I'm glad to learn that the legal standing of the GPL vs. EULAs is different, and that the GPL is on steadier ground. As I said, my direct legal knowledge is pretty much nil.
But I still think, even if only from a PR standpoint, that the two need to be viewed from a similar point of view. It just seems hypocritical to me to support the GPL and denounce the EULA. There are a few similarities which are unavoidable:
First, the delivery mechanism is basically the same, with the same problems. You can never be sure anyone using software has actually read the GPL or EULA attached to it. More people may be familiar with the GPL than with any particular EULA, but that's still no guarantee that it will be understood. Both camps are trusting that including the text somewhere in the software distribution is enough to make it binding.
Second, enforcement and discovery of misuse is practically impossible. Consider the case in point of a human 3d mesh model being used to form virtual clothing, and compare that to using small, derivative pieces of GPL'd code in a commercial app without credit. Chancing across either infraction is statistically almost impossible. If someone doesn't come forth and point it out of their own volition (like our worthy Slashdot poster here), the agreement (EULA or GPL) would be violated.
I see that the two come at problems from separate directions, but I disagree that they "are very different" and "apply to different situations". At the very least they are far more connected than the GPL and a car leasing contract.
It's those two similarities that make me say we should respect EULAs so that we can expect the same respect for the GPL. Maybe we don't strictly need to do this from a legal point of view, but for our own credibility it seems that we should recognize the efficacy of other people's attempts to protect their work as much as we do our prized GPL.
It seems to me like this is more a license agreement issue than a copyright issue. Copyright law (er... IANAL, btw) is where "derivative work" is defined legally, but it glosses over the whole act of getting hold of something to copy in the first place. The license agreement (that you linked to, for this example) is what you agree to in order to get the model in the first place, and if that limits you to not making clothes from their models then you either agree to it, or don't use their models from the outset.
I don't think their license agreement is quite that thorough but they do go on about derivative works and if you think they may care it's best to talk to them... and probably a lawyer... about the originail intent of their language.
[sidebar: We (the Slashdot community et al) should probably follow those agreements as closely as possible if we want to support things like the GPL in legal arenas.]
Now, legal stuff aside, my personal view is that derivative works or whatnot ought to have allowances for "personal" or "non-commercial" use, but if you ARE making money from such models... even if you hand draw the clothing mesh on the human model itself... you owe something back to the original creators of the human model. After all, it saved you time at the expense of someone else's time, and that person deserves some of your payoff (unless they waive it, for example, by giving their work to the "Public Domain"). Their work had value to you which you couldn't get anywhere else. If they want to charge you for that, I think they should be able to. You can't argue that the uncopyrightable "human form" is all that you're using, since it would presumedly be much harder to achieve the same result (your clothing mesh) without their models.
It'd be great if the rest of the world had the sense of sharing that the Open-Source community seems to have, but it just isn't so.
Make Apache do this automatically.
on
Blogspace vs. NPR
·
· Score: 1
What we need is a little flag in apache's conf. file that forces the server to only serve files that have a local referral page, and has an exclusion list (for the public homepage, for example). That way, even though noone ever uses the flag because it's silly, if some company starts suing people over it then we could say "well, why didn't you just flip the flag on your web server so that people COULDN'T do it and it wasn't an issue?"
Unless, of course, the people suing you don't use Apache, but that's just silly.:-)
But can she act? I haven't seen the movie yet, but I'm really hoping she isn't all breasts in this one. A good supporting actress role is needed for spidey; M.J. is integral to the spidey world so her part can't suck (or be acted suckily) or I'll be very disappointed.
I lived there for a year and a half; long enough to see the construction around the airport, er, well... never ever change.:-) At least not much. I guess I should have put in a <sarcasm> tag.
This happened in the Louisville, KY Airport back in May 2001... here's the article.
Curious that this is happening in some of the smaller airports first. I'd have expected San Francisco's airport to be an early adopter. They certainly spent enough on construction costs to throw in a few wireless routers around without anyone noticing. Still, at least it's getting out there somewhere.
Heh. I've been waiting all day for this review to get posted.;-) I made it to the 12:01 AM showing Tuesday night (technically Wed. Morning). It was well worth not getting to leave the theatre until after 3AM to watch the movie.
The review is right on. I had expectations as well as anyone else. I've read the book before, and I'm a few pages short of finishing the first part of the trilogy now, so everything was fresh in my mind.
Of all the changes (there were plenty; mostly omissions), they were all chosen well to fit a screen play. The beginning was slow, but it moved much faster than the book; they got rid of years of non-events that were passed off in the book as just waiting around.
Arwin being written in more to the early story was nice, and I must say I'm very pleased with her performance. There were doubts as to her ability as an actress, but I think she performed magnificently. She was the only character who was very rewritten IMHO. Gandalf was a bit kinder/gentler than the Gandalf in the books, and Elrond a bit less so.
I'm still a bit confused about Aragorn's broken sword. Did it get resmithed and I blinked during that part of the movie, or did I misread that page the other night in the book when I thought I read that it was reforged at Rivendell right then? Oh well.
In any case, before I ramble too far, as with any movie adaptation there was a great deal of nuance lost from the book, but given the exhausting detail in the book and the tight constraints on a movie (even if it IS 3 hours long) it's difficult to imagine any improvements.
Office for Linux; there's a good idea. Microsoft can start writing LOTS of code that people will use on Linux. Especially code with ridiculous scripting languages. THEN, (amazingly) there will be a lot of viruses that are no longer limited to Windows, so Microsoft can say "Hey, look, LINUX has Viruses TOO! It's not just us!" and, because they are marketing behemoths, people will not notice the obvious logical fallacies, and they will ooh and ahh and, well, it's all downhill from there.
And yet, you can still find out about more stories here, quicker, because of the vast group of people posting links, and the absurdly efficient group of people who approve them. It amazes me how many things I see on slashdot before I heard about them anywhere else. This particular story is an exception, but only because I work at KPMG Consulting (but maybe not for long after this!?!).
I work at KPMG Consulting; there really is a bizarre lifestyle here. I do LOVE the theme song. It was available on one of our international intranet sites; one of the more hip netherlandic teams had it commissioned as part of their morale-building exercises.
It worked, actually; everyone in the company has laughed about that for the past year. I guess it was only a matter of time before we got publicly ridiculed because of it. I wonder if it was leaked for publicity? Hmmmmm...
Hacking your car is still alive and well; there are certainly some challenges (cruise control, security systems, etc.). I was on a few mailing lists for hacking the Toyota Prius... there's a Yahoo! group dedicated to it, and the people on there are amazing. There's an LCD display in the Prius, and people are attaching it to night-vision, DVD players, rear-view and side-view cameras, you name it. Plus there's tons of info on hiking up gas mileage, increasing battery capacity and all sorts of cool things.
As with all hacking, it CAN be done, and if someone hasn't done it yet, there are certainly people willing to help you figure out how.
I got to play Kasparov about 10 years ago, during a visit he made to the states. It's amazing to watch these top players run around to 50 different opponents at a time, immediately move, and win every match. If it wasn't clear from his speed, it was clear from talking to him that he did almost no analysis at each board; rather he "recognized" the position, or recognize how similar it was to positions he'd been in many times before, and remembered his strategy for that position.
At the same time, tho, one of the other things I remember from hearing him talk was that he routinely looks 8 or 9 moves ahead in a game if it does require analysis. I'm sure it's a combination of both skills (pattern matching and analysis) that makes the best the best.
What amazes me in all this is the completely separate approaches from TV (video/movie) broadcasters and audio (radio/internet/mp3/whatever) broadcasters. While Cable companies are trying to get real stream-on-demand technology in place, the dubious RIAA are trying to stop the exact same technology for music; even for companies that pay broadcasting fees and aren't being accused of copyright infringement... there was a slashdot article that I have in mind, I just can't find it right now...
This short actually made it onto the SciFi Channel's "Exposure" shorts thingy some months ago. Of course, it was edited for content a bit (naked clown's girlfriend and things were edited over). But full props to them for getting it out there.
Okay, the statement above was "So because they don't support his speech they are allowed to sue him, expel him and confisctate his intelectual property?". We need to separate the issues. They ARE allowed to sue him and expel him. Libel laws and the myriad student/university agreements undoubtedly allow this. The question is of the Intellectual Property, and I'd wager that there's a fair chance that in the university's guidelines (to which the student implicitly agreed at some point), intellectual property generated on the school's computers or by employees as part of a school organization (even if the work is volunteer), becomes the property of the University. I've certailnly seen stranger agreements before. I'm not saying it's right; the University system needs to be mended if this sort of thing happens, but it may mean that in this case, the University is legally justified.
If the people who posted to SlashDot all paid for use of the site (tuition), agreed wether implicitly or explicitly to abide by it's rules (University code of conduct which, yes, somewhere in the vast amount of paperwork when you enter a school you sign an agreement to), and then did something contrary to those rules, SlashDot could complain and do all sorts of things. Fortunately, the important parts of that process in/. land bear no resemblance to what happenes in University land, so the two are hardly comparable.
The REAL issue here is whether or not this will make microchips attractive any more. The main reason I support the use of microchips (over, say, vacuum tubes) is that they look real pretty when you blow up their pictures into poster size. The reason they're pretty, tho, is because there aren't any diagonal lines. Will chip designers keep aesthetics in mind with this new drawing tool at their fingertips? I think not. Support right angles! Support attractive computer chips!
I agree. Saying "this can't be good for the consumer" is getting too easy to say, and it doesn't need to be the case here. Noone argues that selling CDs is bad for the consumer, and that's really all this appears to be doing; it's just going to move the burning mechanism down to the desktop and probably reduce costs and improve flexibility to boot. At least, if done correctly it will.
There's no reason to be negative on new technology that allows new inroads into consumer products. The things that are bad for consumers are exhibited in fighting against new tech. Of course they want to have some security on the process, which may amount to limited copy protection, but if the service lets you burn CDs that work in audio players, they're not doing any major black ops here.
We can't go jumping down everyone's throat just because their new products include "copy protection".
Actually, this is a curious point. They tend to say "three dimensional, graphical space" or some such, which means the virtual area could be "3D", independant of the projection (which is generally on a 2D monitor).
Also, even if someone interprets this to mean real, genuine, 3D interaction, bad news because if those "relatively miniscule" displays ever do catch on, they'll run up against this patent roadblock when they shouldn't. They shouldn't because this has already been done in 2D, and the extension to real 3D, when it becomes available, should fit the "obvious" clause of patent law.
I'm sure people were messing with 3D Avatars for chat rooms some time ago, although I haven't found any in 10 minutes of sifting through archives that meets the Nov. 1996 requirement. It's out there, tho; I'll find it. Or someone else will.
I have to take exception to this; I have TONS of facial hair, and while I love writing hackey little code -snippets for personal use, the code I write for my business clients is clean, clear, and (*gasp*) pretty well documented.
And both types of code are "clever", when possible. Where "clever" means short, efficient, and elegant.
Not that I don't appreciate the stereotype, but if you could get over my facial hair, I'm sure you'd like my style of coding.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad to learn that the legal standing of the GPL vs. EULAs is different, and that the GPL is on steadier ground. As I said, my direct legal knowledge is pretty much nil.
...
But I still think, even if only from a PR standpoint, that the two need to be viewed from a similar point of view. It just seems hypocritical to me to support the GPL and denounce the EULA. There are a few similarities which are unavoidable:
First, the delivery mechanism is basically the same, with the same problems. You can never be sure anyone using software has actually read the GPL or EULA attached to it. More people may be familiar with the GPL than with any particular EULA, but that's still no guarantee that it will be understood. Both camps are trusting that including the text somewhere in the software distribution is enough to make it binding.
Second, enforcement and discovery of misuse is practically impossible. Consider the case in point of a human 3d mesh model being used to form virtual clothing, and compare that to using small, derivative pieces of GPL'd code in a commercial app without credit. Chancing across either infraction is statistically almost impossible. If someone doesn't come forth and point it out of their own volition (like our worthy Slashdot poster here), the agreement (EULA or GPL) would be violated.
I see that the two come at problems from separate directions, but I disagree that they "are very different" and "apply to different situations". At the very least they are far more connected than the GPL and a car leasing contract.
It's those two similarities that make me say we should respect EULAs so that we can expect the same respect for the GPL. Maybe we don't strictly need to do this from a legal point of view, but for our own credibility it seems that we should recognize the efficacy of other people's attempts to protect their work as much as we do our prized GPL.
Now, back to work!
It seems to me like this is more a license agreement issue than a copyright issue. Copyright law (er... IANAL, btw) is where "derivative work" is defined legally, but it glosses over the whole act of getting hold of something to copy in the first place. The license agreement (that you linked to, for this example) is what you agree to in order to get the model in the first place, and if that limits you to not making clothes from their models then you either agree to it, or don't use their models from the outset.
I don't think their license agreement is quite that thorough but they do go on about derivative works and if you think they may care it's best to talk to them... and probably a lawyer... about the originail intent of their language.
[sidebar: We (the Slashdot community et al) should probably follow those agreements as closely as possible if we want to support things like the GPL in legal arenas.]
Now, legal stuff aside, my personal view is that derivative works or whatnot ought to have allowances for "personal" or "non-commercial" use, but if you ARE making money from such models... even if you hand draw the clothing mesh on the human model itself... you owe something back to the original creators of the human model. After all, it saved you time at the expense of someone else's time, and that person deserves some of your payoff (unless they waive it, for example, by giving their work to the "Public Domain"). Their work had value to you which you couldn't get anywhere else. If they want to charge you for that, I think they should be able to. You can't argue that the uncopyrightable "human form" is all that you're using, since it would presumedly be much harder to achieve the same result (your clothing mesh) without their models.
It'd be great if the rest of the world had the sense of sharing that the Open-Source community seems to have, but it just isn't so.
What we need is a little flag in apache's conf. file that forces the server to only serve files that have a local referral page, and has an exclusion list (for the public homepage, for example). That way, even though noone ever uses the flag because it's silly, if some company starts suing people over it then we could say "well, why didn't you just flip the flag on your web server so that people COULDN'T do it and it wasn't an issue?"
:-)
Unless, of course, the people suing you don't use Apache, but that's just silly.
The whole thing is ridiculous anyway.
"Hey, the file server was down for the last hour, do you know what happened?"
"Oh, hey, sorry, I had it in my pocket when I went out for lunch."
But can she act? I haven't seen the movie yet, but I'm really hoping she isn't all breasts in this one. A good supporting actress role is needed for spidey; M.J. is integral to the spidey world so her part can't suck (or be acted suckily) or I'll be very disappointed.
I stand corrected. :-) Bring on the mutant rabbit people!
That just can't go anywhere good.
I lived there for a year and a half; long enough to see the construction around the airport, er, well... never ever change. :-) At least not much. I guess I should have put in a <sarcasm> tag.
This happened in the Louisville, KY Airport back in May 2001... here's the article.
Curious that this is happening in some of the smaller airports first. I'd have expected San Francisco's airport to be an early adopter. They certainly spent enough on construction costs to throw in a few wireless routers around without anyone noticing. Still, at least it's getting out there somewhere.
Heh. I've been waiting all day for this review to get posted. ;-) I made it to the 12:01 AM showing Tuesday night (technically Wed. Morning). It was well worth not getting to leave the theatre until after 3AM to watch the movie.
The review is right on. I had expectations as well as anyone else. I've read the book before, and I'm a few pages short of finishing the first part of the trilogy now, so everything was fresh in my mind.
Of all the changes (there were plenty; mostly omissions), they were all chosen well to fit a screen play. The beginning was slow, but it moved much faster than the book; they got rid of years of non-events that were passed off in the book as just waiting around.
Arwin being written in more to the early story was nice, and I must say I'm very pleased with her performance. There were doubts as to her ability as an actress, but I think she performed magnificently. She was the only character who was very rewritten IMHO. Gandalf was a bit kinder/gentler than the Gandalf in the books, and Elrond a bit less so.
I'm still a bit confused about Aragorn's broken sword. Did it get resmithed and I blinked during that part of the movie, or did I misread that page the other night in the book when I thought I read that it was reforged at Rivendell right then? Oh well.
In any case, before I ramble too far, as with any movie adaptation there was a great deal of nuance lost from the book, but given the exhausting detail in the book and the tight constraints on a movie (even if it IS 3 hours long) it's difficult to imagine any improvements.
Well done! Watch it over and over again.
Office for Linux; there's a good idea. Microsoft can start writing LOTS of code that people will use on Linux. Especially code with ridiculous scripting languages. THEN, (amazingly) there will be a lot of viruses that are no longer limited to Windows, so Microsoft can say "Hey, look, LINUX has Viruses TOO! It's not just us!" and, because they are marketing behemoths, people will not notice the obvious logical fallacies, and they will ooh and ahh and, well, it's all downhill from there.
slashdot almost never (if ever) 'breaks' a story
And yet, you can still find out about more stories here, quicker, because of the vast group of people posting links, and the absurdly efficient group of people who approve them. It amazes me how many things I see on slashdot before I heard about them anywhere else.
This particular story is an exception, but only because I work at KPMG Consulting (but maybe not for long after this!?!).
I work at KPMG Consulting; there really is a bizarre lifestyle here. I do LOVE the theme song. It was available on one of our international intranet sites; one of the more hip netherlandic teams had it commissioned as part of their morale-building exercises.
It worked, actually; everyone in the company has laughed about that for the past year. I guess it was only a matter of time before we got publicly ridiculed because of it. I wonder if it was leaked for publicity? Hmmmmm...
Hacking your car is still alive and well; there are certainly some challenges (cruise control, security systems, etc.). I was on a few mailing lists for hacking the Toyota Prius... there's a Yahoo! group dedicated to it, and the people on there are amazing. There's an LCD display in the Prius, and people are attaching it to night-vision, DVD players, rear-view and side-view cameras, you name it. Plus there's tons of info on hiking up gas mileage, increasing battery capacity and all sorts of cool things.
As with all hacking, it CAN be done, and if someone hasn't done it yet, there are certainly people willing to help you figure out how.
Toodles,
---Chip Lynch
Unlikely; Apocalypse Cow had flame jetting out of some orifices; Man-eating cow was a cow who just ocassionally ate people when you weren't looking.
Bad cow.
I got to play Kasparov about 10 years ago, during a visit he made to the states. It's amazing to watch these top players run around to 50 different opponents at a time, immediately move, and win every match. If it wasn't clear from his speed, it was clear from talking to him that he did almost no analysis at each board; rather he "recognized" the position, or recognize how similar it was to positions he'd been in many times before, and remembered his strategy for that position.
At the same time, tho, one of the other things I remember from hearing him talk was that he routinely looks 8 or 9 moves ahead in a game if it does require analysis. I'm sure it's a combination of both skills (pattern matching and analysis) that makes the best the best.
What amazes me in all this is the completely separate approaches from TV (video/movie) broadcasters and audio (radio/internet/mp3/whatever) broadcasters. While Cable companies are trying to get real stream-on-demand technology in place, the dubious RIAA are trying to stop the exact same technology for music; even for companies that pay broadcasting fees and aren't being accused of copyright infringement... there was a slashdot article that I have in mind, I just can't find it right now...
This short actually made it onto the SciFi Channel's "Exposure" shorts thingy some months ago. Of course, it was edited for content a bit (naked clown's girlfriend and things were edited over). But full props to them for getting it out there.
Okay, the statement above was "So because they don't support his speech they are allowed to sue him, expel him and confisctate his intelectual property?". We need to separate the issues. They ARE allowed to sue him and expel him. Libel laws and the myriad student/university agreements undoubtedly allow this. The question is of the Intellectual Property, and I'd wager that there's a fair chance that in the university's guidelines (to which the student implicitly agreed at some point), intellectual property generated on the school's computers or by employees as part of a school organization (even if the work is volunteer), becomes the property of the University. I've certailnly seen stranger agreements before. I'm not saying it's right; the University system needs to be mended if this sort of thing happens, but it may mean that in this case, the University is legally justified.
If the people who posted to SlashDot all paid for use of the site (tuition), agreed wether implicitly or explicitly to abide by it's rules (University code of conduct which, yes, somewhere in the vast amount of paperwork when you enter a school you sign an agreement to), and then did something contrary to those rules, SlashDot could complain and do all sorts of things. Fortunately, the important parts of that process in /. land bear no resemblance to what happenes in University land, so the two are hardly comparable.
The REAL issue here is whether or not this will make microchips attractive any more. The main reason I support the use of microchips (over, say, vacuum tubes) is that they look real pretty when you blow up their pictures into poster size. The reason they're pretty, tho, is because there aren't any diagonal lines. Will chip designers keep aesthetics in mind with this new drawing tool at their fingertips? I think not. Support right angles! Support attractive computer chips!
I agree. Saying "this can't be good for the consumer" is getting too easy to say, and it doesn't need to be the case here. Noone argues that selling CDs is bad for the consumer, and that's really all this appears to be doing; it's just going to move the burning mechanism down to the desktop and probably reduce costs and improve flexibility to boot. At least, if done correctly it will.
There's no reason to be negative on new technology that allows new inroads into consumer products. The things that are bad for consumers are exhibited in fighting against new tech. Of course they want to have some security on the process, which may amount to limited copy protection, but if the service lets you burn CDs that work in audio players, they're not doing any major black ops here.
We can't go jumping down everyone's throat just because their new products include "copy protection".
It still amazes me what makes it to the top page and what doesn't. These articles should be together.
[insert IANA caveat here]
Actually, this is a curious point. They tend to say "three dimensional, graphical space" or some such, which means the virtual area could be "3D", independant of the projection (which is generally on a 2D monitor).
Also, even if someone interprets this to mean real, genuine, 3D interaction, bad news because if those "relatively miniscule" displays ever do catch on, they'll run up against this patent roadblock when they shouldn't. They shouldn't because this has already been done in 2D, and the extension to real 3D, when it becomes available, should fit the "obvious" clause of patent law.
I'm sure people were messing with 3D Avatars for chat rooms some time ago, although I haven't found any in 10 minutes of sifting through archives that meets the Nov. 1996 requirement. It's out there, tho; I'll find it. Or someone else will.
I have to take exception to this; I have TONS of facial hair, and while I love writing hackey little code -snippets for personal use, the code I write for my business clients is clean, clear, and (*gasp*) pretty well documented.
And both types of code are "clever", when possible. Where "clever" means short, efficient, and elegant.
Not that I don't appreciate the stereotype, but if you could get over my facial hair, I'm sure you'd like my style of coding.