What if you do have permission to do so, under certain conditions, but then Barnes and Nobles who are beyond your control violate those conditions? Hmmm?
If I were Apple, I would just pull the app and call it done.
Although the FSF tends to be far too kind, the fact is copyright law doesnt work that way. They are still on the hook for infringement already committed - or at least could be, if the copyright holders want to pursue it.
It's an unusual enforcement action, though, because they don't want Apple to just make the app disappear, they want Apple to grant its users the full freedoms offered by the GPL.
For the FSF, at least, that is not unusual at all. Quite the opposite, that is always their goal when approaching violators.
I am relying on the OPs honesty there to some degree. "I have approached the companies directly and while one of them acknowledges that they are not fully GPL compliant, due to other license restrictions they cannot make their build environment public."
You are half-right, depending on the exact details of what is being referred to as "build environment" and the GPL version, they might or might not be required to release it.
Think carefully here, try and come up with an answer that doesn't allow me to make an end run around the copyright on music, movies or books by mechanically converting them into a different non-human-readable format.
Not sure what point there would be to your 'end-run' as the result would be, as you say, non-human-readable.
But regardless, the point isn't that copyright wouldnt apply to the non-readable form at all, but that it shouldnt be applicable *directly* to it. For example, with a properly registerd copyright on a piece of software, it would apply to the binary as well - but you shouldnt be able to copyright the binary directly, the proper procedure would be to copyright the actual *software* i.e. source version of the program, which requires disclosing that source. Any binary derived from that source would then be covered of course. Is that clearer?
The point to copyright was supposed to be to encourage, in the long run, more works entering the public domain. So for example you get a limited term monopoly on commercial reproduction of your novel, but in the long term it guaranteed that your novel would be around to enter the public domain. (Berne convention has royally screwed this up, but under the previous constitutional regime copyright was not automatic, it required registration including lodging a copy of the work in question with the library of congress to ensure that it would still be accessible after copyright expired.)
So when you apply that to software, you would need to lodge a copy *in human readable format* for preservation for the same purpose, obviously. A binary would hardly guarantee that the program would be usable in any way after expiration of copyright, with hardware development what it is, and at any rate even if some sort of emulator could still be found in which the program could be made to run, it would not effectively serve the purpose of allowing future generations to study the work like a source copy would. Clearer?
Copyright does last too long. Doesnt mean it should expire any quicker just because it's offered under a free license than otherwise. And chances are very good the code in question is still quite young.
A bigger problem is that it has been incorrectly interpreted to allow copyrighting of binary code. That is not consistent with the founders intentions. If you want to copyright software you should have to publish the source code. But in this case the source code that was licensed is published, obviously, so that isnt an issue here either.
Finally, copyright was not intended to, and should not, apply to non-commercial use. But this is commercial use.
So no, I dont see us 'wanting it both ways' here, at all.
If the build-system has to be reverse-engineered for this company to avoid being held accountable for their commercial infringement of copyright, it's on them to get it done. And the person implementing the new build-system will need to be working in a clean room, without ever seeing the old build system, so there is no call for an NDA there. Get one person to analyse and document the function of the old one, and write the specification, then the person who does the new build system only sees that spec.
No sympathy for them, if they cannot comply with the license they are engaged in commercial copyright infringement and should be thankful you gave them an opportunity to fix it rather than going straight for statutory damages.
However the FSF has limited funds and they do have to pick their battles wisely. If all you can do about the situation is bump your FSF contribution then do it.
As for a practical workaround for your benefit, do you have the ability to write arbitrary bytes to the firmware? If so you should be able do this in a hexeditor. It wouldnt be trivial though - quite a few hours of work, depending on the specifics of how they screwed their HTML up so badly and how it's encoded. You might be able to shortcircuit it a bit by simply determining what IE sends to the device to perform each task, and then scripting your own pages that result in the correct bits being sent to the device. Would have to look at the actual device in-depth to determine which route is most practical.
It is an interesting article, though quite propagandistic. Basically he starts with a conclusion (obviously has to do with who paid his wages and what their marketing department had determined must be their official line) and then tries to make the fact sound like they support it (even when he's talking about facts that dont.)
The load of IFSMGR.SYS in Config.sys is really a dead giveaway. If Win95 had "just used DOS as a bootloader" it wouldnt have been necessary. Instead, windows needed a hook loaded at the device driver stage of the boot process to leverage the control to do stuff like, for example, 32-bit disk access. This was completely normal DOS programming and architecture.
Note also that those state variables were per-VM. (I.e., each MS-DOS "box" you opened got its own copy of those state variables.) After all, each MS-DOS box had its idea of what the current directory was, what was in the file tables, that sort of thing. This was all an act, however, because the real list of open files was kept in by the 32-bit file system manager. It had to be, because disk caches had to be kept coherent, and file sharing need to be enforced globally. If one MS-DOS box opened a file for exclusive access, then an attempt by a program running in another MS-DOS box to open the file should fail with a sharing violation.
And this was no different using when running multiple secondary shells on a pure DOS system without Windows.
It was a bit of a nostalgia kick though. DOS programming was fun. Trying to decipher documentation written in microsoft mode - attempting to be "true enough" without conflicting with the fantasy-world their marketing department demanded, was sometimes not. Thanks for the link.
30 years ago we were still taught that there were standards a patent application had to meet, so no, it never occurred to me or any of the hundreds or thousands of other people that thought of stringing together a number of existing inventions in a fairly obvious way to patent the idea - it's exactly the sort of thing we were taught was not patentable.
Yep. It's the most obvious thing in the world once you have all the components - computers, radio communication, traffic lights, and cars. I did a simulation/concept demonstration on my old Sinclair too.
I would certainly bet I was not the first to think of it either. Fuel efficiency was much more of a mantra in the 70s than the 80s, and though computer penetration was significantly less they certainly existed then too.
I dont think there is any doubt that there are a ton of patents that would be infringed, if they were upheld. But this thing has been gone over with a fine-toothed comb by legions of lawyers multiple times. There were patent lawyers involved from the beginning if I am not mistaken. There are so many over-broad patents out there it is pretty much impossible to do anything at all without 'infringing' these days. So what do you do? You throw out the ones that you can invalidate, then work around the ones remaining. And for a backstop, you build your own pool for counterclaims.
Google isnt stupid. They wouldnt have taken this step if they werent confident they would prevail in court if push comes to shove. MPEG-LA may talk some FUD cause that is easy and cheap. But filing suit would expose them to serious risk - of having their precious patent pool exposed and invalidated. Until and unless they put their money where their mouth is their FUD should be treated as hot air.
Re:For the patent FUDsters sure to follow....
on
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Software patents are broken; patents for physical items are maybe a little jankety, but not completely broken (yet).
Even when the patent system worked as the founders intended, it was debateable whether there was any benefit. Pretty much every major invention came more-or-less simultaneously to several different people, one of them got the patent, everyone else got screwed. But today it's ten times worse. The only function the patent office serves in 2010 is to help large corporations perpetuate an oligopoly where only the chosen few with large patent pools can enter entire markets.
A custom memory pool is not the same as a memory manager.
I know. And what I wrote was correct. DVX, for example, came with a memory manager. Better one than windows had in fact. Much better multitasking as well - and with a much smaller hit on system resources.
Let me put it this way. If you take a running Win95 system, and look at the sheer amount of low-level code therein, DOS would be a tiny, tiny thing.
Let me put it this way. If you are running a linux system, and look at the sheer amount of low-level code therein, Linux would be a tiny, tiny thing. It's still a linux system though.
Some linux systems today boot straight on up into X+DE of choice, without pause. And yes, GNOME or KDE do lots of behind the scenes work that a GUI programmer might think of as 'part of the OS' because they dont have to think about it. A system like that is pretty precisely analogous to Win95. One that also rigs things so you cannot get the damn GUI to unload and give you a primary bash shell instead would be analogous to ME. X+*DE can run on FreeBSD and other kernels instead of Linux, of course. Windows could also run on DR/Novelle DOS, although it deliberately obfuscated that fact. So the analogies match up quite precisely. Yet we dont call X+DE an independent OS. It isnt.
However, Win95 "alone" was much more of an OS than DOS
Win95 'alone' was nothing but a useless pile of binary chunks. Completely and utterly useless - you wouldnt have been able to do anything with it.
Your argument appears to come down to the old prejudice that DOS was too minimal to be called an OS to begin with. Stated baldly, it's so obviously wrong it doesnt even need refuting. It was a pretty minimal OS, certainly by todays standards but even by those of its time, but so what? It did what it was designed to do, and because it was so minimal it left a lot of freedom to build anything you wanted on top of it. Even a bit ugly performance-killing GUI like windows.
Since when do windowing environments include memory managers?
That was normal (practically speaking, it was required) when they ran on top of DOS.
Windows 95 was an operating system.
No it wasnt. Neither was 98 or ME. They were all shells that ran on top of and relied on DOS. They just hid that fact more thoroughly with each release.
Even if they did, they are expected to hold their taste long enough for them to be, you know, eaten?
Which, if you do it right, can take some time. Divide into bite-sized portions, not too big, convey to mouth, chew *thoroughly*, then and only then swallow. Then take a sip of your drink, probably engage in conversation for a minute, before repeating.
If taking a minute at the beginning of the meal to take pictures degrades the taste, then the taste will be degraded horribly by the time the diner finishes the plate. And people who take a moment to close their eyes and thank $deity for their food would be ruining it too. It's a bunch of nonsense.
Flash photography can be distracting and annoying, however.
Windows 3.0 wasnt succesful at all. A lot of boxes may have gone out, but after a week of playing with it, they sat on the shelf and we all went back to getting work done without it. It was atrocious.
Now was it a "Windows operating system" however you parse it. It was at best a windowing environment. The Operating System was still DOS, and remained DOS until NT/XP.
Windows 3.1 was the first MS Windows environment to be useable enough that people actually ran it for more than just a 'look at this' phase. It was still a huge step down from other multi-tasking DOS shells, and it took years for it to be forced down the throats of the more clueful users, by the expedient of discontinuing support and development of all the applications in favour of new, inferior versions which would only run within the Windows environment.
The only way to comply with it would be to download every single torrent and check the contents manually BEFORE posting the link. Which is only possible in theory.
NO. A license is NOT a contract. A contract is (at least) two-sided, created by agreement between the parties, "party A does Z and in return party B will do X." A license is one-sided, take it or leave it, "party A grants permission for X under Y conditions."
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What if you do have permission to do so, under certain conditions, but then Barnes and Nobles who are beyond your control violate those conditions? Hmmm?
Although the FSF tends to be far too kind, the fact is copyright law doesnt work that way. They are still on the hook for infringement already committed - or at least could be, if the copyright holders want to pursue it.
For the FSF, at least, that is not unusual at all. Quite the opposite, that is always their goal when approaching violators.
I use firefox+noscript and it's hardly slow or unresponsive.
I am relying on the OPs honesty there to some degree. "I have approached the companies directly and while one of them acknowledges that they are not fully GPL compliant, due to other license restrictions they cannot make their build environment public."
You are half-right, depending on the exact details of what is being referred to as "build environment" and the GPL version, they might or might not be required to release it.
Not sure what point there would be to your 'end-run' as the result would be, as you say, non-human-readable.
But regardless, the point isn't that copyright wouldnt apply to the non-readable form at all, but that it shouldnt be applicable *directly* to it. For example, with a properly registerd copyright on a piece of software, it would apply to the binary as well - but you shouldnt be able to copyright the binary directly, the proper procedure would be to copyright the actual *software* i.e. source version of the program, which requires disclosing that source. Any binary derived from that source would then be covered of course. Is that clearer?
The point to copyright was supposed to be to encourage, in the long run, more works entering the public domain. So for example you get a limited term monopoly on commercial reproduction of your novel, but in the long term it guaranteed that your novel would be around to enter the public domain. (Berne convention has royally screwed this up, but under the previous constitutional regime copyright was not automatic, it required registration including lodging a copy of the work in question with the library of congress to ensure that it would still be accessible after copyright expired.)
So when you apply that to software, you would need to lodge a copy *in human readable format* for preservation for the same purpose, obviously. A binary would hardly guarantee that the program would be usable in any way after expiration of copyright, with hardware development what it is, and at any rate even if some sort of emulator could still be found in which the program could be made to run, it would not effectively serve the purpose of allowing future generations to study the work like a source copy would. Clearer?
Based on what we've seen so far from the Muzak Maffia, they'll most likely just scan for filenames.
I foresee hundreds of well-seeded linux ISOs with filenames remarkably similar to whatever is top of the charts on the week of release...
Umm no. Nothing has been stolen. There appears to be an ongoing and deliberate commercial infringement of copyright.
Copyright does last too long. Doesnt mean it should expire any quicker just because it's offered under a free license than otherwise. And chances are very good the code in question is still quite young.
A bigger problem is that it has been incorrectly interpreted to allow copyrighting of binary code. That is not consistent with the founders intentions. If you want to copyright software you should have to publish the source code. But in this case the source code that was licensed is published, obviously, so that isnt an issue here either.
Finally, copyright was not intended to, and should not, apply to non-commercial use. But this is commercial use.
So no, I dont see us 'wanting it both ways' here, at all.
Don't ever sign an NDA. That's horrible advice.
If the build-system has to be reverse-engineered for this company to avoid being held accountable for their commercial infringement of copyright, it's on them to get it done. And the person implementing the new build-system will need to be working in a clean room, without ever seeing the old build system, so there is no call for an NDA there. Get one person to analyse and document the function of the old one, and write the specification, then the person who does the new build system only sees that spec.
No sympathy for them, if they cannot comply with the license they are engaged in commercial copyright infringement and should be thankful you gave them an opportunity to fix it rather than going straight for statutory damages.
However the FSF has limited funds and they do have to pick their battles wisely. If all you can do about the situation is bump your FSF contribution then do it.
As for a practical workaround for your benefit, do you have the ability to write arbitrary bytes to the firmware? If so you should be able do this in a hexeditor. It wouldnt be trivial though - quite a few hours of work, depending on the specifics of how they screwed their HTML up so badly and how it's encoded. You might be able to shortcircuit it a bit by simply determining what IE sends to the device to perform each task, and then scripting your own pages that result in the correct bits being sent to the device. Would have to look at the actual device in-depth to determine which route is most practical.
It is an interesting article, though quite propagandistic. Basically he starts with a conclusion (obviously has to do with who paid his wages and what their marketing department had determined must be their official line) and then tries to make the fact sound like they support it (even when he's talking about facts that dont.)
The load of IFSMGR.SYS in Config.sys is really a dead giveaway. If Win95 had "just used DOS as a bootloader" it wouldnt have been necessary. Instead, windows needed a hook loaded at the device driver stage of the boot process to leverage the control to do stuff like, for example, 32-bit disk access. This was completely normal DOS programming and architecture.
And this was no different using when running multiple secondary shells on a pure DOS system without Windows.
It was a bit of a nostalgia kick though. DOS programming was fun. Trying to decipher documentation written in microsoft mode - attempting to be "true enough" without conflicting with the fantasy-world their marketing department demanded, was sometimes not. Thanks for the link.
30 years ago we were still taught that there were standards a patent application had to meet, so no, it never occurred to me or any of the hundreds or thousands of other people that thought of stringing together a number of existing inventions in a fairly obvious way to patent the idea - it's exactly the sort of thing we were taught was not patentable.
Yep. It's the most obvious thing in the world once you have all the components - computers, radio communication, traffic lights, and cars. I did a simulation/concept demonstration on my old Sinclair too.
I would certainly bet I was not the first to think of it either. Fuel efficiency was much more of a mantra in the 70s than the 80s, and though computer penetration was significantly less they certainly existed then too.
For prior art we can claim a paper I did in elementary school about 30 years ago, if anyone can find it.
Patents are completely broken.
Lawyers write the laws.
I dont think there is any doubt that there are a ton of patents that would be infringed, if they were upheld. But this thing has been gone over with a fine-toothed comb by legions of lawyers multiple times. There were patent lawyers involved from the beginning if I am not mistaken. There are so many over-broad patents out there it is pretty much impossible to do anything at all without 'infringing' these days. So what do you do? You throw out the ones that you can invalidate, then work around the ones remaining. And for a backstop, you build your own pool for counterclaims.
Google isnt stupid. They wouldnt have taken this step if they werent confident they would prevail in court if push comes to shove. MPEG-LA may talk some FUD cause that is easy and cheap. But filing suit would expose them to serious risk - of having their precious patent pool exposed and invalidated. Until and unless they put their money where their mouth is their FUD should be treated as hot air.
No, the whole system is broken.
Even when the patent system worked as the founders intended, it was debateable whether there was any benefit. Pretty much every major invention came more-or-less simultaneously to several different people, one of them got the patent, everyone else got screwed. But today it's ten times worse. The only function the patent office serves in 2010 is to help large corporations perpetuate an oligopoly where only the chosen few with large patent pools can enter entire markets.
I know. And what I wrote was correct. DVX, for example, came with a memory manager. Better one than windows had in fact. Much better multitasking as well - and with a much smaller hit on system resources.
Let me put it this way. If you are running a linux system, and look at the sheer amount of low-level code therein, Linux would be a tiny, tiny thing. It's still a linux system though.
Some linux systems today boot straight on up into X+DE of choice, without pause. And yes, GNOME or KDE do lots of behind the scenes work that a GUI programmer might think of as 'part of the OS' because they dont have to think about it. A system like that is pretty precisely analogous to Win95. One that also rigs things so you cannot get the damn GUI to unload and give you a primary bash shell instead would be analogous to ME. X+*DE can run on FreeBSD and other kernels instead of Linux, of course. Windows could also run on DR/Novelle DOS, although it deliberately obfuscated that fact. So the analogies match up quite precisely. Yet we dont call X+DE an independent OS. It isnt.
Win95 'alone' was nothing but a useless pile of binary chunks. Completely and utterly useless - you wouldnt have been able to do anything with it.
Your argument appears to come down to the old prejudice that DOS was too minimal to be called an OS to begin with. Stated baldly, it's so obviously wrong it doesnt even need refuting. It was a pretty minimal OS, certainly by todays standards but even by those of its time, but so what? It did what it was designed to do, and because it was so minimal it left a lot of freedom to build anything you wanted on top of it. Even a bit ugly performance-killing GUI like windows.
That was normal (practically speaking, it was required) when they ran on top of DOS.
No it wasnt. Neither was 98 or ME. They were all shells that ran on top of and relied on DOS. They just hid that fact more thoroughly with each release.
Even if they did, they are expected to hold their taste long enough for them to be, you know, eaten?
Which, if you do it right, can take some time. Divide into bite-sized portions, not too big, convey to mouth, chew *thoroughly*, then and only then swallow. Then take a sip of your drink, probably engage in conversation for a minute, before repeating.
If taking a minute at the beginning of the meal to take pictures degrades the taste, then the taste will be degraded horribly by the time the diner finishes the plate. And people who take a moment to close their eyes and thank $deity for their food would be ruining it too. It's a bunch of nonsense.
Flash photography can be distracting and annoying, however.
Windows 3.0 wasnt succesful at all. A lot of boxes may have gone out, but after a week of playing with it, they sat on the shelf and we all went back to getting work done without it. It was atrocious.
Now was it a "Windows operating system" however you parse it. It was at best a windowing environment. The Operating System was still DOS, and remained DOS until NT/XP.
Windows 3.1 was the first MS Windows environment to be useable enough that people actually ran it for more than just a 'look at this' phase. It was still a huge step down from other multi-tasking DOS shells, and it took years for it to be forced down the throats of the more clueful users, by the expedient of discontinuing support and development of all the applications in favour of new, inferior versions which would only run within the Windows environment.
It wasnt. It was just indexing people who might have pointers to where they could be found.
But to answer the question you were trying to ask, backing up a DVD as an .iso file is perfectly normal and sensible.
The only way to comply with it would be to download every single torrent and check the contents manually BEFORE posting the link. Which is only possible in theory.
NO. A license is NOT a contract. A contract is (at least) two-sided, created by agreement between the parties, "party A does Z and in return party B will do X." A license is one-sided, take it or leave it, "party A grants permission for X under Y conditions."