>How about listening to someone else's radio? I'm sure you could get the RIAA behind that one. And the MPAA for >watching someone's Pay-Per-View movie through a window.
If you could follow through with this ludicrous scenario, it will be a civil suit, and not a criminal charge. This makes it irrelevant to the topic at hand.
You need to learn the distinction between civil suits brought by a party seeking damages, and criminal cases brought by the state.
If THEY can do it, then so can YOU. This law may fail on equal protection challenges. Either it outlaws coffee shop wi-fi, or it permits your open network, but it cannot do both without elevating the rights of one person over another.
This is not a "question" that can be decided in court.
There is no reasonable challenge that can be raised, as to whether a copyright holder has any of the rights the GPL reserves or grants under license.
Copyright is well-established. The GPL asserts nothing that is not already reserved by the fully established body of law that governs copyright, both in federal courts in the United States and under the various treaties with other countries.
So the idea that "the GPL has not been tested in court", is really meaningless, because there is nothing to test. Either copyright exists and may be licensed, or it does not.
Any scenario that "invalidated" the GPL via court order, would end the entertainment and software publishing industries in that jurisdiction, since they rely on the same body of law that makes the GPL possible.
Have you actually read the GPL?
Please read it and then post the clause that you think you could bring to a court with a question as to its validity.
>looks to me like Verizon never saw the original code. They contracted out for routers. They didn't make the >routers themselves.
Reasonable defense for a delay in action, but irrelevant. The company was properly notified and responded to the notice with hostile refusal to comply.
After being given notice by a copyright holder, you can't introduce your ignorance defense.
And technically, the presence of the word "copyright", the circle-C symbol, the author's name, and the date, constitute "notice".
In any case, they were notified of the violation, and it was their refusal to comply with the license that triggered the lawsuit in the first place. And you just can't play that "ignorance" card in court, when the snail mail exchange between your lawyers is on the evidence table:-)
>Turns out it was more worth it to Verizon to pay the authors to keep their (Verizon's) software closed instead >of distributing it under the terms of the GPL. That's just business.
This is a problem that stands to invalidate this settlement.
See, there are other developers who did not consent to any release under any terms other than GPL.
If the terms of the settlement involve one party doing something it had no right to do (re-licensing the works of others), this case isn't over. They might have to give back the money!
>Well he owns some of the copyright and has a right to sue them for violating the GPL for the parts of busybox >he worked on.
Yes, but, the "settlement" no doubt includes consideration for the other party.
If part of that consideration is permission to use the code under any terms other than a court order to abide by the GPL, the settlement itself can be challenged by the other copyright holders, because it is a fresh abridgement of their rights.
If I had a copyright interest here, I would be petitioning for disclosure of the terms of the settlement, because there is reason to suspect the settlement itself may be a GPL violation.
>Without seeing the settlement you do not know if they sued for the entire package or just for those items that >the two gentlemen had copyright on.
Without seeing the settlement you also don't know what consideration was given to Verizon. If they've been granted some other terms besides the GPL without the consent of ALL the copyright holders, it's a whole new violation!
Now wait a minute. It might not be as simple as you want to make it.
There is still the question of the code.
The cash amount of the settlement is undisclosed, and that's fine.
What about the other terms? If the settlement allows Verizon (Actiontec?) to continue to use the code, there are still parties who have a say in this, because it seems that the court has not ordered Verizon to abide by the GPL.
Anderson and Landley have authority to take the damage settlement, but do not have the authority to release anyone else's code under a different license. So what were the terms of the settlement? Does Verizon have to recall all this firmware? Do they get to keep distributing it? If this settlement abridged the rights of *other* people, it can be challenged.
>It's probably not a citable precedent in the legal sense
It wouldn't have been anyway, even if it had gone to court.
It will never be "a GPL case." It will always be "a copyright case".
Here is our copyright. Here are the license terms. Agree to them or not, they are the terms. To question their validity is to also acknowledge you have NO right to the copyrighted work.
If you are waiting for "the GPL to be tested in court", don't hold your breath, because there is not really a valid test that will ever be applied in any court in the US. It's a license that reserves certain rights that are granted by copyright law. All that stuff is pretty well "tested" already.
I think there are things about copyright that are simply difficult for some people to understand. I've tried to explain it time and time again, and so have you, for years!
People seem compelled to insist that rights under copyright are equivalent to property rights, and that copyright infringement and theft are the same thing.
Copyright does a much better job of this: Protecting you, the content creator, from someone else claiming your work as their own and then accusing YOU of stealing it from THEM.
Without copyright law, that could have been the outcome of this case.
Yours is the first claim I've ever come across that the ACLU in particular has interfered with the intelligence gathering process. Do you have some evidence to back up your claim, or does merely saying "it's true" suffice for you?
I don't think you understood -- it's not about whether you "beat your wife", but that you do not seem to understand that your question and his question back to you are very similar, and indicate a fallacious position of the questioner.
>A President may be impeached for any "High crime or Misdemeanor".
It could happen, given the right Congress, that a bill be introduced one morning alleging, literally, "high crimes and misdemeanors" with no further details, it could pass the House in the opening vote, be delivered to the Senate electronically, read on the floor, and a conviction could be rendered by lunchtime on the same day, with the next President sworn in before the close of that business day.
Now this scenario is not going to happen, ever. But it should illustrate that impeachment is a political process, not a legal one.
What if you distribute your own works via P2P? RIAA has no right to abridge your copyright by charging for access to your works. It's not only a violation of copyright to stop someone from distributing, selling, or displaying his work, it may also be a violation of anti-trust laws to create this kind of barrier to entry into a marketplace -- even if the marketplace is not based on conventional economics such as cash or barter.
More people should be creating music. Even if you think your musical talent is garbage, the more people produce, the more they have access to the same exact weapons that the RIAA uses. If they ever claim any kind of control over your works, you get to use the DMCA and all other copyright laws against them.
1. Does the company have a right, under whatever contract exists with the customer, to terminate service?
Actually, I really don't have a second question, because that is the only question that matters here. If GoDaddy is in breach of some contract, it should be straightforward to argue this in court. Point to the clause of the contract that is in breach, and ask the judge for relief. They might even be able to suppress any information about the nature of the site from being mentioned.
If GoDaddy.com has a right to terminate service... take your business elsewhere. There are providers that will not shut down a website until they receive an executed court order. There are also providers that are located beyond the legal reach of US courts.
Or you can just whine on slashdot about how some company violated your right to free speech... but that's not going to get much in the way of results.
I'm still waiting to hear from one person who has had a flash device fail due to the limited number of write cycles. This is the excuse for not using flash memory in certain applications. But it's cheap enough to make it a part that is routinely replaced, for instance, and it could be made so that the duty cycle is predictable (unlike consumer flash devices that go to great lengths to hide the issue from the user.)
#1, genetic modification. We will jail all who grow roses and all who have fruit orchards? #2, human experimentation. What's wrong with medical research, psychological research, etc.? #3, #4, #5 need definition #6, punish success and all suffer #7, only the drugs you don't happen to like. Does everyone agree on which drugs are bad?
>No, but you CAN sue a lawmaker for breach of trust and misuse of public funds
Good luck with that. If you are represented by this lawmaker, I really feel sorry for you. It really is one of the poorest places in the US with the least prospects, unless somebody finds a use for a spent coal mine.
>They survived the aftermath of Operation "Snow White" with no long-term consequences.
Several people were tried, convicted, and served lengthy prison sentences, putting the church in the public eye and simultaneously making it a laughingstock. One long-term consequence was that the media exposure about the church reached the attention of one Ivan Stang, inspiring him to start a competing scam religious cult company.
Slashdot Mirror
Mine is "FBISurveillance"
I'm still waiting for someone to use it.
>There's a big difference betweeen an AP handing out an IP address and me authorizing you to use a service I pay
>for.
What if you got the service for free? Does this law still protect you? If not, it fails an important test for validity.
>If you leave your car in a parking lot, and I sit on it, using it as a chair, you will not be able to just call
>the police and have me arrested.
Actually, in my state if you are doing this and I ask you and you refuse to get off my car, I can shoot you dead, and THEN call the police.
>How about listening to someone else's radio? I'm sure you could get the RIAA behind that one. And the MPAA for
>watching someone's Pay-Per-View movie through a window.
If you could follow through with this ludicrous scenario, it will be a civil suit, and not a criminal charge.
This makes it irrelevant to the topic at hand.
You need to learn the distinction between civil suits brought by a party seeking damages, and criminal cases brought by the state.
>many businesses offer free wi-fi
If THEY can do it, then so can YOU. This law may fail on equal protection challenges.
Either it outlaws coffee shop wi-fi, or it permits your open network, but it cannot do
both without elevating the rights of one person over another.
How does a reasonable person differentiate between non-infringing use of an open network service,
and infringing use of an open network service?
>But what if the GPL were proven in court?
This is not a "question" that can be decided in court.
There is no reasonable challenge that can be raised, as to
whether a copyright holder has any of the rights the GPL
reserves or grants under license.
Copyright is well-established. The GPL asserts nothing that
is not already reserved by the fully established body of law
that governs copyright, both in federal courts in the United States
and under the various treaties with other countries.
So the idea that "the GPL has not been tested in court", is really
meaningless, because there is nothing to test. Either copyright
exists and may be licensed, or it does not.
Any scenario that "invalidated" the GPL via court order, would end
the entertainment and software publishing industries in that jurisdiction,
since they rely on the same body of law that makes the GPL possible.
Have you actually read the GPL?
Please read it and then post the clause that you think you could bring to
a court with a question as to its validity.
>looks to me like Verizon never saw the original code. They contracted out for routers. They didn't make the
>routers themselves.
Reasonable defense for a delay in action, but irrelevant. The company was properly notified and responded to
the notice with hostile refusal to comply.
After being given notice by a copyright holder, you can't introduce your ignorance defense.
And technically, the presence of the word "copyright", the circle-C symbol, the author's name, and
the date, constitute "notice".
In any case, they were notified of the violation, and it was their refusal to comply with the license that triggered the lawsuit in the first place. And you just can't play that "ignorance" card in court, when the snail mail exchange between your lawyers is on the evidence table
>Turns out it was more worth it to Verizon to pay the authors to keep their (Verizon's) software closed instead
>of distributing it under the terms of the GPL. That's just business.
This is a problem that stands to invalidate this settlement.
See, there are other developers who did not consent to any release under any terms other than GPL.
If the terms of the settlement involve one party doing something it had no right to do (re-licensing
the works of others), this case isn't over. They might have to give back the money!
>Well he owns some of the copyright and has a right to sue them for violating the GPL for the parts of busybox
>he worked on.
Yes, but, the "settlement" no doubt includes consideration for the other party.
If part of that consideration is permission to use the code under any terms other than
a court order to abide by the GPL, the settlement itself can be challenged by the other
copyright holders, because it is a fresh abridgement of their rights.
If I had a copyright interest here, I would be petitioning for disclosure of the terms
of the settlement, because there is reason to suspect the settlement itself may be a GPL
violation.
>Without seeing the settlement you do not know if they sued for the entire package or just for those items that
>the two gentlemen had copyright on.
Without seeing the settlement you also don't know what consideration was given to Verizon. If they've been granted some other terms besides the GPL without the consent of ALL the copyright holders, it's a whole new violation!
>Shut up and sue them yourself.
Now wait a minute. It might not be as simple as you want to make it.
There is still the question of the code.
The cash amount of the settlement is undisclosed, and that's fine.
What about the other terms? If the settlement allows Verizon (Actiontec?)
to continue to use the code, there are still parties who have a say in this,
because it seems that the court has not ordered Verizon to abide by the GPL.
Anderson and Landley have authority to take the damage settlement, but do not
have the authority to release anyone else's code under a different license.
So what were the terms of the settlement? Does Verizon have to recall all this
firmware? Do they get to keep distributing it? If this settlement abridged the
rights of *other* people, it can be challenged.
>It's probably not a citable precedent in the legal sense
It wouldn't have been anyway, even if it had gone to court.
It will never be "a GPL case." It will always be "a copyright case".
Here is our copyright. Here are the license terms. Agree to them or
not, they are the terms. To question their validity is to also acknowledge
you have NO right to the copyrighted work.
If you are waiting for "the GPL to be tested in court", don't hold your breath,
because there is not really a valid test that will ever be applied in any court
in the US. It's a license that reserves certain rights that are granted by copyright
law. All that stuff is pretty well "tested" already.
I think there are things about copyright that are simply difficult for some people to understand.
I've tried to explain it time and time again, and so have you, for years!
People seem compelled to insist that rights under copyright are equivalent to property rights, and
that copyright infringement and theft are the same thing.
Copyright does a much better job of this: Protecting you, the content creator, from someone else
claiming your work as their own and then accusing YOU of stealing it from THEM.
Without copyright law, that could have been the outcome of this case.
Even better... If you can make them tire of paying settlements, you can finally have "the GPL tested in court."
Yours is the first claim I've ever come across that the ACLU in particular has interfered with the intelligence gathering process.
Do you have some evidence to back up your claim, or does merely saying "it's true" suffice for you?
I don't think you understood -- it's not about whether you "beat your wife", but that you do not seem to understand
that your question and his question back to you are very similar, and indicate a fallacious position of the questioner.
>A President may be impeached for any "High crime or Misdemeanor".
It could happen, given the right Congress, that a bill be introduced one morning
alleging, literally, "high crimes and misdemeanors" with no further details,
it could pass the House in the opening vote, be delivered to the Senate electronically,
read on the floor, and a conviction could be rendered by lunchtime on the same day, with
the next President sworn in before the close of that business day.
Now this scenario is not going to happen, ever. But it should illustrate that impeachment
is a political process, not a legal one.
The ACLU agrees with the Supreme Court's long-standing interpretation...
Agreeing with the Supreme Court makes you... wait for it... Conservative.
What if you distribute your own works via P2P? RIAA has no right to abridge your copyright by charging for access to your works.
It's not only a violation of copyright to stop someone from distributing, selling, or displaying his work, it may also be a violation
of anti-trust laws to create this kind of barrier to entry into a marketplace -- even if the marketplace is not based on conventional
economics such as cash or barter.
More people should be creating music. Even if you think your musical talent is garbage, the more people produce, the more they have
access to the same exact weapons that the RIAA uses. If they ever claim any kind of control over your works, you get to use the DMCA
and all other copyright laws against them.
1. Does the company have a right, under whatever contract exists with the customer, to terminate service?
Actually, I really don't have a second question, because that is the only question that matters here.
If GoDaddy is in breach of some contract, it should be straightforward to argue this in court. Point
to the clause of the contract that is in breach, and ask the judge for relief. They might even be able
to suppress any information about the nature of the site from being mentioned.
If GoDaddy.com has a right to terminate service... take your business elsewhere. There are providers that
will not shut down a website until they receive an executed court order. There are also providers that are
located beyond the legal reach of US courts.
Or you can just whine on slashdot about how some company violated your right to free speech... but that's
not going to get much in the way of results.
I'm still waiting to hear from one person who has had a flash device fail due to the limited number of write cycles.
This is the excuse for not using flash memory in certain applications. But it's cheap enough to make it a part that
is routinely replaced, for instance, and it could be made so that the duty cycle is predictable (unlike consumer flash
devices that go to great lengths to hide the issue from the user.)
#1, genetic modification. We will jail all who grow roses and all who have fruit orchards?
#2, human experimentation. What's wrong with medical research, psychological research, etc.?
#3, #4, #5 need definition
#6, punish success and all suffer
#7, only the drugs you don't happen to like. Does everyone agree on which drugs are bad?
>No, but you CAN sue a lawmaker for breach of trust and misuse of public funds
Good luck with that.
If you are represented by this lawmaker, I really feel sorry for you. It really is one of the poorest places in the US with the least prospects, unless somebody finds a use for a spent coal mine.
>They survived the aftermath of Operation "Snow White" with no long-term consequences.
Several people were tried, convicted, and served lengthy prison sentences, putting the church in
the public eye and simultaneously making it a laughingstock. One long-term consequence was that
the media exposure about the church reached the attention of one Ivan Stang, inspiring him to start
a competing scam religious cult company.