"Therefore, by
modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the
Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and
all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying
the Program or works based on it."
So the act of distributing the program indicates the author's acceptance
of the GPL. US law takes a dim view of people trying to back out of
written offers. And who is going to sue the author? The only legal effect of the GPL is that under certain conditions certain people have the right to make copies of code that otherwise they wouldn't be allowed to make. Which means the only possible effect of going against the GPL is that you might be guilty of copyright infringement where otherwise you wouldn't be guilty. But if you are the copyright holder, you cannot possibly be guilty of copyright infringement by copying it. Even if you were, only the copyright holder can sue you. As long as you are not schizophrenic you are quite safe.
mac spoofing, arp poisoning, dns spoofing, and a fake certificate Yes, I forgot that if they are able to install software on your computer, they might also be able to install a root certificate created by the police, and send you a kind-of-genuine certificate for www.terrorists.com, signed by www.police.de. Or they _might_ be able to convince a certificate authority to give them an actual, valid certificate for www.terrorists.com, which would be a bit worrying.
With a minute of thinking: The first method would be much better, because they don't need to know ahead who I am going to contact.
With another minute of thinking: My computer has for example four Verisign root certificates installed. Does that mean that Verisign (I only take them as an example) could technically install a box with a computer into the phone line 50 meters away from my house, and do a man-in-the-middle attack by creating genuine Verisign certificates for any SSL connection that I make, without breaking into my home or doing anything to my computer at all? And the only trace that I would have would be the curious fact that everyone I contact uses certificates signed by Verisign?
With a further minute of thinking: My computer has about 100 root certificates installed that came with Leopard, and similar things happen for Windows users. I have no idea where these certificates come from; I just have to trust Microsoft and Apple. If the police could convince Microsoft and Apple to put a root certificate owned by the police into their installers, then the police could read anyone's SSL connections without breaking into their homes (but breaking into their connection a bit further down the line)?
Does anyone know how a man-in-the-middle attack against SSL, as mentioned in the article, is supposed to work?
The only possibility that I can see is to modify the browser itself, so that when the user tries to get a secure connection to www. criminals.com, the browser contacts www. police.de instead, gets a valid certificate from the police, while the police's computer then makes a secure connection to www. criminals.com.
Germany still seems to have a lot of it's old attitudes lying around. Installing trojans on the computers of it's citizens for the purpose of listening to skype calls is way beyond what I would expect from a country like Germany. Then again, they still can't have video games with Nazis or blood in them. How long before someone packages up a Linux live CD with Skype preinstalled so that you can ensure you're computer isn't compromised when making phone calls? 1. It is legal (if you get permission from a judge etc.) to listen in to phone conversations.
2. With Skype using 256 bit encryption, the police cannot do in practice what it is allowed to do legally.
3. Some company makes software/hardware that enables the police to do what they are allowed to do legally.
It seems to be necessary to install some software on the user's computer to achieve this. As long as this software doesn't do anything but opening up Skype communications, it doesn't do anything that would affect the user's rights. All their Skype communications can only be heard by people who are legally allowed to hear it - even though one of them is the police, which is not the _intended_ recipient.
1. He cannot take back the license and is actually required to continue to distribute source to anyone who he has given binaries to, under the terms of the license he released his code under. In practical terms, if the work was all his, he could probably stop distribution. He could not stop anyone else from doing so,
2. The moron has been trying to revoke the GPL only for certain source files as he does not own copyright on the rest. He borrowed some from ffmpeg by the looks of things, which is under GPL, qualifying his entire work as a derived work and meaning that he cannot under any circumstances go closed source on this. It's not his decision. He can't even go closed source on future versions. Now that is very, very tricky for him. If it is true that he distributed an executable that was based on GPL'd code written by others, then he _must_ give you a license to use the _complete_ source under GPL terms. So there are two possibilities: a) He claimed that he revoked the license for his own code, but he cannot actually revoke it legally. In that case everything is fine, we can ignore this. Or b) He has actually legally revoked the license for his own code, and everyone has to destroy their copies and not distribute it anymore. In that case, he is in violation of the GPL for the bits of code that are not his, so his original distribution was copyright infringement.
It's a terrible theory.
If he is doing it under duress, there is no good reason for him to keep the duress a secret. Fully agreed with that. Let's say I wrote a tool that lets you copy Blueray DVDs and published it under the GPL. Some people would surely get very upset and threaten me - not because of any copyright problems with my code, but because of what the code does. And I start getting very, very afraid.
Now I wouldn't post that I revoke the GPL license. Actually, I wouldn't even think of revoking it, because _I_ don't mind if you have my copyrighted code and distribute it further. However, I would publish that this code has unrelated legal problems, and that owning it, using it and distributing it could get you in trouble with the law or at least with some very expensive lawyers.
Most legal folks outside of the FSF seem to believe that a license IS a contract, not withstanding the lack of consideration. That is complete news to me. According to US law, it is a license (and because of the lack of consideration, it couldn't possibly be a contract). Under German law, it is a contract; in German law, the lack of consideration is no problem, the receiver doesn't need to accept the contract, and the GPL "license" explicitly says that they don't require you to prove in any way that you accepted the contract. Of course, without accepting the contract, you don't have the right to distribute.
The GPL has obligations for the author as well as the users.
He released it under the GPL. He now has to stick to it. The GPL is a license which basically says "the copyright holder gives you the license to distribute a copy, if you make the distribution in the following way... ". If this is the only thing that allows you to make copies then you must follow the GPL terms. If there are any other reasons that allow you to make copies, you don't have to adhere to the terms. Reasons could be that you are the copyright holder (like Apple Inc. is now the copyright holder of CUPS and can distribute it under any terms they like), or because you bought a different license that allows you to distribute, or if the author died 70 years ago or earlier.
So the author (copyright holder) doesn't have to do anything. If you ask him for a copy and he doesn't give it to you, the worst that could happen is that the copyright holder sues him for copyright infringement for the previous distribution. As I can't see him suing himself, nothing will happen. On the other hand, your right to distribute the software (as long as you can do it according to the GPL terms) is there forever.
If someone upstream does not have the rights granted in the GPL, he or she cannot confer them to others. It is a general principle of law, dating back to the Roman empire, but as much a part of common law: nemo plus iuris transferre potest quam ipse habeat. Nobody can transfer more rights than he has himself. You are right in principle, but the GPL takes that into account. Let's say I (Person A) write software, add the GPL license, and give it to B. B gives it to you (C). C doesn't actually receive the GPL license from B, he receives it from A. If B gives the code to C but violates the terms of the GPL, then that is copyright infringement by B. However, the GPL states that C still owns the software legally and under the terms of the GPL, because that right is granted to them by A. (C may be unable to redistribute under the terms of the GPL, for example if he didn't receive the source code and cannot find it anywhere. )
So as long as the original copyright holder published it under the GPL, anybody has the right, forever, to distribute it under the terms of the GPL, even if someone in between lost their rights. For example, anybody buying a router with GPL code from one of the companies sued by Busybox is completely safe.
Yes, it propogates. If the first person was not authorized to distribute the code, then the GPL does not make it valid. As the GPL prohibits licencing encumbered code, it does not apply, thus any distributions were not made under the GPL, and thus those distributions cannot be redistributed under the GPL as the original copy was never validly released under the GPL. Of course, IANAL. In this case, the person who "revokes" the license claims that he is the sole author of the software in question (unfortunately, he doesn't write that he is the copyright holder, but if he isn't the copyright holder, then he doesn't have the right to give or deny permission to anyone, so we should assume he is the copyright holder).
So according to what he says, everybody who has the code right now has it legally. He also says he is revoking the GPL, he doesn't claim that the code was stolen from him, so anybody who received the code has it under the GPL license.
He has of course the right not to make any further distributions himself using the GPL, or not make any bugfixes available under GPL, or just not make any bugfixes available at all, and to ask people to please delete the software and not distribute it. However, anybody who has the software still has the right to distribute it, that is irrevocable. There is nothing at all he can do about it. If he tries to sue anybody for distribution, that would be thrown out of court in no time.
You gotta wonder whether and how much money changed hands to make these criminal cases happen. None. All they have to do is go to the police, claim that their copyrights have been infringed to some degree that would make it criminal, and then the police would be supposed to investigate. They tried exactly the same thing in Germany. The only difference apparently was that the German police and judges quickly figured out that the record companies didn't have any intention whatsoever to actually follow through with the roughly 10,000 criminal cases that they wanted the police to investigate, so in Germany the police decided that they have better things to do than wasting their time on filesharers.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is typical late 90s shenanigans on the part of apple. I know a lot of software companies did this back in the 90s - they print up a jillion boxes of software and ship it to the stores, counting it as sales. This works in the short term, but when the stuff shows up on wooden palettes at the Qwiky Mart all marked down 50%, it travels back up the chain pretty quick, and affects share price. so, i would propose a tag to this article, stuffthechannel. Apple just released their number of iPhones sold in the last quarter. There are accounting rules for this: An iPhone counts as sold at the time when it is either paid for, or when the person receiving it has an obligation to pay and can't get around it (without being bankrupt). And since Enron, the SEC checks these things quite carefully.
So now we have two choices: Either Apple has done things that will get them into deep trouble, and most likely someone into jail. Or, as unlikely as it may sound, there is just a blogger you can't get his numbers right. Or, of course, 700,000 iPhones are still wrapped up under 700,000 Christmas trees. Now what do you think is most likely?
There's a lot of discussion about stuff like this, but it's meaningless. The fact of the matter is, until the law or the courts say otherwise, your data is protected under the fourth amendment. Oh sure, law enforcement _wants_ to be able to search your data without a warrant, but they also would like to search your house and your car and just about anything else without a warrant too.
For now, there _is_ an expectation of privacy for your data, and until a law says otherwise you can expect that the results of a warrantless search to be thrown out. And if they aren't, you can appeal it up to the supreme court, at which point _they'll_ thrown them out. Period. There is no argument that can be made, even to people that don't understand computers, that makes computers any different than (paper) notebooks. Hell, there are even laws against computer trespassing. That law all but explicitly says that computers have an expectation of privacy. As the first link in the article explains, when you get lawfully arrested, the police is allowed to search for weapons (to prevent you from using them) and to search for evidence (so you don't hide it or destroy it). With the reasoning behind that, they could most likely take your iPhone away from you, so that you can't delete any evidence that might be on it. However, they wouldn't be allowed to check its contents without a search warrant.
If it turns out that the iPhone was stolen (and the fact that it was found on you shows you're guilty), then that search was legal and the fact that you had the phone in your pocket can be used against you, even without a search warrant. If they check your phone records and find a list of ten drug dealers on your phone, that cannot be used against you. Once they have taken the phone away from you, you can't delete any evidence on it, so they can't search further without search warrant.
From the DTrace source (in an #IFDEF APPLE): /*
* If the thread on which this probe has fired belongs to a process marked P_LNOATTACH
* then this enabling is not permitted to observe it. Move along, nothing to see here.
*/
Luckily no malicious programmer will mark their malware's process with this flag! Maybe Apple has a few Macs with a modified DTrace version that _only_ observes processes with this flag set...
I would think that someone should send a copy of the Microsoft and Apple APIs and corresponding documentation for implementing "Drag and Drop" in Windows and in MacOS 9 / MacOS X. I suppose that this documentation would count as "published" because everyone who wants them can download them from the Internet. Actually, you would have to find versions as they were available at the time the patent was filed, plus any previous versions. Anything that is in either of these APIs would have to be removed from the patent as "prior art"; anything that is obvious (once you know the prior art) would have to be removed as obvious.
The kid was not convicted for a "zone transfer". He was convicted for repeatedly hacking into an ISP's server, and one of the many things he did was a zone transfer. This is like saying that opening doors is now illegal in Arizona, after a burglar was convicted for opening a door (and forgetting to mention that he used a crowbar, entered the house and stole anything of value).
Actually, when most people in a company are equipped with CrackBerries, people will send out stuff that has to be acted on within 15 minutes or it's useless. I admit that too many people are freaking addicted to devices but iPhone 15 minute pull email technology is too slow for business. I think these businesses severely underestimate the importance of being able to do a few hours of uninterrupted work.
Everyone should know that making a patent application doesn't mean you are actually developing it. In many companies, submitting a patent gives a developer brownie points with their management, whether the patent is for something that could be used to make money or not. This patent only means that (1) should Microsoft decide to develop such a system then no patent troll can extort them, and (2) should anyone else decide to develop such a system and manage to sell it, then Microsoft can extort money from them.
So, Intel is going to charge us less for a processor with 4 cores because we can turn three off most of the time? Or is the power saving supposed to make the cost of the chip less prohibitive? First, it seems you are under the impression that this might be Intel's idea. It is not. Second, turning off cores is stupid. If you want to reduce performance of a multi-core chip, you reduce the clock speed as far as possible. Four cores at a quarter of the maximum clock speed use lots less electricity than one core running at full speed.
It's a valid point. Certainly the European car manufacturers have a "gentleman's agreement" to limit their high-end sports cars to a maximum speed of 155mph (around 250km/h). Now, I know that I wouldn't use that kind of power every day, but it would annoy me to know that the car was capable of more but prevented from doing so by an artificial limitation. If I'm paying for a 500bhp car, I want it to run like a 500bhp car... I suppose people like you are the reason for the limitation.
You know back in the days of Napster everyone was screaming about how horrible it was to go after Napster because it was clearly the individual sharers that were breaking the law. Now we hear everyone getting excited because there is the possiblity that someone who admitted to deliberately sharing copyrighted material online might get off on a weird technicality. I wouldn't call "look at the law, look what it says is illegal and what is not illegal, and you'll find that what I did isn't illegal at all" a "weird technicality".
Like if you were in court for murder, and the victim is actually alive, then I wouldn't call this a "weird technicality".
He did more than just plan to break the law. He attempted to. Attempting to break the law is not breaking the law. There are cases where the law says that attempting to commit a certain crime is itself a (lesser) crime, like attempted murder is a crime, but a lesser crime than murder, but unless the law says that attempting something is a crime, it is no crime. In the case of copyright infringement, the law explicitly says that only actual distribution is copyright infringement, attempting it is not.
in this case the only difference between it being a crime or not is whether anyone found your files to download. same exact action, one being a crime and one not, does that make any sense? no, no it doesn't. Of course it makes sense, once you remove your mistake that anything here is a crime in the first place. It is not a crime. You don't go to jail for it. It is about damages and liability. Trying to distribute records, but without success, doesn't cause damage. That is also a major difference for example to theft. Theft is a crime, and the police will arrest you. Copyright infringement (in cases like this one) is not a crime.
The guy took CDs he bought. He ripped them to mp3. He then loaded those mp3s into some file-sharing program. Why did he do this if not for the purpose of copyright infringement? As the article explains, the law says quite clearly that there is no such thing as "attempted copyright infringement". Either the music was distributed or it was not. If it was not distributed, and if there is no evidence of distribution, then there is no case. Intention doesn't count.
Slashdot Mirror
"Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it."
So the act of distributing the program indicates the author's acceptance of the GPL. US law takes a dim view of people trying to back out of written offers. And who is going to sue the author? The only legal effect of the GPL is that under certain conditions certain people have the right to make copies of code that otherwise they wouldn't be allowed to make. Which means the only possible effect of going against the GPL is that you might be guilty of copyright infringement where otherwise you wouldn't be guilty. But if you are the copyright holder, you cannot possibly be guilty of copyright infringement by copying it. Even if you were, only the copyright holder can sue you. As long as you are not schizophrenic you are quite safe.
With a minute of thinking: The first method would be much better, because they don't need to know ahead who I am going to contact.
With another minute of thinking: My computer has for example four Verisign root certificates installed. Does that mean that Verisign (I only take them as an example) could technically install a box with a computer into the phone line 50 meters away from my house, and do a man-in-the-middle attack by creating genuine Verisign certificates for any SSL connection that I make, without breaking into my home or doing anything to my computer at all? And the only trace that I would have would be the curious fact that everyone I contact uses certificates signed by Verisign?
With a further minute of thinking: My computer has about 100 root certificates installed that came with Leopard, and similar things happen for Windows users. I have no idea where these certificates come from; I just have to trust Microsoft and Apple. If the police could convince Microsoft and Apple to put a root certificate owned by the police into their installers, then the police could read anyone's SSL connections without breaking into their homes (but breaking into their connection a bit further down the line)?
Does anyone know how a man-in-the-middle attack against SSL, as mentioned in the article, is supposed to work?
The only possibility that I can see is to modify the browser itself, so that when the user tries to get a secure connection to www. criminals.com, the browser contacts www. police.de instead, gets a valid certificate from the police, while the police's computer then makes a secure connection to www. criminals.com.
It seems to be necessary to install some software on the user's computer to achieve this. As long as this software doesn't do anything but opening up Skype communications, it doesn't do anything that would affect the user's rights. All their Skype communications can only be heard by people who are legally allowed to hear it - even though one of them is the police, which is not the _intended_ recipient.
2. The moron has been trying to revoke the GPL only for certain source files as he does not own copyright on the rest. He borrowed some from ffmpeg by the looks of things, which is under GPL, qualifying his entire work as a derived work and meaning that he cannot under any circumstances go closed source on this. It's not his decision. He can't even go closed source on future versions. Now that is very, very tricky for him. If it is true that he distributed an executable that was based on GPL'd code written by others, then he _must_ give you a license to use the _complete_ source under GPL terms. So there are two possibilities: a) He claimed that he revoked the license for his own code, but he cannot actually revoke it legally. In that case everything is fine, we can ignore this. Or b) He has actually legally revoked the license for his own code, and everyone has to destroy their copies and not distribute it anymore. In that case, he is in violation of the GPL for the bits of code that are not his, so his original distribution was copyright infringement.
If he is doing it under duress, there is no good reason for him to keep the duress a secret. Fully agreed with that. Let's say I wrote a tool that lets you copy Blueray DVDs and published it under the GPL. Some people would surely get very upset and threaten me - not because of any copyright problems with my code, but because of what the code does. And I start getting very, very afraid.
Now I wouldn't post that I revoke the GPL license. Actually, I wouldn't even think of revoking it, because _I_ don't mind if you have my copyrighted code and distribute it further. However, I would publish that this code has unrelated legal problems, and that owning it, using it and distributing it could get you in trouble with the law or at least with some very expensive lawyers.
So the author (copyright holder) doesn't have to do anything. If you ask him for a copy and he doesn't give it to you, the worst that could happen is that the copyright holder sues him for copyright infringement for the previous distribution. As I can't see him suing himself, nothing will happen. On the other hand, your right to distribute the software (as long as you can do it according to the GPL terms) is there forever.
So as long as the original copyright holder published it under the GPL, anybody has the right, forever, to distribute it under the terms of the GPL, even if someone in between lost their rights. For example, anybody buying a router with GPL code from one of the companies sued by Busybox is completely safe.
So according to what he says, everybody who has the code right now has it legally. He also says he is revoking the GPL, he doesn't claim that the code was stolen from him, so anybody who received the code has it under the GPL license.
He has of course the right not to make any further distributions himself using the GPL, or not make any bugfixes available under GPL, or just not make any bugfixes available at all, and to ask people to please delete the software and not distribute it. However, anybody who has the software still has the right to distribute it, that is irrevocable. There is nothing at all he can do about it. If he tries to sue anybody for distribution, that would be thrown out of court in no time.
So now we have two choices: Either Apple has done things that will get them into deep trouble, and most likely someone into jail. Or, as unlikely as it may sound, there is just a blogger you can't get his numbers right. Or, of course, 700,000 iPhones are still wrapped up under 700,000 Christmas trees. Now what do you think is most likely?
For now, there _is_ an expectation of privacy for your data, and until a law says otherwise you can expect that the results of a warrantless search to be thrown out. And if they aren't, you can appeal it up to the supreme court, at which point _they'll_ thrown them out. Period. There is no argument that can be made, even to people that don't understand computers, that makes computers any different than (paper) notebooks. Hell, there are even laws against computer trespassing. That law all but explicitly says that computers have an expectation of privacy. As the first link in the article explains, when you get lawfully arrested, the police is allowed to search for weapons (to prevent you from using them) and to search for evidence (so you don't hide it or destroy it). With the reasoning behind that, they could most likely take your iPhone away from you, so that you can't delete any evidence that might be on it. However, they wouldn't be allowed to check its contents without a search warrant.
If it turns out that the iPhone was stolen (and the fact that it was found on you shows you're guilty), then that search was legal and the fact that you had the phone in your pocket can be used against you, even without a search warrant. If they check your phone records and find a list of ten drug dealers on your phone, that cannot be used against you. Once they have taken the phone away from you, you can't delete any evidence on it, so they can't search further without search warrant.
* If the thread on which this probe has fired belongs to a process marked P_LNOATTACH
* then this enabling is not permitted to observe it. Move along, nothing to see here.
*/
Luckily no malicious programmer will mark their malware's process with this flag! Maybe Apple has a few Macs with a modified DTrace version that _only_ observes processes with this flag set...
I would think that someone should send a copy of the Microsoft and Apple APIs and corresponding documentation for implementing "Drag and Drop" in Windows and in MacOS 9 / MacOS X. I suppose that this documentation would count as "published" because everyone who wants them can download them from the Internet. Actually, you would have to find versions as they were available at the time the patent was filed, plus any previous versions. Anything that is in either of these APIs would have to be removed from the patent as "prior art"; anything that is obvious (once you know the prior art) would have to be removed as obvious.
The kid was not convicted for a "zone transfer". He was convicted for repeatedly hacking into an ISP's server, and one of the many things he did was a zone transfer. This is like saying that opening doors is now illegal in Arizona, after a burglar was convicted for opening a door (and forgetting to mention that he used a crowbar, entered the house and stole anything of value).
Everyone should know that making a patent application doesn't mean you are actually developing it. In many companies, submitting a patent gives a developer brownie points with their management, whether the patent is for something that could be used to make money or not. This patent only means that (1) should Microsoft decide to develop such a system then no patent troll can extort them, and (2) should anyone else decide to develop such a system and manage to sell it, then Microsoft can extort money from them.
Like if you were in court for murder, and the victim is actually alive, then I wouldn't call this a "weird technicality".