Came across this problem whilst brainstorming for The Circle.
There is no way to verify that a peer is running some genuine/particular client or other (at least, not without DRM hardware).
The only way to make sure that you're not uploading fies to RIAA dupes is to have a real-life web-of-trust amongst your users. Unless your web of trust is a serious conspiracy, it's unlikely to be effective.
It *is* (theoretically) possible to detect misbehaving clients, though. Imagine you require all participants to sign each of their transactions, and there are particular pairs of transactions which are inconsistent (such as, reply to a search for file X, but then claim not to have X when a download is requested). Nodes which see such behaviour can compile cryptographicaly secure evidence that a node has bisbehaved (the node can then be temporarily blacklisted).
On Paul's comment that copyright infringement is unethical, here is the (usually neglected) rule-of-thumb:
1. If, absent piracy, you would have bought it anyway, then you owe the artist (and maybe the publisher?) some money.
2. If you wouldn't have shelled out to purchase a copy, then copyright infringement is ethical.
This is not a big mystery, or even all that new. If I ran an anonymous FTP server, and let anyone in the world log in and download copyrighted works, I could be held liable for facilitating their theft.
That got me thinking.
The answer appears to be that, if you take material down when you get a notice-and-takedown letter, the DMCA gives you appropriate protection (17 USC 512 (c) and (d) ). The definition of "service provider" in 512 (k) clearly covers both anonymous FTP and Freenet servers.
What happens when all Freenet users get inundated with notice-and-takedown letters is much less obvious, of course.
IANAL, btw, although I am doing a PhD on digital copyright
Inferences about knowledge are drawn all the time in criminal cases. If you have a picture of a small child being forced to perform a sex act, it is no defense to say "I don't really know her/his age." You are presumed to know that the person in the picture is a child, a presumption that a jury of your peers will decide the reasonableness of. (E.g. whether they think it is obvious).
This seems to me to be a complete dis-analogy.
What do you think the odds of a US jury convicting a freenet user of trafficking KP are, if the defence provides convincing evidence that it was virtually for the defendant to have known what was passing through their node?
(ie, they didn't have the choice about whether to offer a drug user/dealer a ride, and they didn't have the option of looking under the seat to find the drugs)
Note: this isn't a rhetorical question.
Does functionality determine what people buy?
on
Dual-headed Laptops
·
· Score: 1
You should definitely read this article, The Economics of the Microsoft case, by Tim Bresnahan, who was chief economist (?) for the DOJ during the trial.
I think most people, if they realised that a BSD-style version of Mono actually has significant commercial value (something that has escaped some of the other responders who think that having a GPL version is the be-all and end-all) would be a little hesitant about giving code to Mono or about promoting it freely. Most members of the open source community give their time and efforts based on it going back into the community, not into a corporate's pockets.
If you write a patch adding some feature or other to Mono, you own the copyright in that patch. If you were relying on the GPL to obtain permission to create that derivative work from copyrighted Ximian software, then if you distribute your patch, it must also be available under the GPL, so Ximian has a licence to use it.
But Ximian only has a licence to use it under the GPL. If they want to sell a proprietary version of Mono, they can't include your contributions with permission.
Thus, if I were Ximian, I would just ask for this permission for small patches. For significant contributions, I would pay the contributors to obtain it using a fair slice of the royalties from Mono.
Note that there are other licenses, such as the Netscape and Mozilla Public Licenses, which require that permission of this sort be given to the company which originally produced the software.
On the other hand, Ximian only release their code under GPL and GPL-like licenses, not under more permissive BSD license. My belief is that Ximian's business plan involves keeping this right to themselves, probably for sale later on - perhaps in a couple of years - when (if).Net ever achieves dominance....
Don't support.Net. And don't support Mono. They are Microsoft's whores.
Well, as a previous poster pointed out, this isn't completely true. But anyway, what's wrong with Ximian trying to create a valuable commercial asset for themselves? It's not like they're a charity. If they get a nice revenue stream, it'll enable them to write more handy GPLed code.
If you want a proprietary extension of Mono, you pay them for it. If you like free software, well, it's GPLed...
That would be the point. What's wrong with private schools? What's the betting that they'd be both better and cheaper than the current state provisioned systems.
What's wrong with private schools? Well, it depends. It can be great to have independently run schools, provided they're publicly funded. But if you have to pay for your private school, then only wealthy (or smart & organised) parents will be able to get their kids into decent schools.
The more education is privatised, the more the population of poorly educated, alienated people grows. The kids who get the dregs of a market-based school system have a hard enough start in life as it is.
Note: the United States has further complications in its school system, if I understand it correctly, because public funding for schools comes from local government, and thus the value of your property determines the quality of your local school...
Did we sign the earlier Rome convention? I think we did, in which case we could go back to the pre-1976, 36 years + renewable for 36 years by the author and still have U.S. Copyrights recognized the world over(Clause 7). Not that it matters, WTO members must recognize each others copyrights, and IMF loans always specify such things, so that covers just about everyone except Antarctica.
This is true, but the US would itself be breaching TRIPs and would thus be subject to action through the WTO's dispute resolution process, which has, amongst other things, the power to authorise countries to impose sanctions against "independently minded countries".
Breaking the Berne treaty could get U.S. copyrights de-recognized all over the world.
It makes me most sad to read this. The only reason that Berne has teeth is that the US fought long and hard to have it made a requirement for WTO membership.
Although I believe that after the United States got its choice of minimum copyright and patent standards written in to the GATT, they are theoretically no longer supposed to use these unilateral sanctions to coerce other countries into changing their laws.
Well maybe it's overall contribution? The top 3 pieces of code, are not the GNU project. The first GNU project's contribution is only 15% of the contribution of the top three. 6 of the next 7 projects are GNU projects. Combined they still only account for 69% of the top three projects.
Your reasoning here is disingenuous.
If you look at size of contributions, I would say
you have:
linux kernel - 2.4M LOC
GNU (gcc + binutils + glibc + gdb) core infrastructure - 3.2M LOC
XFree86 - 1.8 M LOC
hence, the largest contributing components are GNU, then Linux, then X. It is ridiculous to say "GNU is only 69% of the size of Linux + X + Mozilla, therefore we should call it Linux!". Note also, that I didn't include GNU software like emacs, which I would say is an application and not essential to the functionality of the system.
The popularity of Linux has made the GNU software available for millions of people who never used it before and many of those might not have ever used it otherwise. Thus Linux has proven to be a fantastic avenue for Richard and his dream of people using the useful applications the FSF people have built.
(...snip...)
Richard should be happy about the success of Linux because without Linux nobody but a few geeks would know about GNU and the FSF, let alone give a damn about it.
I have a different theory (and it is just a theory): The early work of the GNU project in the 80s was largely the result of isolated coding by small groups of (geographically) localised developers.
It was only once 'net usage started to become much more common, particularly in universities, in the early 90s, that the more decentralised method of free software development over the Internet became feasible.
That was the possibility which Linus really exploited to make the Linux kernel as succesful as it was. At the same time, the HURD was suffering from the good old-fashioned software engineering problems which can strike down overly ambitious projects.
But, it seems that Linus was really filling a void (decentralised development of a Free Software kernel) which had recently appeared; and it seems likely that if he hadn't written Linux, someone else would have done something very similar...
Note: of course, the same argument could be used
to claim that if RMS hadn't championed the cause of Free Software in the early 80s, then someone else would have done the same. This may be true too, although, because hacker communities of the time were much smaller, it might have taken quite a lot longer for that to happen.
The Circle is a nifty little P2P network which has trust metrics built into it. At the moment, it only uses trust to evaluate "gossip", which is a decentralised news system; but some work is being done to extend this to DOS-resistant file sharing.
At this stage, it seems likely that it will work best with a trust metric only, rather than a mixture of "trust" and "distrust".
Mechanisms which simply block nodes based on the "denouncements" of (even trusted) others are a bit risky because they are an obvious tool for DOSers
themselves.
That's not to say that a p2p network couldn't have an "immune system" -- but they need to be very carefully constructed.
Well, software patents are deeply flawed - they do nothing to encourage innovation, but they are used collectively to protect organisations against other software patents (sue us,and we'll sue you).
Given that they appear to be the way of the future (even in Europe, the organised eurolinux campaign seems to be struggling to hold off the "overly enthusiastic" patent office), the Free Software community should definitely use them when they discover nifty algorithms.
As someone above pointed out, the GPL guarantees that any GPL-dependent organisation (such as RedHat) will have to license software patents on a royalty-free basis for GPL software. It would be better to license them for all
DFSG-free code. Note that such a license would not apply if, for example, Microsoft took some *BSD code an incorporated it in Win2k, because it's no longer DFSG-free.
The only question then is whether you charge royalties to proprietary software firms for use of the patented techniques, or whether you exclude them completely...
But since the US passed the Bayh-Dole act, government funded agencies are free to privatise their discoveries for profit - and in practice, there is a lot of pressure to play the commercialisation game.
So perhaps the right strategy to lobby for is to GPLed the code, with the alternative of paying for a proprietary license, as Trolltech, for example, does with Qt.
This also has the nice property that it debunks all of Microsoft's arguments against the GPL, which claim that the license prevents the transfer of publicly funded technology to the private sector.
The purpose of copyright is to provide incentives for authors to work on useful, creative activities. In the US, you can use the "progress of science and useful arts" terminology of your Constitution to support this.
Now, the problem is that the "exclusive rights" copyright uses -- such as the right to control reproduction -- are very problematic on the internet for two reasons:
Raising the cost of information goods from $0 to a few dollars (or tens of dollars) is a massive increase, which will prevent many people from accessing important (or enjoyable) information. This is not the case when copyright adds a few dollars to the cost of a book, and it certainly impededs the "progress of science and useful arts"
As you probably understand, but your representatives don't, so-called "digital rights management" technology is ridiculous. Aside from denying users many valuable activities that would be deemed "fair use", it is, on some level, theoretically impossible to make DRM secure. You don't prevent access to cleartext music, film or writing by placing an encrypted copy in everyone's home, and then have their media gadgetry decrypt it.
That wouldn't be such a problem, except the massive costs of this extremely poor security model will be passed on to the public.
Now, as for alternatives, they come in two flavours -- there are the bottom-up, decentralised ones, such as the Street Performer Protocol (a variant of which Stephen King used very succesfully, even if it wasn't always reported correctly). Other bottom-up models include Ian Clarke's "fairshare", gift economies, or tipping systems. None of these alternatives require government support, and have been slow to take off (many people blame the lack of safe, easy micropayment facilities), but no doubt there's a lot government could do to encourage them.
There are also government-supported alternatives, in which funds are raised through voluntary tax credits, or taxation (which could be levies on hardware or internet usage, or general revenue) and allocated to artists in a decentralised fashion, by the public. An example of this kind of model is described in Steven Shavell and Tanguy van Ypersele, Rewards versus Intellectual Property Rights, Journal of Law and Economics, October 2001.
I'm just finishing a paper on applying publicly funded reward models to copyright on the net -- it's not quite ready for public release yet, but email me if you'd like a copy.
Also, you can find more interesting sources at this wiki, and I'm just in the process of setting up thesemailing lists for discussion of these models.
All these laws are being passed in order to activate the WIPO Copyright Treaty, which was stitched up by the RIAA/MPAA et. al in 1996, before Slashdot even existed.
Actually, it's miraculous that it's taken this long for the US to be able to coerce everyone into ratifying it. They were having trouble getting the number of countries they needed, so they started forcing lots of developing countries to ratify it by using bilateral investment treaties. As a result, it looks like the treaty will be activated soon...
This is a really important question. Were these problems with evidence, problems with fair use exceptions (not really a GPL violation), or problems with jurisdiction?
Perhaps the circumstances indicated that the damages would have been trivial, and hence the prosecution would be pointless, but again, in that case surely the license violation would not have been so problematic?
Actually, if the copyright holders were not willing to co-operate, then the license would not have been enforceable- for example, if the author was deceased and their estate was not willing to become involved.
Enough wild speculation:). I can't really think of any sensible reason which might have made prosecution impossible.
Your criticism appears to be that IBM is prepared to promote Linux whilst at the same time not wholly accepting the philosophy which produced it. You feel that because they have put a lot of money into Linux they must automatically adopt a particular view of IP. To do otherwise is "unethical and inconsistent"
Okay, I accept that these labels are only applicable from the public, or the Free software community's perspective. IBM is, of course, consistently self interested. When I say that IBM does things which are unethical, I refer to utilitarian ethics; although I'm not actually a utilitarian myself, I don't think there is another ethical framework which has the same legitimacy in discussions of public policy.
Many people defened the "free market" economy because they claim that it has many desirable utilitarian properties. Those people tend to ignore the distorting economic effects of power. When a large corporation actively lobbies for changes in, for example, IP laws, which are clearly contrary to the public interest, it is our responsibility as informed citizens to point that out to them (in the politest possible way, of course;).
I spent a while wondering about IBM, and the fact that they support Linux, whilst simultaneously being one of the biggest proponents of IP. Of course, it isn't strange that they do this - IBM is a very large organisation, and it is quite possible for one division to say "hey, Free Software is cool and cheap for us to use", while another says "we can benefit from patents on all this R&D we're doing, let's lobby for the expansion of the patent system".
The more inappropriate aspect of this response is that it adopts the language of property rights with respect to copyright and patents - the view that monopolies in information are somehow natural, god given things.
This is a deeply problematic view of copyright and patent law, one which was explicity ruled out in various common law jurisdictions by virtue of Donaldson v. Becket (1774) and the US Constitution.
A more reasonable and modern approach is to regard IP laws as economic instruments which must balance the public interest in incentives with the public interest in widespread distribution. The Free Software movement (and the more general anti-IP sentiment on the internet) is a result of the fact that technology has shifted this balance - the public interest dictates that copyright and patent laws ought to be weaker, to utilise the distributional possibilities of the net. In this context, IBM's actions can be seen to be more unethical and inconsistent.
Of course, expecting the average copyright lawyer, let alone IBM marketing, to acknowledge this, is rather unrealisitic.:)
Um, the GPL is a intelectual property license. As far as I know, it falls into the general catagory of contract law. Every country that I know of has a functioning system of contract law, for the simple reason that it's impossible to do buisiness otherwise.
The GPL is not an "intellectual property" license, since, legally speaking, there is no single thing called "intellectual property". There are copyrights, patents, trademarks, unfair competiton laws, and in different countries, different kinds of sui generis ("in its own class") laws, covering plants, circuit layouts, databases etc. The GPL is a copyright license, which grants the recipient some of the rights held by the copyright owner, under copyright law.
Note that this is quite different to a contract, which is a voluntary negotiated agreement between two parties.
Because some things (eg the right to use a progam, once you have it) are not controlled by copyright, lots of proprietary software companies try to use End User License Agreements (which are actually contracts) to enforce onerous conditions on their users. Of course, since the agreement must be voluntary and negotiated, many courts would regard a click-wrap contract as non-binding. Hence UCITA.
It is actually possible to do interesting copyleft-style things using contracts (see the free world license, for example), but it seems very clear that the free software community stands to loose much more than it could gain by the general application of contracts in software distribution.
Erm, aren't the GPL etc. governed by US law? And since when did China subscribe to that?
The GPL is a grant of license with respect to copyright law. Many countries have copyright laws under which the GPL probably makes some sense (signatories to the Berne Convention, for example), so the expectation is that the GPL will be enforceable there.
Lots of people here have been saying that the GPL is meaningless in China. China wasn't a signatory to the Berne Convention, and didn't have much in the way of copyright. That is, until recently.
When China wanted to join the World Trade Organisation, it was forced to sign TRIPs. TRIPs (trade related aspecs of intellecutal property) is a little document designed for Pfizier, Monsanto, IBM, Sony et. al., which enforces 20 year patents, life of the author + 50 year copyrights, restrictions on "compulsory licensing", and DMCA-style anti-circumvention device prohibitions. In perhaps the most spectacular coup for corporatations over the public interest (ever), it was tacked onto the GATT in 1994. In effect, any country which does not believe that their interests are served by such extreme IP monopolies, suffers massive trade sanctions through WTO exclusion (see Braithwaite and Drahos, Global Business Regulation, chapter 7, for more details).
China, like everyone else, has buckled to this pressure, and is going to want to create the impression that it's trying to follow TRIPs. If someone could actually identify a prima facie deliberate GPL violation in China, they might have some chance of a successful prosecution.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no way to verify that a peer is running some genuine/particular client or other (at least, not without DRM hardware).
The only way to make sure that you're not uploading fies to RIAA dupes is to have a real-life web-of-trust amongst your users. Unless your web of trust is a serious conspiracy, it's unlikely to be effective.
It *is* (theoretically) possible to detect misbehaving clients, though. Imagine you require all participants to sign each of their transactions, and there are particular pairs of transactions which are inconsistent (such as, reply to a search for file X, but then claim not to have X when a download is requested). Nodes which see such behaviour can compile cryptographicaly secure evidence that a node has bisbehaved (the node can then be temporarily blacklisted).
On Paul's comment that copyright infringement is unethical, here is the (usually neglected) rule-of-thumb:
1. If, absent piracy, you would have bought it anyway, then you owe the artist (and maybe the publisher?) some money.
2. If you wouldn't have shelled out to purchase a copy, then copyright infringement is ethical.
This is not a big mystery, or even all that new. If I ran an anonymous FTP server, and let anyone in the world log in and download copyrighted works, I could be held liable for facilitating their theft.
That got me thinking.
The answer appears to be that, if you take material down when you get a notice-and-takedown letter, the DMCA gives you appropriate protection (17 USC 512 (c) and (d) ). The definition of "service provider" in 512 (k) clearly covers both anonymous FTP and Freenet servers.
What happens when all Freenet users get inundated with notice-and-takedown letters is much less obvious, of course.
IANAL, btw, although I am doing a PhD on digital copyright
Oops, missing a slight important word: that should be virtually impossible :)
If sharing music is piracy, then violating the Sherman Antitust Act is thermonuclear terrorism.
:)
This is the best sig I've seen in ages, but it has a spelling mistake in it
This seems to me to be a complete dis-analogy.
What do you think the odds of a US jury convicting a freenet user of trafficking KP are, if the defence provides convincing evidence that it was virtually for the defendant to have known what was passing through their node?
(ie, they didn't have the choice about whether to offer a drug user/dealer a ride, and they didn't have the option of looking under the seat to find the drugs)
Note: this isn't a rhetorical question.
You should definitely read this article, The Economics of the Microsoft case, by Tim Bresnahan, who was chief economist (?) for the DOJ during the trial.
If you write a patch adding some feature or other to Mono, you own the copyright in that patch. If you were relying on the GPL to obtain permission to create that derivative work from copyrighted Ximian software, then if you distribute your patch, it must also be available under the GPL, so Ximian has a licence to use it.
But Ximian only has a licence to use it under the GPL. If they want to sell a proprietary version of Mono, they can't include your contributions with permission.
Thus, if I were Ximian, I would just ask for this permission for small patches. For significant contributions, I would pay the contributors to obtain it using a fair slice of the royalties from Mono.
Note that there are other licenses, such as the Netscape and Mozilla Public Licenses, which require that permission of this sort be given to the company which originally produced the software.
On the other hand, Ximian only release their code under GPL and GPL-like licenses, not under more permissive BSD license. My belief is that Ximian's business plan involves keeping this right to themselves, probably for sale later on - perhaps in a couple of years - when (if) .Net ever achieves dominance. ...
.Net. And don't support Mono. They are Microsoft's whores.
Don't support
Well, as a previous poster pointed out, this isn't completely true. But anyway, what's wrong with Ximian trying to create a valuable commercial asset for themselves? It's not like they're a charity. If they get a nice revenue stream, it'll enable them to write more handy GPLed code.
If you want a proprietary extension of Mono, you pay them for it. If you like free software, well, it's GPLed...
What's wrong with private schools? Well, it depends. It can be great to have independently run schools, provided they're publicly funded. But if you have to pay for your private school, then only wealthy (or smart & organised) parents will be able to get their kids into decent schools.
The more education is privatised, the more the population of poorly educated, alienated people grows. The kids who get the dregs of a market-based school system have a hard enough start in life as it is.
Note: the United States has further complications in its school system, if I understand it correctly, because public funding for schools comes from local government, and thus the value of your property determines the quality of your local school...
This is true, but the US would itself be breaching TRIPs and would thus be subject to action through the WTO's dispute resolution process, which has, amongst other things, the power to authorise countries to impose sanctions against "independently minded countries".
The dispute resolution process has already been used to prevent the US from creating exceptions to its copyright laws.
It makes me most sad to read this. The only reason that Berne has teeth is that the US fought long and hard to have it made a requirement for WTO membership.
Some information from previous slashdot posts I've made.
Well, it's worked for them in the past.
Although I believe that after the United States got its choice of minimum copyright and patent standards written in to the GATT, they are theoretically no longer supposed to use these unilateral sanctions to coerce other countries into changing their laws.
Your reasoning here is disingenuous.
If you look at size of contributions, I would say you have:
linux kernel - 2.4M LOC
GNU (gcc + binutils + glibc + gdb) core infrastructure - 3.2M LOC
XFree86 - 1.8 M LOC
hence, the largest contributing components are GNU, then Linux, then X. It is ridiculous to say "GNU is only 69% of the size of Linux + X + Mozilla, therefore we should call it Linux!". Note also, that I didn't include GNU software like emacs, which I would say is an application and not essential to the functionality of the system.
The popularity of Linux has made the GNU software available for millions of people who never used it before and many of those might not have ever used it otherwise. Thus Linux has proven to be a fantastic avenue for Richard and his dream of people using the useful applications the FSF people have built.
(...snip...)
Richard should be happy about the success of Linux because without Linux nobody but a few geeks would know about GNU and the FSF, let alone give a damn about it.
I have a different theory (and it is just a theory): The early work of the GNU project in the 80s was largely the result of isolated coding by small groups of (geographically) localised developers.
It was only once 'net usage started to become much more common, particularly in universities, in the early 90s, that the more decentralised method of free software development over the Internet became feasible.
That was the possibility which Linus really exploited to make the Linux kernel as succesful as it was. At the same time, the HURD was suffering from the good old-fashioned software engineering problems which can strike down overly ambitious projects.
But, it seems that Linus was really filling a void (decentralised development of a Free Software kernel) which had recently appeared; and it seems likely that if he hadn't written Linux, someone else would have done something very similar...
Note: of course, the same argument could be used to claim that if RMS hadn't championed the cause of Free Software in the early 80s, then someone else would have done the same. This may be true too, although, because hacker communities of the time were much smaller, it might have taken quite a lot longer for that to happen.
At this stage, it seems likely that it will work best with a trust metric only, rather than a mixture of "trust" and "distrust". Mechanisms which simply block nodes based on the "denouncements" of (even trusted) others are a bit risky because they are an obvious tool for DOSers themselves.
That's not to say that a p2p network couldn't have an "immune system" -- but they need to be very carefully constructed.
Nope. Did I inadvertently claim to be one?
Given that they appear to be the way of the future (even in Europe, the organised eurolinux campaign seems to be struggling to hold off the "overly enthusiastic" patent office), the Free Software community should definitely use them when they discover nifty algorithms.
As someone above pointed out, the GPL guarantees that any GPL-dependent organisation (such as RedHat) will have to license software patents on a royalty-free basis for GPL software. It would be better to license them for all DFSG-free code. Note that such a license would not apply if, for example, Microsoft took some *BSD code an incorporated it in Win2k, because it's no longer DFSG-free.
The only question then is whether you charge royalties to proprietary software firms for use of the patented techniques, or whether you exclude them completely...
But since the US passed the Bayh-Dole act, government funded agencies are free to privatise their discoveries for profit - and in practice, there is a lot of pressure to play the commercialisation game.
So perhaps the right strategy to lobby for is to GPLed the code, with the alternative of paying for a proprietary license, as Trolltech, for example, does with Qt.
This also has the nice property that it debunks all of Microsoft's arguments against the GPL, which claim that the license prevents the transfer of publicly funded technology to the private sector.
Now, the problem is that the "exclusive rights" copyright uses -- such as the right to control reproduction -- are very problematic on the internet for two reasons:
That wouldn't be such a problem, except the massive costs of this extremely poor security model will be passed on to the public.
Now, as for alternatives, they come in two flavours -- there are the bottom-up, decentralised ones, such as the Street Performer Protocol (a variant of which Stephen King used very succesfully, even if it wasn't always reported correctly). Other bottom-up models include Ian Clarke's "fairshare", gift economies, or tipping systems. None of these alternatives require government support, and have been slow to take off (many people blame the lack of safe, easy micropayment facilities), but no doubt there's a lot government could do to encourage them.
There are also government-supported alternatives, in which funds are raised through voluntary tax credits, or taxation (which could be levies on hardware or internet usage, or general revenue) and allocated to artists in a decentralised fashion, by the public. An example of this kind of model is described in Steven Shavell and Tanguy van Ypersele, Rewards versus Intellectual Property Rights, Journal of Law and Economics, October 2001.
I'm just finishing a paper on applying publicly funded reward models to copyright on the net -- it's not quite ready for public release yet, but email me if you'd like a copy.
Also, you can find more interesting sources at this wiki, and I'm just in the process of setting up these mailing lists for discussion of these models.
Actually, it's miraculous that it's taken this long for the US to be able to coerce everyone into ratifying it. They were having trouble getting the number of countries they needed, so they started forcing lots of developing countries to ratify it by using bilateral investment treaties. As a result, it looks like the treaty will be activated soon...
This is a really important question. Were these problems with evidence, problems with fair use exceptions (not really a GPL violation), or problems with jurisdiction?
Perhaps the circumstances indicated that the damages would have been trivial, and hence the prosecution would be pointless, but again, in that case surely the license violation would not have been so problematic?
Actually, if the copyright holders were not willing to co-operate, then the license would not have been enforceable- for example, if the author was deceased and their estate was not willing to become involved.
Enough wild speculation :). I can't really think of any sensible reason which might have made prosecution impossible.
Okay, I accept that these labels are only applicable from the public, or the Free software community's perspective. IBM is, of course, consistently self interested. When I say that IBM does things which are unethical, I refer to utilitarian ethics; although I'm not actually a utilitarian myself, I don't think there is another ethical framework which has the same legitimacy in discussions of public policy.
Many people defened the "free market" economy because they claim that it has many desirable utilitarian properties. Those people tend to ignore the distorting economic effects of power. When a large corporation actively lobbies for changes in, for example, IP laws, which are clearly contrary to the public interest, it is our responsibility as informed citizens to point that out to them (in the politest possible way, of course ;).
The more inappropriate aspect of this response is that it adopts the language of property rights with respect to copyright and patents - the view that monopolies in information are somehow natural, god given things.
This is a deeply problematic view of copyright and patent law, one which was explicity ruled out in various common law jurisdictions by virtue of Donaldson v. Becket (1774) and the US Constitution.
A more reasonable and modern approach is to regard IP laws as economic instruments which must balance the public interest in incentives with the public interest in widespread distribution. The Free Software movement (and the more general anti-IP sentiment on the internet) is a result of the fact that technology has shifted this balance - the public interest dictates that copyright and patent laws ought to be weaker, to utilise the distributional possibilities of the net. In this context, IBM's actions can be seen to be more unethical and inconsistent.
Of course, expecting the average copyright lawyer, let alone IBM marketing, to acknowledge this, is rather unrealisitic. :)
BTW, for further reading, see RMS' artcile Re-evaluating copyright: the public must prevail, William Fisher's Theories of Intellectual Property, or A Philosophy of Intellectual Property by Peter Drahos.
The GPL is not an "intellectual property" license, since, legally speaking, there is no single thing called "intellectual property". There are copyrights, patents, trademarks, unfair competiton laws, and in different countries, different kinds of sui generis ("in its own class") laws, covering plants, circuit layouts, databases etc. The GPL is a copyright license, which grants the recipient some of the rights held by the copyright owner, under copyright law.
Note that this is quite different to a contract, which is a voluntary negotiated agreement between two parties.
Because some things (eg the right to use a progam, once you have it) are not controlled by copyright, lots of proprietary software companies try to use End User License Agreements (which are actually contracts) to enforce onerous conditions on their users. Of course, since the agreement must be voluntary and negotiated, many courts would regard a click-wrap contract as non-binding. Hence UCITA.
It is actually possible to do interesting copyleft-style things using contracts (see the free world license, for example), but it seems very clear that the free software community stands to loose much more than it could gain by the general application of contracts in software distribution.
The GPL is a grant of license with respect to copyright law. Many countries have copyright laws under which the GPL probably makes some sense (signatories to the Berne Convention, for example), so the expectation is that the GPL will be enforceable there.
Lots of people here have been saying that the GPL is meaningless in China. China wasn't a signatory to the Berne Convention, and didn't have much in the way of copyright. That is, until recently.
When China wanted to join the World Trade Organisation, it was forced to sign TRIPs. TRIPs (trade related aspecs of intellecutal property) is a little document designed for Pfizier, Monsanto, IBM, Sony et. al., which enforces 20 year patents, life of the author + 50 year copyrights, restrictions on "compulsory licensing", and DMCA-style anti-circumvention device prohibitions. In perhaps the most spectacular coup for corporatations over the public interest (ever), it was tacked onto the GATT in 1994. In effect, any country which does not believe that their interests are served by such extreme IP monopolies, suffers massive trade sanctions through WTO exclusion (see Braithwaite and Drahos, Global Business Regulation, chapter 7, for more details).
China, like everyone else, has buckled to this pressure, and is going to want to create the impression that it's trying to follow TRIPs. If someone could actually identify a prima facie deliberate GPL violation in China, they might have some chance of a successful prosecution.