometimes for the good of society you have to destroy those who threaten all of a society, with things like the death penalty.
Spend more time amoung some of the hardened criminals and you will see this truth.
You might want to look at a different more accurate translation of the Old Testament other than the King James version.
It is more accurate to say "Thou shall not *MURDER*." rather than kill.
Don't forget that they were shortly commanded to killed everyone in the promise land, who was God's enemy, just a bit later. War isn't murder, the needless taking of a life is murder.
The limited database size of 5 gig makes it worthless to just about every Open Source web site or developer other than the very very small guys who would rather use something like MySQL or PostgreSQL instead.
How exactly is it helpful to release a free version that most people can't use in real world applications? The answer is, it isn't.
How about some of the victims of lawsuits against Open Source packages/programs and some of the professors and others who have fought for the legal rights of Open Source. The people who decide to fight against the DMCA rather than fold up their tents and go away under threat of lawsuits.
I don't know who told you that Guild Wars would not have a monthly fee but that is wrong. It is a MMORPG just like all the others out there and it will have a monthly fee just like all the others when it comes out.
Must be something unique to your setup since I use Samba here all the time with Windows XP without any problems with my Red Hat 9.0 server running Samba.
I would assume that royalites would be paid out to the Wachowski Brothers for their scripts and their piece of the "Matrix" pie that they own the rights to.
I assume you are saying now that Warner Brothers is saying that the Brothers damaged the Matrix brand that they (WB) owned a huge portion of and thus aren't going to pay out to anyone who has damaged the brand.
Interesting note that I read about one of the E3 annoucements is that supposedly Microsoft is going to be releasing a version of the XBox controller for the PC. So it should mean that you can play Halo and Halo 2 more like what they are on the XBox if you so choose.
You might want to read through some of the EA/Microsoft announcements that have been floating around. I am pretty sure I read one of the announcements that EA talked Microsoft into letting EA run their own servers for the EA Sports titles on XBox. So it would seem that XBox Live isn't quite so closed anymore, at least with reguards to EA. That was one of EA's main complaints about XBox Live is that they didn't want to give control of the game servers over to Microsoft but rather handle it in house like they do for the PS2 games.
You might want to look at FreeVSD ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/freevsd/ ). It used to be a commerical package and many ISPs have used it over the years. It hasn't been updated in a few months though since the company went under in Jan. 2003.
It has all your virtual server stuff and even has a web interface to manage everything as well, like the creation of new virtual servers, etc.
I don't see why the Open Source community couldn't pick up on it and update it for the last releases of Linux distributions. Everyone keeps saying that they would pay to help develop an Open Source virtual server program, well here is your chance to do so with a working program.
If you are looking for a web hosting control panel then you also might want to look at Vishwakarma (http://kandalaya.org/vishwakarma.shtml). It is a nice package and has been around for awhile with a nice web interface and even has support for reseller, and user management options.
You might want to look at FreeVSD (
http://sourceforge.net/projects/freevsd/). It used to be a commerical package and many ISPs have used it over the years. It hasn't been updated in a few months though since the company went under in Jan. 2003.
It has all your virtual server stuff and even has a web interface to manage everything as well, like the creation of new virtual servers, etc.
I don't see why the Open Source community couldn't pick up on it and update it for the last releases of Linux distributions. Everyone keeps saying that they would pay to help develop an Open Source virtual server program, well here is your chance to do so with a working program.
If you are looking for a web hosting control panel then you also might want to look at Vishwakarma (http://kandalaya.org/vishwakarma.shtml). It is a nice package and has been around for awhile with a nice web interface and even has support for reseller, and user management options.
I have a problem with what SCO is doing. I have bought and downloaded and used Caldera Linux in the past and recently from Caldera/SCO. So my question is do their customers need a license? If they don't and the product is GPLed then why does anyone need a license at all. If the product isn't GPL then I should be able to sue for "bait and switch" as well as misrepresentation of the product. I bought it, and it was suppose to be a GPLed Linux distribution. Also I should be able to sue for false advertisement since SCO/Caldera advertised a product that was suppose to be a GPLed Linux product with a few extra commercial programs and commercial support.
SCO can't say that everyone using Linux needs a license but their customers, because their customers are covered under their purchase and the GPL. If so then I can give my stuff away for free and SCO can't do anything about it. If not then I should sue SCO for lying to me both in the sale of the product and in the advertising of the product.
SCO can't have it both ways. They can't have their cake and eat it too. Either it was covered under the GPL and thus everyone should ignore SCO, or they are facing major lawsuits from all of their customers for misrepresentation of the product and out and out lying about the product.
So - who owns the heroes of ABC/WildStorm's Terra Obscura? No one, everyone and DC. Kind of. The characters who appeared in Tom Strong #11 and #12, including Pyroman, Miss Masque, The American Crusader, The Black Terror, the Fighting Yank, and Doc Strange (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Tom Strong himself). In the story, "Terror on Terra Obscura," Strong teamed up with Strange to rescue the heroes, who had been imprisoned by an alien of impossible power.
To Tom Strong, the entire mission was somewhat surreal - to him, the heroes that he was helping to rescue existed on his earth solely as comic book characters, something like how the JSA existed as comic characters on Earth-1 to the JLA, back when there was an Earth-1 and Earth-2, or, if you want something a little more metaphysical, the existence of the heroes on the far side of the galaxy percolated through...ideaspace, where it was captured by comic creators on Tom Strong's earth who were imaginauts...or..something...
The heroes are slated to get a return engagement in 2003 when Peter Hogan pens a Terra Obscura miniseries for ABC [with art by Yanique Paquette and Karl Story], utilizing the same characters on the same world. Ideally, interest will be high enough, according to Hogan, in the miniseries that ABC will launch the heroes of Terra Obscura in their own ongoing monthly.
If you're the gambling sort, it's a safe bet that a solid 99% of the readers of the Tom Strong storyline thought that the characters were simply fruits of Alan Moore's imagination, heroes who were shared shades of similarity to "real" Golden Age comic heroes. After all, the proper archetypes were present - the patriotic hero (the Fighting Yank), the science hero (American Crusader), the "dark" hero (The Black Terror, renamed the Terror, who comes complete with young sidekick), the jungle queen (Princess Panther), the monster, the fire-man, and even the talking ape were there.
The thing is, the characters weren't, or at least originally weren't the products of Moore's imagination - the heroes of Terra Obscura were, in fact, real comic characters published in the 1940s by Ned Pines under the Standard/Better/Nedor imprint(s). While the fact does little to change the story, it does raise a question or two. No, DC didn't quietly acquire another stable of comic characters as they had done with the Charlton characters in the late '80s by buying them outright - the Nedor characters are themselves in a unique position in terms of copyright: They are in the public domain, and can therefore be freely used by anyone. As an aside - in the ABC universe, the heroes are located on "Terra Obscura," a unique world which itself is an invention of Alan Moore, and is therefore copyrighted to DC/ABC/WildStorm.
Before we continue, a little history lesson is needed on how things got to be the way they are.
A Publisher of Many Names
The heroes which are collectively referred to as "Nedor" heroes were originally published by Pines, who had three names for his publishing company over the years, Standard, Better, and Pines. As a company, Standard began publishing in 1932, and was the king of comics with adjective titles - Thrilling Comics, Thrilling Detective, Exciting Comics, Startling Comics - all were staples of Standard/Better/Pines over the years.
From the early days, Standard employed editor Leo Margulies and Mort Weisinger, who took the ball and ran with it, in 1939 creating series after series, and hero after hero. Alex Schomberg provided dozens of covers over the series' runs. Standard's standard fair for the early '40s was pulp-inspired superheroes, but as Standard couldn't get a good footing against National Periodical Publications' stars of the costumed set, Superman and Batman (as well as the Justice Society) and others, and sales of Standard's hero line slipped, and by 1949, the company dropped costumed heroes, sticking to real-life adventures, funny animal books, and romance comics. Aside from the Nedor heroes, one character of Standard's original comic series remains alive today - Dennis the Menace.
Like many of the comic characters created in the 1940s, the heroes of the Standard line weren't copyrighted. It wasn't necessarily a careless move by the publisher, just a simple business decision. Remember - this was in the days before the phrase "intellectual property" was even coined, and comic book characters were disposable commodities. One was created in order to sell comics to boys, and when its sales started to slip, another was created to take its place. "Progress" was the theme of the day, and no one would have thought to bring back a concept that was perceived to have failed - why return to something that the public clearly had passed on? Thinking of the better world coming tomorrow was the name of the game, and nostalgia had yet to become a pastime for individuals and an income stream for companies. Everyone, from the man on the street to comic book publishers, was looking for the next big thing, and had precious little time to spend on the old thing that no one wanted.
At the same time, creators' right were largely unheard of, and the creators themselves were generally nose-to-the-grindstone workhorses, and no real interest or incentive to try to keep or reclaim their original work or worry about the rights to the characters they wrote or drew. After all, the first comic book fandom had yet to be born, and the first "comic book convention" was decades away. Aside from a few superstars, comic artists and writers were scratching by, and were immensely more concerned with putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their head than securing the rights of ownership for a pulp knockoff they jotted down when the publisher came looking for a comic book hero.
Additionally, the Standard/Nedor heroes were like many, many other heroes of the '40s - colorful, and attention grabbing when they were on the cover of a comic, but ultimately, their stories were pretty pedestrian. No kids were clamoring for fan clubs or decoder rings from the Nedor line, as they were for Superman. Within a few years of the end of their publication, the heroes sank beneath the waves of popular culture, remembered only by a very few.
"Come on Little Chum - We're Going Into the Public Domain!"
With the above influences working on them, in their original form, the Nedor characters were never trademarked, and the stories in which they appeared in have long gone out of copyright (a period which lasted 28 years after publication) and were not renewed. As such, the characters legally moved into the public domain one by one, beginning with Doc Strange, in order of their publication, making it free for anyone to use them.
The public wha...?
For example, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden has had multiple adaptations, spinoffs and derivative products come out - all of which are legal, from the Secret Garden Cookbook to the most recent movie adaptation, because the work is in the public domain. Anyone can create a work based on the original without having to acquire any kind of rights whatsoever - the work, legally, belongs to all mankind.
An aside - before you go off thinking that governments actually made one law that would ultimately benefit the culture of the planet in a timeless fashion, copyright critics, pointing fingers at recent copyright extensions, such as the Sonny Bono Act (which was lobbied for largely by large media companies, and the validity of which is slated to be argued to the Supreme Court by Lawrence Lessig on October 9th) claim that the number of works entering the public domain has been drastically reduced in the past thirty years, and they're right. The move is seen by many anti-copyright pundits as a move as a culture from valuing the expression of an individual artist to valuing a corporate property.
Ironically, Walt Disney, one of the companies that has lobbied the hardest for copyright extension (ensuring the company will reap the profits from their characters for generations to come) is also one of the biggest beneficiaries of the public domain - from Snow White to Cinderella, Jungle Book (released one year after Kipling's own copyright expired) and much of classical music in Fantasia came from the public domain. Without recent extensions approved by congress, Mickey Mouse would have gone into the public domain in 2004.
So - how does all of this apply to the Nedor heroes? Well, as alluded to previously, they didn't just go into the public domain, and ABC/WildStorm isn't the first comic publisher to publish them - or even the only publisher to currently publish them. The Nedor heroes have bubbled up a few times in the decades since their journey into the public domain, from Ace Comics and First Comics to Eclipse and currently, AC Comics.
The Point Is: No One's Fighting
Before moving on, it must be stressed that none of this is a matter of publishing legality - everyone, from AC to WildStorm to anyone reading this article could legitimately and legally create and publish comics starring any of the Nedor heroes that are based on the original materials from the '40s. There's the rub - the characters have to be based directly upon the original versions which appeared in the comics. From there, things get a little more...legal.
For example, take The Black Terror. Created in 1941 by Richard Hughes and David Gabrielsen, the character first appeared in Exciting Comics #9 in 1941. Both AC and ABC took the base character, The Black Terror, and modified it (in different ways), and renamed it The Terror (AC, after naming their version, later renamed theirs "The Terrorist"). Both were based on Nedor's The Black Terror, but were modified in unique ways by the respective publishers. Likewise, Beau Smith's version of the character, published by Eclipse (and co-written with Chuck Dixon and illustrated by Dan Brereton) used the name, but was worlds away from the original version. The character also showed up in the '80s in versions published by Ace Comics, and in Roy Thomas' Alter Ego comic series at First Comics.
In Smith's case, the desire to use the Nedor hero as a starting point for his own take was a result of childhood memories. "When I was a kid, my dad gave me a couple of old coverless Black Terror comics that he had as a kid," Smith said. "There were in the attic at my grandma's attic. I got hooked on the cool looking character with the skull and crossbones on his chest. I always wanted to do something with the character after that.
"He was in the public domain, and I had a high concept crime/alternate universe idea that I had been saving up, and this was the perfect opportunity for it. I called my buddy Chuck Dixon and we decided to write it together. We changed the basic background of the character and did our own. As a result of what we did with the original concept, Chuck and I have the rights to the story and the characters as they appeared in our three issue run....names and all that."
Smith said he wasn't sure if Eclipse owned any of the rights to the characters, or if Todd McFarlane acquired the rights to his and Dixon's version of the Black Terror when he purchased the Eclipse assets. Smith did write a new story with the Black Terror while he was with McFarlane Productions, which was illustrated by Clayton Crain, but to date, McFarlane has opted not to publish it.
Smith wasn't the only creator with a soft spot in his heart for the characters - as mentioned previously, the pool of Nedor characters had been dipped into by Roy Thomas and ACE Comics, but in 1988, publisher Bill Black brought back a host of public domain characters, including many of the Nedor heroes for use in AC's Femforce series, placing them in new series, as well as reprinting original stories.
Over the years, AC Comics has taken the initiative to seek out and preserve many Golden Age comics and heroes, painstakingly retouching and correcting the art from the original comics - since no original art still exists - to produce reprint editions. As stated on their website, AC's reprints of public domain Golden Age comics is threefold:
1. To help preserve the history of the American comic book. 2. To make material available to collectors who have been priced out of the Golden-Age collecting market. 3. To introduce Golden-Age material to a new generation of comic book readers.
AC has also endeavored to compile information about the creators of the Golden Age comics - as much as it is available - and publish the information in various magazines, including Men of Mystery, which featured the Nedor heroes in a special edition.
Again, given the time period in which the work was originally created, many creators were never credited with their work, and in some cases, attribution of the creation of Golden Age characters is only anecdotal in nature.
Along with reprints of the original characters, AC has written the Nedor heroes as continuations of their Golden Age incarnations, maintaining the same general concepts and secret identities, but have also made some alterations in terms of costumes and names. The changes AC has made in the Nedor characters made done in order to make their versions distinctive in order that the publisher could copyright their stories, as well as protect their looks, just as Smith and Dixon did with their version of the Black Terror, and ABC has done with their versions of the characters.
To date, AC has been publishing the Nedor heroes (both on their own and as supporting characters) for going on twenty years, a run nearly double the original run the characters enjoyed in the '40s.
As the covers in this article show, the Terra Obscura storyline in Tom Strong #11 and #12 isn't the only connection between the Nedor line and WildStorm's ABC line - in 1942, Nedor launched America's Best Comics #1, a title which brought together Nedor's top three characters, Fighting Yank, Doc Strange, and the Black Terror together between two covers. And of course, there is that similarity between Doc Strange and Tom Strong, noted by Strong in issue #11 - the two could be brothers. It was a similarity Moore himself noted in an interview with Previews, but said that while he was inspired the America's Best Comics title as a name for a line, the similarity between the two characters was a complete coincidence.
For Moore aficionados, his account of later discoveries after creating both Tom Strong and Promethea come as little surprise, and fit into the creators' theories about ideaspace and the fact that he occasionally runs off and prays to a snake god...or...something under his house. "I didn't know there was The Book of Promethea by Hélène Cixous, or things like that," Moore told Previews. "I didn't know John Kendrick Bangs had written a bunch of stories about a place very much like the Immateria when I made Sophie Bangs the secret identity of Promethea. All of these things are delicious coincidences. I even found a character created from about 1910 in a series of novels published by the Boy Scouts of America about this ultimate Boy Scout named Tom Strong. It's just great! If you're hitting the right kind of vein of archetypal stuff then things like this will just happen. I'm just tapping into something. It works out."
In a recent interview with Newsarama, Moore expanded upon his decision to use the characters. "The original idea for the whole thing came when somebody, it may have been Rick Veitch, told me that there had been, back in the '40s, an America's Best Comics which I wasn't aware of," Moore said. "I thought it was a striking coincidence that we had America's Best Comics, and there was a series by the same name in the '40s. I asked [ABC editor] Scott Dunbier to check it out and see if he could find out anything about this comic, and whether there were any interesting characters.
"For all I knew, it might have been a Western comic book, but I asked him to tell me if there were any interesting characters, with an eye to possibly reviving them if they were sort of old, forgotten characters, in the current America's Best Comics as a kind of instant 1940s continuity. I left it with Scott, and he got back to me, along with some other people who sent me covers from the original comics - it was then I realized that Doc Strange looked very much like Tom Strong - he had the same kind of bizarrely muscled physique. He wore a red t-short, and these jodhpurs, and boots. I realized that we wouldn't be able to do a character with the name Doc Strange [due to this upstart company called Marvel, which had created a character named Dr. Strange in the interim]. I though that maybe we could change the name to Tom Strange, because at that point, I though that point his first name had never been given. I found out later that it was Hugo, so I think that the current orthodoxy at ABC is that his name is Thomas Hugo Strange."
Moore said that originally, the plan was to use the characters only for the two-part "Terra Obscura" storyline which would explain where Tom Strange came from - it was a story that needed a world populated with heroes. "I came up with the Terra Obscura idea, which I thought was an interesting variant on the notion that this is a planet which is in the same dimension as ours, and is an exact duplicate, just elsewhere in space," Moore said. "I started to research as many of the Nedor heroes as I could. Jim Steranko was a great help - he dug out loads of old articles which filled in a lot of details for me, and we did the story from there.
"That was originally going to be all we were doing. Then, Pete Hogan, after having just done a pretty splendid job on the Tesla Strong special was looking for something else to do. He suggested that, because there was such a lot of positive feedback and interest on the web regarding the Terra Obscura characters that he wondered about doing a miniseries. It sounded good to me. Pete and I have been working together on this, and it's coming along well.
"Initially, it was an idea if there was an interesting character in this 1940s, America's Best Comics we could kind of bring him back in the present day and pleasantly confuse readers as to whether America's Best Comics really did exist in the 1940s," Moore continued. "It was more that than anything - we'd exploit the coincidence and sort of pretended that we had this backlog of characters that stretched back to the 1940s."
The Perils and Promise of the Public Domain
By becoming part of the public domain, the heroes of the old Standard line of comics are part of the cultural heritage of the United States and world, just like Thomas Nash's versions of Santa Claus and Uncle Sam, and nearly all the classical music in the world. As such, they can be used by current creators as source material who would be "standing on the shoulders of giants" as it were to create their own, new works.
According to public domain advocates, what AC and ABC (and previously, Eclipse and others) are doing with the old Nedor heroes is exactly why material should go into the public domain, that is, the original works can be freely built upon to further enhance the cultural landscape of the world. Okay, so whether or not FemForce and Tom Strong #11 and #12 enhance the cultural landscape of the world is arguable, but again, AC and ABC are doing exactly what they're supposed to in regards to works in the public domain - using them as source works, and either re-presenting them or building upon them to tell new stories.
It's exactly what Borders or Barnes & Noble do when they publish and release their own editions of classic literature - or, for that matter, what Alan Moore did in creating League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. That said though, working with properties from the public domain, especially when using them as a foundation to build upon comes with its own problems due to the simple fact that anyone can do it. If one publishing house starts up a version of say, Pyroman (a Nedor hero) with writer A and artist B, a publishing house down the street can do their own version of Pyroman with writer C and artist D.
In such a setting, the market would determine which version of the character survives, based on everything from quality of the product to the marketing each publishers attempt. One publish could win out over the other and make millions while the other fails, despite the time and effort expended.
While neither Dunbier nor anyone from AC Comics chose to go on record, sources confirmed that, despite the legalities of each company's use of the characters, the smaller publisher is mildly annoyed at ABC's apparent ongoing use of the characters.
Also, in today's world where the creator of a property has come to be considered in higher regard than in years past, there is a danger in a property such as the Nedor heroes entering the public domain and then being revised or revisited by a creator such as Alan Moore or Peter Hogan, and that is that the original creators of the work may be forgotten or overlooked. Already, the specific creator pedigree of many Nedor heroes is unknown, lost in the mists of time and churning of the 1940s' publishing industry.
As stated above, many readers of Tom Strong #11 or #12 would automatically assign the creation of the Terra Obscura characters to Moore - after all, the guy did create heroes that were a shade away from the Charlton heroes for Watchmen, why couldn't he just do it again?
As a result, the original creators of the characters are lost to the mists of time - technically, as they should be, as part of becoming part of the public domain, but perhaps unfairly so in the view of fans indoctrinated in the creator rights battles of the past decades.
The public domain, in the eyes of its advocates, is a necessary part of the cultural landscape of America - something that the founding fathers outlined - something that allows a vigorous and growing culture without the restrictions of royalties. For every pro argument, there's a con, mostly from copyright holders.
For example, if Disney and other media companies would be unsuccessful in extending the term of copyright extension, Mickey Mouse hits the public domain in 2003. Legally, Universal could produce a line of Mickey Mouse cartoons based on the original appearance of the character from the 1928 Steamboat Willie, and anyone could package and sell the original Steamboat Willie cartoon - all without credit or payment to Walt Disney.
The challenges of public domain don't just affect the Nedor heroes - there are dozens upon dozens of Golden Age heroes who are currently in the public domain waiting for their chance at a second shot or re-presentation, or to be completely forgotten, their histories, creators, and adventures lost forever.
My bigger problem in the Open Source community right now is how the law deals with coders who submit code to a project.
If you work at a company and submit your companies IP or patents in patch or feature upgrade to an Open Source project, then currently it looks like the law says everyone who was involved with coding the project is liable for IP theft, patent theft, and possible copyright violations. This is reguardless of what they did or didn't know about, and reguardless if they were lied to or not about the nature of the code and coprights, IP, patents etc.
What is the Open Source community and the legal system going to do about this to fix and is there anything it can do?
It seems to me that you might be able to replace your PC's BIOS with a replacement BIOS from Red Hat. They have the Redboot BIOS that supports ethernet and serial interfaces at the BIOS level.
If you don't have to agree to the GPL license to get some software packge and use it, then it would seem that your basically saying that once I have the software package I can do anything I want with it. Since I didn't agree to a license you can't restrict me with it, thus I can reasonably assume that you were putting the software in the public domain since you put the source code and everything out there free for the taking. Thus based on this logic I can then do anything I want with the code including making it a commerical package or including bits of it in my commercial package.
If this isn't the case then you are actually putting restrictions on my use of what appears to the "common man" to be something that would normally be found only in the pubic domain.
The GPL is a license and it does require accent to it to get the software. If you don't agree to the license then you don't even have a right to the copyrighted source code/program, which in this case is licensed under the GPL. Copyright does not say that anyone has a right to get my stuff, copyright allows me (the copyright holder) to determin if anyone gets it, and on what terms they get it (as allowed by or limited by law). Under copyright law I can say that no one is allowed a copy of my work and that it is all private for my use only.
Also I do not need a sale or purchase to enforce my license of my software. I can say I am giving up these rights (my private exclusive use) in exchange for you agreeing to these terms. Or in other words the only way I am going to let you have access to my copyright material is under the following conditions, you don't like the conditions then I'm sorry you can't have access to my copyright material. The exchange of money is in a way, beside the point, in the eyes of the law when it comes to copyright law and license/contract law. I have given up something and you are agreeing to my terms, thus getting something, the copyright material, and agreeing to my restrictions (when compared to the public domain) thus in theory you are giving something up. In the case of the GPL I am theorically getting something too, any modifications (your copyright work) to the (my) copyright work if you distribute your changes.
Thus the GPL isn't that different from most license agreements and depends on the law to enforce it and give it some teeth. It would seem that if the GPL didn't depend on contract law for its basis, then it couldn't be expected to force people to distribute the source code to their changes when they redistribute a modified version.
Thus it doesn't seem to me to be that weird for a GPL software package to have the option of using a click-through license that basically says if you want this software here are the terms that you must agree to in order to get it. Yes, not every user will redistribute modified GPL software, thus not many would trigger the need to enforce the license, but the law doesn't care about anything but what would be potentially the exception in this case.
Blizzard mayi claim that someone stole their code for BNETD in legal court documents but that doesn't make it a legal find of fact, or in other words the truth. That is just what they are claiming, and to a degree what they have to claim to make the court believe that the lawsuit has some merit and isn't totally bogus to be thrown out before it even starts. Think of it as a claim to prevent their lawsuit from being tossed out as a totally frivilous lawsuit that clog the courts these days that judges try to throw out as fast as they can.
Blizzard may make the claim, but it still doesn't make it true, nor has the court had a chance to rule on it yet.
Yes, Blizzard said a few years ago in an interview with one of the gaming magazines that $10-15 of every game goes to supporting Battle.net. That is where they get the money to keep Battle.net running.
I'm not sure how many of you have actually read the DMCA and know exactly what it does and doesn't allow. It seems a lot of people are confused and misunderstand what the DMCA does allow for projects like "The BNETD Project". The DMCA allows you to circumvent the copy protection of software and hardware in order to develop an inter-operable device or program. Also the DMCA specifically says that leaving out the copy protection of a device for inter-operability is *NOT* a violation of the DMCA. Nor is defeating/removing the copy protection in order to figure out how to make something inter-operable. Also note that the key sections of the DMCA require that either the primary purpose of the device be illegal and/or that it defeats the copy protection for profit. Neither of these statements are true of "The BNETD Project". Please note the 2 quotes below or read the entire law yourself at:
DMCA Section 1201-bc3
"Nothing in this section shall require that the design of, or design and selection of parts and components for, a consumer electronics, telecommunications, or computing product provide for a response to any particular technological measure, so long as such part or component, or the product in which such part or component is integrated, does not otherwise fall within the prohibitions of subsection (a)(2) or (b)(1)."
DMCA Section 1201-f
" Reverse Engineering.-(1) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title."
Slashdot Mirror
I read somewhere that copy protection is put on most games not by the developers but by the publishers of the game. One article from a developer I was reading said that the publisher put copy protection on games to help stop or slow down illegal copies during the first like 3-4 weeks that it is out. That everyone knows that copy protection doesn't stop anyone cold from copying software, it is just suppose to slow them down during the most profitable weeks of a game's launch.
Supposedly most games make their biggest income during the first 4-6 weeks from when they are released, which is why they try and slow down the copies during that period.
It has been rumored for years that game companies have privately supported limited pirating of their lesser known titles to help them get promoted.
In fact I know of one business application that a company created and knew it was being pirated and turned a blind eye to it, in hopes that it would get the application more exposure to the corporate types who would actually buy it, so they got the support.
In another case I know of a vertical market application that one of the salesmen gave to a pirate group in order to help it get more exposure and get the company's name out there.
So I know of 2 cases and probably more where this happens.
If the lowest bidder gets the contract does that mean that a free Open Source e-voting program would automatically get the contract? :)
Isn't this exactly the kind of project that is perfect for Open Source. Its something a lot people (states/countries/etc.) could/would use and its something that would benefit from lots of people working on it to amke sure it is secure and works well? It doesn't seem like once it is made that there needs to be a ton of extra upgrades or features added to it.
Seems this kind of tool/program is exactly the kind of thing that should be done Open Source and stands a lot better chance of being a better program and more secure due to peer review and public scrutiny. Not to mention the amount of public tax dollars it would save since it would free and costs could be shared by all states for any support or maintance that was needed.
I can see you have never really worked with anyone in the criminal system who has commited violent crimes. You must be one of those people who really believes that there is no such thing a true evil, or that people can truely be evil.
Sometimes for the good of society it is better to not have certain people who are by their very nature evil and unredeemable part of that society. Sometimes for the good of society you have to destroy those who threaten all of a society, with things like the death penalty.
Spend more time amoung some of the hardened criminals and you will see this truth.
You might want to look at a different more accurate translation of the Old Testament other than the King James version.
It is more accurate to say "Thou shall not *MURDER*." rather than kill.
Don't forget that they were shortly commanded to killed everyone in the promise land, who was God's enemy, just a bit later. War isn't murder, the needless taking of a life is murder.
Forgot to mention that I read somewhere the average database driven web site is an average of 10-20 gigs for most OSS type sites.
The limited database size of 5 gig makes it worthless to just about every Open Source web site or developer other than the very very small guys who would rather use something like MySQL or PostgreSQL instead.
How exactly is it helpful to release a free version that most people can't use in real world applications? The answer is, it isn't.
Move along people nothing to see here.
How about some of the victims of lawsuits against Open Source packages/programs and some of the professors and others who have fought for the legal rights of Open Source. The people who decide to fight against the DMCA rather than fold up their tents and go away under threat of lawsuits.
Interesting hack but I suspect it is soon to become just one thing in a long list of things that Google bans or doesn't allow.
I don't know who told you that Guild Wars would not have a monthly fee but that is wrong. It is a MMORPG just like all the others out there and it will have a monthly fee just like all the others when it comes out.
Must be something unique to your setup since I use Samba here all the time with Windows XP without any problems with my Red Hat 9.0 server running Samba.
I would assume that royalites would be paid out to the Wachowski Brothers for their scripts and their piece of the "Matrix" pie that they own the rights to.
I assume you are saying now that Warner Brothers is saying that the Brothers damaged the Matrix brand that they (WB) owned a huge portion of and thus aren't going to pay out to anyone who has damaged the brand.
Interesting note that I read about one of the E3 annoucements is that supposedly Microsoft is going to be releasing a version of the XBox controller for the PC. So it should mean that you can play Halo and Halo 2 more like what they are on the XBox if you so choose.
You might want to read through some of the EA/Microsoft announcements that have been floating around. I am pretty sure I read one of the announcements that EA talked Microsoft into letting EA run their own servers for the EA Sports titles on XBox. So it would seem that XBox Live isn't quite so closed anymore, at least with reguards to EA. That was one of EA's main complaints about XBox Live is that they didn't want to give control of the game servers over to Microsoft but rather handle it in house like they do for the PS2 games.
You might want to look at FreeVSD ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/freevsd/ ). It used to be a commerical package and many ISPs have used it over the years. It hasn't been updated in a few months though since the company went under in Jan. 2003.
It has all your virtual server stuff and even has a web interface to manage everything as well, like the creation of new virtual servers, etc.
I don't see why the Open Source community couldn't pick up on it and update it for the last releases of Linux distributions. Everyone keeps saying that they would pay to help develop an Open Source virtual server program, well here is your chance to do so with a working program.
If you are looking for a web hosting control panel then you also might want to look at Vishwakarma (http://kandalaya.org/vishwakarma.shtml). It is a nice package and has been around for awhile with a nice web interface and even has support for reseller, and user management options.
You might want to look at FreeVSD ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/freevsd/). It used to be a commerical package and many ISPs have used it over the years. It hasn't been updated in a few months though since the company went under in Jan. 2003.
It has all your virtual server stuff and even has a web interface to manage everything as well, like the creation of new virtual servers, etc.
I don't see why the Open Source community couldn't pick up on it and update it for the last releases of Linux distributions. Everyone keeps saying that they would pay to help develop an Open Source virtual server program, well here is your chance to do so with a working program.
If you are looking for a web hosting control panel then you also might want to look at Vishwakarma (http://kandalaya.org/vishwakarma.shtml). It is a nice package and has been around for awhile with a nice web interface and even has support for reseller, and user management options.
I have a problem with what SCO is doing. I have bought and downloaded and used Caldera Linux in the past and recently from Caldera/SCO. So my question is do their customers need a license? If they don't and the product is GPLed then why does anyone need a license at all. If the product isn't GPL then I should be able to sue for "bait and switch" as well as misrepresentation of the product. I bought it, and it was suppose to be a GPLed Linux distribution. Also I should be able to sue for false advertisement since SCO/Caldera advertised a product that was suppose to be a GPLed Linux product with a few extra commercial programs and commercial support.
SCO can't say that everyone using Linux needs a license but their customers, because their customers are covered under their purchase and the GPL. If so then I can give my stuff away for free and SCO can't do anything about it. If not then I should sue SCO for lying to me both in the sale of the product and in the advertising of the product.
SCO can't have it both ways. They can't have their cake and eat it too. Either it was covered under the GPL and thus everyone should ignore SCO, or they are facing major lawsuits from all of their customers for misrepresentation of the product and out and out lying about the product.
Which is it?
So - who owns the heroes of ABC/WildStorm's Terra Obscura? No one, everyone and DC. Kind of.
The characters who appeared in Tom Strong #11 and #12, including Pyroman, Miss Masque, The American Crusader, The Black Terror, the Fighting Yank, and Doc Strange (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Tom Strong himself). In the story, "Terror on Terra Obscura," Strong teamed up with Strange to rescue the heroes, who had been imprisoned by an alien of impossible power.
To Tom Strong, the entire mission was somewhat surreal - to him, the heroes that he was helping to rescue existed on his earth solely as comic book characters, something like how the JSA existed as comic characters on Earth-1 to the JLA, back when there was an Earth-1 and Earth-2, or, if you want something a little more metaphysical, the existence of the heroes on the far side of the galaxy percolated through...ideaspace, where it was captured by comic creators on Tom Strong's earth who were imaginauts...or..something...
The heroes are slated to get a return engagement in 2003 when Peter Hogan pens a Terra Obscura miniseries for ABC [with art by Yanique Paquette and Karl Story], utilizing the same characters on the same world. Ideally, interest will be high enough, according to Hogan, in the miniseries that ABC will launch the heroes of Terra Obscura in their own ongoing monthly.
If you're the gambling sort, it's a safe bet that a solid 99% of the readers of the Tom Strong storyline thought that the characters were simply fruits of Alan Moore's imagination, heroes who were shared shades of similarity to "real" Golden Age comic heroes. After all, the proper archetypes were present - the patriotic hero (the Fighting Yank), the science hero (American Crusader), the "dark" hero (The Black Terror, renamed the Terror, who comes complete with young sidekick), the jungle queen (Princess Panther), the monster, the fire-man, and even the talking ape were there.
The thing is, the characters weren't, or at least originally weren't the products of Moore's imagination - the heroes of Terra Obscura were, in fact, real comic characters published in the 1940s by Ned Pines under the Standard/Better/Nedor imprint(s). While the fact does little to change the story, it does raise a question or two. No, DC didn't quietly acquire another stable of comic characters as they had done with the Charlton characters in the late '80s by buying them outright - the Nedor characters are themselves in a unique position in terms of copyright: They are in the public domain, and can therefore be freely used by anyone. As an aside - in the ABC universe, the heroes are located on "Terra Obscura," a unique world which itself is an invention of Alan Moore, and is therefore copyrighted to DC/ABC/WildStorm.
Before we continue, a little history lesson is needed on how things got to be the way they are.
A Publisher of Many Names
The heroes which are collectively referred to as "Nedor" heroes were originally published by Pines, who had three names for his publishing company over the years, Standard, Better, and Pines. As a company, Standard began publishing in 1932, and was the king of comics with adjective titles - Thrilling Comics, Thrilling Detective, Exciting Comics, Startling Comics - all were staples of Standard/Better/Pines over the years.
From the early days, Standard employed editor Leo Margulies and Mort Weisinger, who took the ball and ran with it, in 1939 creating series after series, and hero after hero. Alex Schomberg provided dozens of covers over the series' runs. Standard's standard fair for the early '40s was pulp-inspired superheroes, but as Standard couldn't get a good footing against National Periodical Publications' stars of the costumed set, Superman and Batman (as well as the Justice Society) and others, and sales of Standard's hero line slipped, and by 1949, the company dropped costumed heroes, sticking to real-life adventures, funny animal books, and romance comics. Aside from the Nedor heroes, one character of Standard's original comic series remains alive today - Dennis the Menace.
Like many of the comic characters created in the 1940s, the heroes of the Standard line weren't copyrighted. It wasn't necessarily a careless move by the publisher, just a simple business decision. Remember - this was in the days before the phrase "intellectual property" was even coined, and comic book characters were disposable commodities. One was created in order to sell comics to boys, and when its sales started to slip, another was created to take its place. "Progress" was the theme of the day, and no one would have thought to bring back a concept that was perceived to have failed - why return to something that the public clearly had passed on? Thinking of the better world coming tomorrow was the name of the game, and nostalgia had yet to become a pastime for individuals and an income stream for companies. Everyone, from the man on the street to comic book publishers, was looking for the next big thing, and had precious little time to spend on the old thing that no one wanted.
At the same time, creators' right were largely unheard of, and the creators themselves were generally nose-to-the-grindstone workhorses, and no real interest or incentive to try to keep or reclaim their original work or worry about the rights to the characters they wrote or drew. After all, the first comic book fandom had yet to be born, and the first "comic book convention" was decades away. Aside from a few superstars, comic artists and writers were scratching by, and were immensely more concerned with putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their head than securing the rights of ownership for a pulp knockoff they jotted down when the publisher came looking for a comic book hero.
Additionally, the Standard/Nedor heroes were like many, many other heroes of the '40s - colorful, and attention grabbing when they were on the cover of a comic, but ultimately, their stories were pretty pedestrian. No kids were clamoring for fan clubs or decoder rings from the Nedor line, as they were for Superman. Within a few years of the end of their publication, the heroes sank beneath the waves of popular culture, remembered only by a very few.
"Come on Little Chum - We're Going Into the Public Domain!"
With the above influences working on them, in their original form, the Nedor characters were never trademarked, and the stories in which they appeared in have long gone out of copyright (a period which lasted 28 years after publication) and were not renewed. As such, the characters legally moved into the public domain one by one, beginning with Doc Strange, in order of their publication, making it free for anyone to use them.
The public wha...?
For example, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden has had multiple adaptations, spinoffs and derivative products come out - all of which are legal, from the Secret Garden Cookbook to the most recent movie adaptation, because the work is in the public domain. Anyone can create a work based on the original without having to acquire any kind of rights whatsoever - the work, legally, belongs to all mankind.
An aside - before you go off thinking that governments actually made one law that would ultimately benefit the culture of the planet in a timeless fashion, copyright critics, pointing fingers at recent copyright extensions, such as the Sonny Bono Act (which was lobbied for largely by large media companies, and the validity of which is slated to be argued to the Supreme Court by Lawrence Lessig on October 9th) claim that the number of works entering the public domain has been drastically reduced in the past thirty years, and they're right. The move is seen by many anti-copyright pundits as a move as a culture from valuing the expression of an individual artist to valuing a corporate property.
Ironically, Walt Disney, one of the companies that has lobbied the hardest for copyright extension (ensuring the company will reap the profits from their characters for generations to come) is also one of the biggest beneficiaries of the public domain - from Snow White to Cinderella, Jungle Book (released one year after Kipling's own copyright expired) and much of classical music in Fantasia came from the public domain. Without recent extensions approved by congress, Mickey Mouse would have gone into the public domain in 2004.
So - how does all of this apply to the Nedor heroes? Well, as alluded to previously, they didn't just go into the public domain, and ABC/WildStorm isn't the first comic publisher to publish them - or even the only publisher to currently publish them. The Nedor heroes have bubbled up a few times in the decades since their journey into the public domain, from Ace Comics and First Comics to Eclipse and currently, AC Comics.
The Point Is: No One's Fighting
Before moving on, it must be stressed that none of this is a matter of publishing legality - everyone, from AC to WildStorm to anyone reading this article could legitimately and legally create and publish comics starring any of the Nedor heroes that are based on the original materials from the '40s. There's the rub - the characters have to be based directly upon the original versions which appeared in the comics. From there, things get a little more...legal.
For example, take The Black Terror. Created in 1941 by Richard Hughes and David Gabrielsen, the character first appeared in Exciting Comics #9 in 1941. Both AC and ABC took the base character, The Black Terror, and modified it (in different ways), and renamed it The Terror (AC, after naming their version, later renamed theirs "The Terrorist"). Both were based on Nedor's The Black Terror, but were modified in unique ways by the respective publishers. Likewise, Beau Smith's version of the character, published by Eclipse (and co-written with Chuck Dixon and illustrated by Dan Brereton) used the name, but was worlds away from the original version. The character also showed up in the '80s in versions published by Ace Comics, and in Roy Thomas' Alter Ego comic series at First Comics.
In Smith's case, the desire to use the Nedor hero as a starting point for his own take was a result of childhood memories. "When I was a kid, my dad gave me a couple of old coverless Black Terror comics that he had as a kid," Smith said. "There were in the attic at my grandma's attic. I got hooked on the cool looking character with the skull and crossbones on his chest. I always wanted to do something with the character after that.
"He was in the public domain, and I had a high concept crime/alternate universe idea
that I had been saving up, and this was the perfect opportunity for it. I called my buddy Chuck Dixon and we decided to write it together. We changed the basic background of the character and did our own. As a result of what we did with the original concept, Chuck and I have the rights to the story and the characters as they appeared in our three issue run....names and all that."
Smith said he wasn't sure if Eclipse owned any of the rights to the characters, or if Todd McFarlane acquired the rights to his and Dixon's version of the Black Terror when he purchased the Eclipse assets. Smith did write a new story with the Black Terror while he was with McFarlane Productions, which was illustrated by Clayton Crain, but to date, McFarlane has opted not to publish it.
Smith wasn't the only creator with a soft spot in his heart for the characters - as mentioned previously, the pool of Nedor characters had been dipped into by Roy Thomas and ACE Comics, but in 1988, publisher Bill Black brought back a host of public domain characters, including many of the Nedor heroes for use in AC's Femforce series, placing them in new series, as well as reprinting original stories.
Over the years, AC Comics has taken the initiative to seek out and preserve many Golden Age comics and heroes, painstakingly retouching and correcting the art from the original comics - since no original art still exists - to produce reprint editions. As stated on their website, AC's reprints of public domain Golden Age comics is threefold:
1. To help preserve the history of the American comic book.
2. To make material available to collectors who have been priced out of the Golden-Age collecting market.
3. To introduce Golden-Age material to a new generation of comic book readers.
AC has also endeavored to compile information about the creators of the Golden Age comics - as much as it is available - and publish the information in various magazines, including Men of Mystery, which featured the Nedor heroes in a special edition.
Again, given the time period in which the work was originally created, many creators were never credited with their work, and in some cases, attribution of the creation of Golden Age characters is only anecdotal in nature.
Along with reprints of the original characters, AC has written the Nedor heroes as continuations of their Golden Age incarnations, maintaining the same general concepts and secret identities, but have also made some alterations in terms of costumes and names. The changes AC has made in the Nedor characters made done in order to make their versions distinctive in order that the publisher could copyright their stories, as well as protect their looks, just as Smith and Dixon did with their version of the Black Terror, and ABC has done with their versions of the characters.
To date, AC has been publishing the Nedor heroes (both on their own and as supporting characters) for going on twenty years, a run nearly double the original run the characters enjoyed in the '40s.
As the covers in this article show, the Terra Obscura storyline in Tom Strong #11 and #12 isn't the only connection between the Nedor line and WildStorm's ABC line - in 1942, Nedor launched America's Best Comics #1, a title which brought together Nedor's top three characters, Fighting Yank, Doc Strange, and the Black Terror together between two covers. And of course, there is that similarity between Doc Strange and Tom Strong, noted by Strong in issue #11 - the two could be brothers. It was a similarity Moore himself noted in an interview with Previews, but said that while he was inspired the America's Best Comics title as a name for a line, the similarity between the two characters was a complete coincidence.
For Moore aficionados, his account of later discoveries after creating both Tom Strong and Promethea come as little surprise, and fit into the creators' theories about ideaspace and the fact that he occasionally runs off and prays to a snake god...or...something under his house. "I didn't know there was The Book of Promethea by Hélène Cixous, or things like that," Moore told Previews. "I didn't know John Kendrick Bangs had written a bunch of stories about a place very much like the Immateria when I made Sophie Bangs the secret identity of Promethea. All of these things are delicious coincidences. I even found a character created from about 1910 in a series of novels published by the Boy Scouts of America about this ultimate Boy Scout named Tom Strong. It's just great! If you're hitting the right kind of vein of archetypal stuff then things like this will just happen. I'm just tapping into something. It works out."
In a recent interview with Newsarama, Moore expanded upon his decision to use the characters. "The original idea for the whole thing came when somebody, it may have been Rick Veitch, told me that there had been, back in the '40s, an America's Best Comics which I wasn't aware of," Moore said. "I thought it was a striking coincidence that we had America's Best Comics, and there was a series by the same name in the '40s. I asked [ABC editor] Scott Dunbier to check it out and see if he could find out anything about this comic, and whether there were any interesting characters.
"For all I knew, it might have been a Western comic book, but I asked him to tell me if there were any interesting characters, with an eye to possibly reviving them if they were sort of old, forgotten characters, in the current America's Best Comics as a kind of instant 1940s continuity. I left it with Scott, and he got back to me, along with some other people who sent me covers from the original comics - it was then I realized that Doc Strange looked very much like Tom Strong - he had the same kind of bizarrely muscled physique. He wore a red t-short, and these jodhpurs, and boots. I realized that we wouldn't be able to do a character with the name Doc Strange [due to this upstart company called Marvel, which had created a character named Dr. Strange in the interim]. I though that maybe we could change the name to Tom Strange, because at that point, I though that point his first name had never been given. I found out later that it was Hugo, so I think that the current orthodoxy at ABC is that his name is Thomas Hugo Strange."
Moore said that originally, the plan was to use the characters only for the two-part "Terra Obscura" storyline which would explain where Tom Strange came from - it was a story that needed a world populated with heroes. "I came up with the Terra Obscura idea, which I thought was an interesting variant on the notion that this is a planet which is in the same dimension as ours, and is an exact duplicate, just elsewhere in space," Moore said. "I started to research as many of the Nedor heroes as I could. Jim Steranko was a great help - he dug out loads of old articles which filled in a lot of details for me, and we did the story from there.
"That was originally going to be all we were doing. Then, Pete Hogan, after having just done a pretty splendid job on the Tesla Strong special was looking for something else to do. He suggested that, because there was such a lot of positive feedback and interest on the web regarding the Terra Obscura characters that he wondered about doing a miniseries. It sounded good to me. Pete and I have been working together on this, and it's coming along well.
"Initially, it was an idea if there was an interesting character in this 1940s, America's Best Comics we could kind of bring him back in the present day and pleasantly confuse readers as to whether America's Best Comics really did exist in the 1940s," Moore continued. "It was more that than anything - we'd exploit the coincidence and sort of pretended that we had this backlog of characters that stretched back to the 1940s."
The Perils and Promise of the Public Domain
By becoming part of the public domain, the heroes of the old Standard line of comics are part of the cultural heritage of the United States and world, just like Thomas Nash's versions of Santa Claus and Uncle Sam, and nearly all the classical music in the world. As such, they can be used by current creators as source material who would be "standing on the shoulders of giants" as it were to create their own, new works.
According to public domain advocates, what AC and ABC (and previously, Eclipse and others) are doing with the old Nedor heroes is exactly why material should go into the public domain, that is, the original works can be freely built upon to further enhance the cultural landscape of the world. Okay, so whether or not FemForce and Tom Strong #11 and #12 enhance the cultural landscape of the world is arguable, but again, AC and ABC are doing exactly what they're supposed to in regards to works in the public domain - using them as source works, and either re-presenting them or building upon them to tell new stories.
It's exactly what Borders or Barnes & Noble do when they publish and release their own editions of classic literature - or, for that matter, what Alan Moore did in creating League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. That said though, working with properties from the public domain, especially when using them as a foundation to build upon comes with its own problems due to the simple fact that anyone can do it. If one publishing house starts up a version of say, Pyroman (a Nedor hero) with writer A and artist B, a publishing house down the street can do their own version of Pyroman with writer C and artist D.
In such a setting, the market would determine which version of the character survives, based on everything from quality of the product to the marketing each publishers attempt. One publish could win out over the other and make millions while the other fails, despite the time and effort expended.
While neither Dunbier nor anyone from AC Comics chose to go on record, sources confirmed that, despite the legalities of each company's use of the characters, the smaller publisher is mildly annoyed at ABC's apparent ongoing use of the characters.
Also, in today's world where the creator of a property has come to be considered in higher regard than in years past, there is a danger in a property such as the Nedor heroes entering the public domain and then being revised or revisited by a creator such as Alan Moore or Peter Hogan, and that is that the original creators of the work may be forgotten or overlooked. Already, the specific creator pedigree of many Nedor heroes is unknown, lost in the mists of time and churning of the 1940s' publishing industry.
As stated above, many readers of Tom Strong #11 or #12 would automatically assign the creation of the Terra Obscura characters to Moore - after all, the guy did create heroes that were a shade away from the Charlton heroes for Watchmen, why couldn't he just do it again?
As a result, the original creators of the characters are lost to the mists of time - technically, as they should be, as part of becoming part of the public domain, but perhaps unfairly so in the view of fans indoctrinated in the creator rights battles of the past decades.
The public domain, in the eyes of its advocates, is a necessary part of the cultural landscape of America - something that the founding fathers outlined - something that allows a vigorous and growing culture without the restrictions of royalties. For every pro argument, there's a con, mostly from copyright holders.
For example, if Disney and other media companies would be unsuccessful in extending the term of copyright extension, Mickey Mouse hits the public domain in 2003. Legally, Universal could produce a line of Mickey Mouse cartoons based on the original appearance of the character from the 1928 Steamboat Willie, and anyone could package and sell the original Steamboat Willie cartoon - all without credit or payment to Walt Disney.
The challenges of public domain don't just affect the Nedor heroes - there are dozens upon dozens of Golden Age heroes who are currently in the public domain waiting for their chance at a second shot or re-presentation, or to be completely forgotten, their histories, creators, and adventures lost forever.
My bigger problem in the Open Source community right now is how the law deals with coders who submit code to a project.
If you work at a company and submit your companies IP or patents in patch or feature upgrade to an Open Source project, then currently it looks like the law says everyone who was involved with coding the project is liable for IP theft, patent theft, and possible copyright violations. This is reguardless of what they did or didn't know about, and reguardless if they were lied to or not about the nature of the code and coprights, IP, patents etc.
What is the Open Source community and the legal system going to do about this to fix and is there anything it can do?
It seems to me that you might be able to replace your PC's BIOS with a replacement BIOS from Red Hat. They have the Redboot BIOS that supports ethernet and serial interfaces at the BIOS level.
If you don't have to agree to the GPL license to get some software packge and use it, then it would seem that your basically saying that once I have the software package I can do anything I want with it. Since I didn't agree to a license you can't restrict me with it, thus I can reasonably assume that you were putting the software in the public domain since you put the source code and everything out there free for the taking. Thus based on this logic I can then do anything I want with the code including making it a commerical package or including bits of it in my commercial package.
If this isn't the case then you are actually putting restrictions on my use of what appears to the "common man" to be something that would normally be found only in the pubic domain.
The GPL is a license and it does require accent to it to get the software. If you don't agree to the license then you don't even have a right to the copyrighted source code/program, which in this case is licensed under the GPL. Copyright does not say that anyone has a right to get my stuff, copyright allows me (the copyright holder) to determin if anyone gets it, and on what terms they get it (as allowed by or limited by law). Under copyright law I can say that no one is allowed a copy of my work and that it is all private for my use only.
Also I do not need a sale or purchase to enforce my license of my software. I can say I am giving up these rights (my private exclusive use) in exchange for you agreeing to these terms. Or in other words the only way I am going to let you have access to my copyright material is under the following conditions, you don't like the conditions then I'm sorry you can't have access to my copyright material. The exchange of money is in a way, beside the point, in the eyes of the law when it comes to copyright law and license/contract law. I have given up something and you are agreeing to my terms, thus getting something, the copyright material, and agreeing to my restrictions (when compared to the public domain) thus in theory you are giving something up. In the case of the GPL I am theorically getting something too, any modifications (your copyright work) to the (my) copyright work if you distribute your changes.
Thus the GPL isn't that different from most license agreements and depends on the law to enforce it and give it some teeth. It would seem that if the GPL didn't depend on contract law for its basis, then it couldn't be expected to force people to distribute the source code to their changes when they redistribute a modified version.
Thus it doesn't seem to me to be that weird for a GPL software package to have the option of using a click-through license that basically says if you want this software here are the terms that you must agree to in order to get it. Yes, not every user will redistribute modified GPL software, thus not many would trigger the need to enforce the license, but the law doesn't care about anything but what would be potentially the exception in this case.
Blizzard mayi claim that someone stole their code for BNETD in legal court documents but that doesn't make it a legal find of fact, or in other words the truth. That is just what they are claiming, and to a degree what they have to claim to make the court believe that the lawsuit has some merit and isn't totally bogus to be thrown out before it even starts. Think of it as a claim to prevent their lawsuit from being tossed out as a totally frivilous lawsuit that clog the courts these days that judges try to throw out as fast as they can.
Blizzard may make the claim, but it still doesn't make it true, nor has the court had a chance to rule on it yet.
Yes, Blizzard said a few years ago in an interview with one of the gaming magazines that $10-15 of every game goes to supporting Battle.net. That is where they get the money to keep Battle.net running.
I'm not sure how many of you have actually read the DMCA and know exactly what it does and doesn't allow. It seems a lot of people are confused and misunderstand what the DMCA does allow for projects like "The BNETD Project". The DMCA allows you to circumvent the copy protection of software and hardware in order to develop an inter-operable device or program. Also the DMCA specifically says that leaving out the copy protection of a device for inter-operability is *NOT* a violation of the DMCA. Nor is defeating/removing the copy protection in order to figure out how to make something inter-operable. Also note that the key sections of the DMCA require that either the primary purpose of the device be illegal and/or that it defeats the copy protection for profit. Neither of these statements are true of "The BNETD Project". Please note the 2 quotes below or read the entire law yourself at:
c hapter12
http://www.loc.gov/copyright/title17/circ92.html#
DMCA Section 1201-bc3
"Nothing in this section shall require that the design of, or design and selection of parts and components for, a consumer electronics, telecommunications, or computing product provide for a response to any particular technological measure, so long as such part or component, or the product in which such part or component is integrated, does not otherwise fall within the prohibitions of subsection (a)(2) or (b)(1)."
DMCA Section 1201-f
" Reverse Engineering.-(1) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title."