Bernstein's work was never a source of legal confusion. The software wasn't license-free at all. It lacked a license agreement, but it did not lack a license. The fundamental error in the argument and in those "confused" is that a license is what constitutes a license. Bernstein's fundamental error is that modification is not a right possessed by copy owners under the statutory license. It is not possible to be in possession of software acquired lawfully and be without license. If the terms of a license agreement create a situation in which that person is outside the terms, then he is not in legal possession. If he has the software and no cause of action exists against him, then he has a license.
You, like the laity generally, conflate license and license agreement. They are not interchangeable, and they are not the same thing. A license is not a document, but simply a grant of rights and a scope in which to exercise them. Anything else, including any conditions for granting the license, restrictions on the use of rights granted (whether attribution, source contribution, SLA restrictions, or cross-grants) is not simply a license, but rather a license agreement.
In no case is there actually a problem. Bernstein declared his intent not to enforce the copyright; his own site to this day outlines what he considers acceptable use of his software. There was no cause of action, and his delivery of software conferred a license to use and to modify, per his conduct.
That's not the correct way to share: the law gives the author the ability to sue people who infringe on their copyright
Choosing not to enforce and lack of license are two separate matters. You can decline copyright by abandonment or by intentional ceding to the public domain. You can also reserve all the rights and just not use them against users, with or without an implicit or explicit license. You can further just lose the right to sue by inaction or by failure to register the works.
None of these is "incorrect" or "correct". They are all valid possibilities that may be implemented by the creator of a work.
and infringement is defined as lack of licence.
Lack of license is not the definition of copyright infringement, and one must be careful to understand what is an is not a license. A license agreement, whether proprietary or open source, is not coterminous with license (permission to use).
Therefore, if one shares their creations with no licence attached, they can at any time change their mind and sue. Users know this, and are afraid to use copyrightable works that carry no explicit licence.
Users do not refrain from using copyrighted works, regardless of the license. This is the problem. They've been spoiled by generosity in many cases and have come to expect what is, in fact, a courtesy. Then they bitch about someone taking away "their" "rights", which sometimes are not rights and not theirs to lose regardless of that. Then they point to abusers and greedy asshats like the RIAA to justify their lack of respect for the work and rights of others.
But directly to the point, sharing one's creation with no license attached is not possible. What may not be clear is the extent of the license granted in the sharing, but the statutory defaults come into play there, so it's quite easy to play it safe.
As to whether it's relevant, absolutely it is. On its own, a writing style (much less a pedestrian, tortured one like Rowling's) is not eligible for copyright protection. However, no one has suggested that is the case--from either side. The relevance of the writing style speaks to the purpose and character of the allegedly infringing work, as well as to the amount and substantiality of the copying. These, as anyone actually involved or educated in the field would immediately know, are parts of the multifactor balancing test for fair use cases. The most important factor, and the deciding one in the case, is the market impact, coupled with the commercial nature of the endeavor.
The ruling follows a trend of erring on the side of the author's right to prepare or license such derivative works, and isn't at all suspect, given that the website was not enjoined and Rowling made a specific point of stopping the commercial profit in the publication of the book. The low damages further reflect the court's rather balanced view of the offending work. The submitter's "criticism" of the opinion is a fairly generic and less-than-insightful critique of the case-by-case analysis of fair use cases--but as Learned Hand wrote decades ago, that's the way it is and the way it should be.
If so most authors should have their books contested, as people learn partly through imitation and experience. Throwing weak points out like that makes me suspect of the ruling.
It's only a "weak point" if you don't know what you're reading.
The laws are made with copyright in mind, without contemplating the possibility of someone wanting to share freely.
Absolutely and utterly false. Anyone wanting to share freely simply chooses not to enforce their copyright. This system already exists. "Copyleft" is nothing more than a copyright license.
Plus I see no reason why anyone should be forced to write or attach a licence in their words in order to escape from the evils of copyright.
No one is forced. You're free to attach no license at all to your works and spread them into the wind.
I think governments should maintain two sets of laws: copyright for the control freaks, and copyleft for the sharers.
They already do. It's called copyright. You are not proposing a change, except for the statutory codification of some form of copyright license, which apart from being totally unnecessary also introduces the problem of which copyleft license to codify. Anything that's not the GPL will get a bunch of zealots whipped up into a furor, while choosing the GPL is not the best option for this group of "people who want to share". The conditionals and modal restrictions of the GPL make for complex legal enforcement and lack consistency in a rights-divesting sense.
Or should we consider copyleft the default law and only apply copyright to whatever has a Copyright (CR) 2008 notice?
No, because copyleft can't exist without copyright. Copyleft simply alters whether particular exclusive rights are reserved by default or licensed by default, and it can't function unless the right to exclude divests from the creator or assignee--if the rights to the work don't start with a copyright holder, no one has the authority to grant those rights. Likewise, if the creator doesn't start with those rights, there's no one with the rights to grant them.
You create a work. By the operation of all legal systems, you have full & complete control over that work--it's not published, and no one has the right to invade your property to acquire it without your permission. That is the fundamental right to privacy. When you choose to step beyond it, and offer a portion to the public, that is publication. You give up a portion of your rights, but again, that portion which you do not cede remains yours--it's not granted, it's reserved by you. That's copyright. "Copyleft" is just a term of convenience--just like IP--referring to a more permissive grant of those rights than is customary.
We could perhaps have three legal frameworks: copyright, copyleft, and permissive.
They already exist and are already recognized in our legal system. What improvement do you see as happening? What is your solution to the basic problem you end with:
there are many licences to choose from, with subtle but important differences, and for many of them if you make an initial choice it will be difficult to change the licence, especially for massive collaborative works with no copyright assignment.
Which license do you choose to be codified? An initial default makes it more difficult to change the license, because you have to specifically repudiate the statutory one. As it exists now, the statutory license can be repudiated for sharing simply with a statement: "I release this work to the public domain." If you don't like either of those options, you write your own license. Copyright allows for anything from zero control to nearly full control, subject to certain specific unwaivable limitations and a number of waivable ones. As for "massive collaborative works", who gets to enforce violations of the law? You need a rightsholder to have standing to sue.
I'm failing to see the basic need for or benefit of your solution, except that it simply replaces the copyright symbol with a copyleft symbol that stands for something. Well, there's already a symbol for that, and you can write whatever you want in your copyright notice. You can say "(c) 2008 John Smith. All rights reserved." or "(c) 2008 John Smith. (CL) John Smith, governed by GPLv2." Problem solved.
If we had a machine to duplicate food, would you still buy it to support the farmers?
If there were a machine to duplicate food, what would give you the right to take an apple from the farmer to duplicate in the first place? The farmer, having labored to produce the best apples, having invested a lot of time and money into producing a large crop, suddenly sells one 25-cent apple and then goes bankrupt? As they say in the production industry, the second shoe costs $10 to make. The first one cost $3 million.
"Infinite reproducibility" still requires finiteproducibility. There's nothing to reproduce if the first one never gets made.
As for whether the second one and the thousands after that are free, that's not a decision you get to make as a customer. Some people will offer their work either way; the ones that don't choose to don't lose that right because you can take it. It's not yours to take. If you want to control it, make it yourself.
What happened was ignorance, jealousy, and greed. Nothing else. It's pretty damn easy to break into a house, and at negligible cost. There's no difference; "He didn't lose anything" is crap. It's taking something that doesn't belong to you and that you have no right to take. It's petty and immoral, and you can rationalize it from here to Tuesday, but it will remain wrong. You don't get to decide that someone's good or service is profitable enough and take it for yourself without following the terms of their offer to sell. Period. If you don't like the price or the terms, you don't get what he's selling. Christ.
Once people have an investment, it's only a matter of time before profit begins to drive things, and consolidation reduces the number of shareholders to a manageable few, or alternatively explodes shareholders to the point of no longer having a non-financial interest--simply the equivalent of an IPO of the next Columbia Pictures or whoever.
You end up right back where you started. There's nothing wrong with community financing models, but it's not a viable solution for the entire industry. It's a variation on the existing theme.
When you get right down to it, what right exactly do you think you'd buy for your $10? Reproduction? Distribution to your friends? If the 5 million "shareholders" acquired that right, who would be left to pay to watch the film? There's little opportunity for profit there.
In the end, you buy a ticket to watch the film. This $10 ticket is your share in the venture, and it covers the expenses, from the capital and operating costs of the cinema to the production, distribution, and marketing costs for the film. What you gain for that investment is viewing access.
More generally, and not in response to the above, the media industry is the only one in which success and large profits are viewed as a bad thing by a jealous and greedy populace--as if most artists enjoy that kind of success and as if they should be forced to perform an at-cost service because people are capable of taking without paying. This isn't energy or healthcare, which are essential human services. This is entertainment and frivolity. Apart from "record oil profit" stories, there's no real outrage at corporations making money. But god forbid that someone who spent millions of dollars developing the video game you want should have the audacity to sell it on the terms and the price he chooses--that's unjust. If you want to regulate the conduct or cap profits, do it. But an arbitrary and ill-informed, ill-reasoned, ill-advised assault on a very old, very basic, and very global system is not the answer. Copyright isn't the problem. Copyright allows the creator to do what he pleases--from BSD and GPL licenses to utterly restricting transfers and sales. It's a system that works well, and its abuse is your run of the mill corporate asshattery, rewarded by your run of the mill fickle consumer and damaged by your typical greedy pirate. No amount of copyright reform or abolition will fix or compensate for those basic underlying factors.
Can you imagine what the world would be like if people simply took it upon themselves to decide when others had more than they "deserved" and just wantonly took what they considered the "excess", pointing and laughing at "laws" and "locks" and "doors"? Holy hell. What ever happened to the very simple "no thank you" when someone was selling something you felt gave you less than you wanted for more than you were willing to pay?
Because before the advent of recording and copyright, the rich musical culture was a result of people investing their time and labor in becoming musicians, and in learning and performing pieces. Since not everyone had the time or resources to become a musician, there was value in it, because the musician had something you couldn't do for yourself.
With recordings, anyone can enjoy the benefit of a musician at any time, with a minimal investment. The floor dropped out. If someone could wait at your job until you finished working on something that took months or even years, and could then instantly reproduce it before you'd had an opportunity to be compensated, I doubt you would accept it and move on.
This "we existed before copyright" nonsense doesn't prove anything. If recording had existed from the beginning, some form of copyright would have, too. The truth is that people only do what they love if they can afford to do so, and copyright is a big reason why people can afford to make music and can afford to listen to such an immense variety of music.
What you're missing is that this only happens where an existing project is sufficiently developed to provide a meaningful head start, and where the project squarely meets the need of the company.
If the project is similar, but not similar enough, requiring significant time and money to adapt, or if the project is too immature, such that the time of getting developers and staff up to speed on it is not worth just hiring a set of new developers to create a project, then the OSS project will not be selected.
in reality the situation will probably never really comeup where suddenly no company is behind the big OSS projects anymore...
Yes, that's exactly the parent's point--it relies on either charity or self-interest of a profitable, proprietary company to foster the growth of enterprise OSS projects, which makes it a dependent development model.
Which has nothing to do with either the AC you responded to, nor does it have anything to do with your post, which said that cable TV providers don't have to provide local channels.
Wrong. Cable providers are subject to a "must carry" rule. The FCC mandates that providers must provide local channels to their subscribers via the CATV connection. The cable companies eventually sued, probably hoping to compress the hell out of them to save bandwidth, and they lost. That's why your local channels in HD are substantially higher quality in terms of bitrate than Comcast's shiteous triple-packed HD channels.
The rule is part of 47 CFR 76--but I can't recall the exact citation.
That's tantamount to not voting. In most states, the write-in slot must be filled with the name of an actual person, and in order to win, that person must file with the Secretary of State. Without this step, it is equivalent to leaving the ballot blank, and it has zero mathematical impact on the election; it is exactly as if you cast no vote.
I don't mean it in the "a single vote changes nothing" sense. I mean it in the "your ballot is invalid" sense. This is the case in California, Texas, and New York, to name the big ones. It's never a waste to vote for a candidate other than the big two, but it is a waste to vote for a candidate who is not a candidate.
None of these make any sense. Two months will make no difference to any of them!
Are you serious? Two months makes a major difference. You think it's a coincidence that there have never been simultaneous shuttle missions?
Nor will there if it's sent 2 months later. What, if a parachute fails you think they're going to catch it?
You're just completely lost now. The difference there is between manned and unmanned, not the timing.
No, the idea that anything is going to suddenly happen to it after its 6 month journey is absurd.
Excuse me? Sandstorms? Mechanical failure? Meteorites? Corrosion? Remote navigation failure? Mid-course collision that would be recoverable if it were a manned mission? Come on, these are just the easy things.
It doesn't take up any size or weight, because it's a separate launch.
That's the point.
Why not just launch both at the same time?
Money, manufacturing limits, and op-tempo.
In fact, wouldn't it make more sense to just launch the required stuff 2 years beforehand so it's waiting for them when they arrive?
Because there's no way to assess its condition, nor is there any way for a human to take over if there is a problem on arrival. Landing a large apparatus on Mars is not like landing a rover. These failure modes are undesirable.
If, on the other hand, you're suggesting that we send the bulk of the habitats and equipment first and leave it in orbit, that's an option. But this two-year optimality interval you're laboring under is absurd. It is not worth the risk of 21-22 months of being unattended for the sake of a minor fuel savings.
There are periods of alignment, yes, and it is foolhardy to launch near the middle of the cycles. The difference of two months, however, for a large craft, is not tremendous. On a small exploration craft with a milk-jug-sized bottle of hydrazine, you get launch windows measured in weeks. On a manned mission, there's a great deal that's both more important and more significant in terms of time, money, and logistics.
Your computer can make as many copies into RAM as needed to run. If parts are paged out to disk or flash, that's ok too...
Also known as limitations in sections 107-122. What's your point?
No, the orginal EULA isn't worth the paper it's (not) printed on. The doctrine of first sale applies.
DFS does not have anything to do with the EULA. DFS allows you to resell the medium you own. It does not confer any rights in the work embodied in the medium. If you're not using the OS, the EULA doesn't apply because you're not using the OS, and nothing else.
I'd like to see any court case against a person that bought software at a retail store and didn't sign anything specific. (As long as the consumer has followed copyright law)
Any of them will do--none of the EULA cases involve any "specific signings". Kloth, Davidson v. Jung, Faulkner v. Nat. Geographic, Intl. Typeface v. Adobe, and hundreds more. No signature is necessary, and following copyright law and not the license agreement is mutually exclusive. If you have not accepted the terms under which the copyright holder has authorized the distribution of a copy, you have not received an authorized copy under copyright law.
Many times the EULA has two click boxes, titled accept and decline. That's the agent
No. An agent is a person.
You'd have to check individual state law to determine who in a company is authorized to sign contracts.
No, you'd have to check with the individual organization. State law does not control whom they designate as contracting agents. At best, it provides guidelines.
I'd like to see a test of this in a real court. Some of the EULAs are many pages long.
95% of consumer SLAs are four pages or less.
I don't worry about EULAs, as long as I'm within copyright law.
You can't be within copyright law if you ignore license terms. Obviously, you don't actually understand copyright law, so the statement is as comical as it is incorrect. The only parts of licenses you get to ignore are the independently unlawful provisions, which are well-defined, e.g., binding arbitration clauses, transferability restrictions (where an ongoing service is not involved), automatic assignment of exclusive rights.
Platform restrictions, format restrictions, number of license restrictions, prior ownership restrictions, warranty disclaimers, limitations of liability, forum selection, choice of law, and scope of license restrictions are all enforceable. I don't really know what you think you can be ignoring that falls outside of copyright law.
It's not stuff they'll need on arrival. It's stuff they will need in the future, plus the return vehicle they may need sooner rather than later. It's a recognition that a return vehicle with the initial crew prohibits outfitting the first mission with the supplies, equipment, and redundancy they need by taking up crucial space and weight.
That's not the issue. A two month change in the launch window would require a fuel premium, but at a far lower overall opportunity cost than waiting two years and hoping for the best or a half-assed initial mission.
Since most of the launch weight would be wasted with the return vehicle, and since all the essential supplies would have been launched earlier with the primary crew, the tradeoff is more than worthwhile, especially because it allows for a rescue mission within 90 days of landing should something go wrong after establishing the camp on the Martian surface. Any catastrophe immediately upon arrival is going to be non-recoverable (i.e., fatal), so let's look at optimizing for recoverable modes of failure. A second mission two months behind is roughly 8% off-optimum positioning--in other words, manageable, with acceptable fuel penalties.
Waiting until a problem occurs to begin launch preparations would result in an even bigger fuel premium, not to mention a horrific delay.
However, we already have maps of Mars. We have reasonably fast communication capability and data uplinks. People "on the ground" can relay useful information without sailing two months back to the motherland (not to mention the incredibly wasteful notions of either carrying return fuel, or carrying a fuel refinery, both of which occupy space and weight that could be better used to equip the first visitors properly for their trip.
Sending astronauts to Mars to stay permanently, without any experience of the efficacy of the technology, is inviting disaster.
Sending astronauts to Mars to stay temporarily, without any experience of the efficacy of the return vehicle, is inviting disaster.
Overcomplication in mission profiles and equipment is a greater problem. The first mission there should be a simple, straight-shot delivery vehicle, loaded up with habitats, tools, and backup equipment for a one-year camp on Mars.
The second mission, which should be launched two or three months, not years, later, could include a return vehicle with additional supplies and food. The problem at Jamestown was that they brought along insufficient resources of every kind. Dedicating half of the first mission to coming home again is the repeat you fear.
This comment is so boneheaded that's it's hard to know even where to begin. We'll just start at the beginning.
Most children can't enter contracts (licenses)
Licenses are not contracts. License agreements are contracts. Documents labeled with one or the other do not make them so. Most documents labeled "license" are usually license agreements containing a license, but that's another story.
Second, the presence of terms binding on the consumer are exactly that. The consumer is responsible for being in a position to take legal possession, with its attendant restrictions. Since the child has no standing to sue, the parent often assumes the role. It works both ways. When a neighborhood kid throws a baseball through your $10,000 handcrafted leaded-glass door, you can absolutely sue. When a child purchases a electronic device, the warranty disclaimer is valid, even though the child can't receive legal notice. Having your child commit copyright infringement is, like all other ventures, not a way out. As long as you get a guardian ad litem appointed, minors are not magically off-limits.
Third, violation of license terms is not solely a contractual issue, but copyright infringement, which is not affected by ability to enter into a contract. If anything, the lack of legal authority simply proves infringement, since the party in question never received lawful possession of the work. Too often people lose sight of the fact that a copyright holder has the exclusive right to make and to authorize reproductions and distributions of his work. That means selling copies of whatever portions of his work he chooses, under whatever terms he chooses, to whomever he chooses, subject only to the specific limitations of sections 107-122.
Once you buy a copyrighted work off the shelf, you are pretty much free to read it, use it, or burn it as you see fit.
This is a common, but uncommonly stupid, notion. Such a statement is an oversimplification regarding the purchase of a work to which no other terms are attached. No court has ever held that paying money is itself tantamount to owning a copy. The question you and so many others avoid is, "what did you buy?" If it's a book, a CD, or a software title with no additional terms, then you are correct. If it is a book, a CD, or a software title in the context of specific transaction terms, you are utterly incorrect.
The big scary ELUAs haven't been tested in court.
Sure they have. Wishful thinking and willful blindness doesn't change that. What you mean to say is that no license agreement model has been categorically rejected by any court. They've certainly been tested--hundreds of them. There are dozens that have been ruled unenforceable in part. None has been ruled categorically unenforceable. Ever.
If you are presented with a contract by a company, you can cross out sections of the contract that you can't live with. If the company's agent accepts that contract, they are bound by it.
No. If you are presented with an offer to contract, you can negotiate changes. An authorized officer may enter into such an agreement. If you are presented with a form contract, you can take it, leave it, or demand an individual negotiation. There is no "company agent" to give valid assent.
If you modify a EULA, and the program accepts it, is it still valid?
The original EULA is still valid. Your modifications are meaningless. This is the Twenty-first Century rendition of tearing out the copyright notices and covers of printed books.
Oh shove it. They're not disenfranchised. They're lazy.
There is no excuse. As you point out, we're talking about roughly 40% of the adult population--more than enough to make a difference.
It is a serious error to believe that a significant number of that 40% didn't vote out of protest for the system. Mostly (1) apathetic (2) non-citizens and (3) current and former felons. In that order.
Well, won't an official unlocking tool be a breach of their contract with AT&T?
No.
The agreement is between Apple and AT&T. In order to get an iPhone, you must sign a contract for two years of AT&T service. Once you fulfill that obligation (by completing it, or by terminating it with penalties), you can use the iPhone on any carrier that will accept you. The release of a tool to customers upon completion of the service term breaches no contract.
A not-official one would certainly not moot the case at all
Antitrust. The IBM-compatible mainframes were useless without MVS, and, given that the hardware was not infringing on any applicable patents or copyrights, IBM had no choice.
The same cannot be said of OS X and Macs, since Macs and Mac-compatible hardware can run a variety of operating systems, from Solaris to Windows to Ubuntu to OS X.
Full price does not imply unlocked. The status of its lock has no bearing on whether it functions as designed--especially since it was designed to be locked. It continues to function exactly as it did from day one. It was a functioning product then, and it continues to be indefinitely. The hyperbolic rhetoric does not generate sympathy.
I agree, from a social-normative perspective, that they should help. But from a legal perspective, they don't have to, and from a business perspective, it's a wash. As it's their product, they can follow whatever logic suits them.
Slashdot Mirror
Bernstein's work was never a source of legal confusion. The software wasn't license-free at all. It lacked a license agreement, but it did not lack a license. The fundamental error in the argument and in those "confused" is that a license is what constitutes a license. Bernstein's fundamental error is that modification is not a right possessed by copy owners under the statutory license. It is not possible to be in possession of software acquired lawfully and be without license. If the terms of a license agreement create a situation in which that person is outside the terms, then he is not in legal possession. If he has the software and no cause of action exists against him, then he has a license.
You, like the laity generally, conflate license and license agreement. They are not interchangeable, and they are not the same thing. A license is not a document, but simply a grant of rights and a scope in which to exercise them. Anything else, including any conditions for granting the license, restrictions on the use of rights granted (whether attribution, source contribution, SLA restrictions, or cross-grants) is not simply a license, but rather a license agreement.
In no case is there actually a problem. Bernstein declared his intent not to enforce the copyright; his own site to this day outlines what he considers acceptable use of his software. There was no cause of action, and his delivery of software conferred a license to use and to modify, per his conduct.
That's not the correct way to share: the law gives the author the ability to sue people who infringe on their copyright
Choosing not to enforce and lack of license are two separate matters. You can decline copyright by abandonment or by intentional ceding to the public domain. You can also reserve all the rights and just not use them against users, with or without an implicit or explicit license. You can further just lose the right to sue by inaction or by failure to register the works.
None of these is "incorrect" or "correct". They are all valid possibilities that may be implemented by the creator of a work.
and infringement is defined as lack of licence.
Lack of license is not the definition of copyright infringement, and one must be careful to understand what is an is not a license. A license agreement, whether proprietary or open source, is not coterminous with license (permission to use).
Therefore, if one shares their creations with no licence attached, they can at any time change their mind and sue. Users know this, and are afraid to use copyrightable works that carry no explicit licence.
Users do not refrain from using copyrighted works, regardless of the license. This is the problem. They've been spoiled by generosity in many cases and have come to expect what is, in fact, a courtesy. Then they bitch about someone taking away "their" "rights", which sometimes are not rights and not theirs to lose regardless of that. Then they point to abusers and greedy asshats like the RIAA to justify their lack of respect for the work and rights of others.
But directly to the point, sharing one's creation with no license attached is not possible. What may not be clear is the extent of the license granted in the sharing, but the statutory defaults come into play there, so it's quite easy to play it safe.
Is that even an enforceable law?
Well, it's not a law, so no.
As to whether it's relevant, absolutely it is. On its own, a writing style (much less a pedestrian, tortured one like Rowling's) is not eligible for copyright protection. However, no one has suggested that is the case--from either side. The relevance of the writing style speaks to the purpose and character of the allegedly infringing work, as well as to the amount and substantiality of the copying. These, as anyone actually involved or educated in the field would immediately know, are parts of the multifactor balancing test for fair use cases. The most important factor, and the deciding one in the case, is the market impact, coupled with the commercial nature of the endeavor.
The ruling follows a trend of erring on the side of the author's right to prepare or license such derivative works, and isn't at all suspect, given that the website was not enjoined and Rowling made a specific point of stopping the commercial profit in the publication of the book. The low damages further reflect the court's rather balanced view of the offending work. The submitter's "criticism" of the opinion is a fairly generic and less-than-insightful critique of the case-by-case analysis of fair use cases--but as Learned Hand wrote decades ago, that's the way it is and the way it should be.
If so most authors should have their books contested, as people learn partly through imitation and experience. Throwing weak points out like that makes me suspect of the ruling.
It's only a "weak point" if you don't know what you're reading.
The laws are made with copyright in mind, without contemplating the possibility of someone wanting to share freely.
Absolutely and utterly false. Anyone wanting to share freely simply chooses not to enforce their copyright. This system already exists. "Copyleft" is nothing more than a copyright license.
Plus I see no reason why anyone should be forced to write or attach a licence in their words in order to escape from the evils of copyright.
No one is forced. You're free to attach no license at all to your works and spread them into the wind.
I think governments should maintain two sets of laws: copyright for the control freaks, and copyleft for the sharers.
They already do. It's called copyright. You are not proposing a change, except for the statutory codification of some form of copyright license, which apart from being totally unnecessary also introduces the problem of which copyleft license to codify. Anything that's not the GPL will get a bunch of zealots whipped up into a furor, while choosing the GPL is not the best option for this group of "people who want to share". The conditionals and modal restrictions of the GPL make for complex legal enforcement and lack consistency in a rights-divesting sense.
Or should we consider copyleft the default law and only apply copyright to whatever has a Copyright (CR) 2008 notice?
No, because copyleft can't exist without copyright. Copyleft simply alters whether particular exclusive rights are reserved by default or licensed by default, and it can't function unless the right to exclude divests from the creator or assignee--if the rights to the work don't start with a copyright holder, no one has the authority to grant those rights. Likewise, if the creator doesn't start with those rights, there's no one with the rights to grant them.
You create a work. By the operation of all legal systems, you have full & complete control over that work--it's not published, and no one has the right to invade your property to acquire it without your permission. That is the fundamental right to privacy. When you choose to step beyond it, and offer a portion to the public, that is publication. You give up a portion of your rights, but again, that portion which you do not cede remains yours--it's not granted, it's reserved by you. That's copyright. "Copyleft" is just a term of convenience--just like IP--referring to a more permissive grant of those rights than is customary.
We could perhaps have three legal frameworks: copyright, copyleft, and permissive.
They already exist and are already recognized in our legal system. What improvement do you see as happening? What is your solution to the basic problem you end with:
there are many licences to choose from, with subtle but important differences, and for many of them if you make an initial choice it will be difficult to change the licence, especially for massive collaborative works with no copyright assignment.
Which license do you choose to be codified? An initial default makes it more difficult to change the license, because you have to specifically repudiate the statutory one. As it exists now, the statutory license can be repudiated for sharing simply with a statement: "I release this work to the public domain." If you don't like either of those options, you write your own license. Copyright allows for anything from zero control to nearly full control, subject to certain specific unwaivable limitations and a number of waivable ones. As for "massive collaborative works", who gets to enforce violations of the law? You need a rightsholder to have standing to sue.
I'm failing to see the basic need for or benefit of your solution, except that it simply replaces the copyright symbol with a copyleft symbol that stands for something. Well, there's already a symbol for that, and you can write whatever you want in your copyright notice. You can say "(c) 2008 John Smith. All rights reserved." or "(c) 2008 John Smith. (CL) John Smith, governed by GPLv2." Problem solved.
If we had a machine to duplicate food, would you still buy it to support the farmers?
If there were a machine to duplicate food, what would give you the right to take an apple from the farmer to duplicate in the first place? The farmer, having labored to produce the best apples, having invested a lot of time and money into producing a large crop, suddenly sells one 25-cent apple and then goes bankrupt? As they say in the production industry, the second shoe costs $10 to make. The first one cost $3 million.
"Infinite reproducibility" still requires finite producibility. There's nothing to reproduce if the first one never gets made.
As for whether the second one and the thousands after that are free, that's not a decision you get to make as a customer. Some people will offer their work either way; the ones that don't choose to don't lose that right because you can take it. It's not yours to take. If you want to control it, make it yourself.
What happened was ignorance, jealousy, and greed. Nothing else. It's pretty damn easy to break into a house, and at negligible cost. There's no difference; "He didn't lose anything" is crap. It's taking something that doesn't belong to you and that you have no right to take. It's petty and immoral, and you can rationalize it from here to Tuesday, but it will remain wrong. You don't get to decide that someone's good or service is profitable enough and take it for yourself without following the terms of their offer to sell. Period. If you don't like the price or the terms, you don't get what he's selling. Christ.
What you're describing is a nascent movie studio.
Once people have an investment, it's only a matter of time before profit begins to drive things, and consolidation reduces the number of shareholders to a manageable few, or alternatively explodes shareholders to the point of no longer having a non-financial interest--simply the equivalent of an IPO of the next Columbia Pictures or whoever.
You end up right back where you started. There's nothing wrong with community financing models, but it's not a viable solution for the entire industry. It's a variation on the existing theme.
When you get right down to it, what right exactly do you think you'd buy for your $10? Reproduction? Distribution to your friends? If the 5 million "shareholders" acquired that right, who would be left to pay to watch the film? There's little opportunity for profit there.
In the end, you buy a ticket to watch the film. This $10 ticket is your share in the venture, and it covers the expenses, from the capital and operating costs of the cinema to the production, distribution, and marketing costs for the film. What you gain for that investment is viewing access.
More generally, and not in response to the above, the media industry is the only one in which success and large profits are viewed as a bad thing by a jealous and greedy populace--as if most artists enjoy that kind of success and as if they should be forced to perform an at-cost service because people are capable of taking without paying. This isn't energy or healthcare, which are essential human services. This is entertainment and frivolity. Apart from "record oil profit" stories, there's no real outrage at corporations making money. But god forbid that someone who spent millions of dollars developing the video game you want should have the audacity to sell it on the terms and the price he chooses--that's unjust. If you want to regulate the conduct or cap profits, do it. But an arbitrary and ill-informed, ill-reasoned, ill-advised assault on a very old, very basic, and very global system is not the answer. Copyright isn't the problem. Copyright allows the creator to do what he pleases--from BSD and GPL licenses to utterly restricting transfers and sales. It's a system that works well, and its abuse is your run of the mill corporate asshattery, rewarded by your run of the mill fickle consumer and damaged by your typical greedy pirate. No amount of copyright reform or abolition will fix or compensate for those basic underlying factors.
Can you imagine what the world would be like if people simply took it upon themselves to decide when others had more than they "deserved" and just wantonly took what they considered the "excess", pointing and laughing at "laws" and "locks" and "doors"? Holy hell. What ever happened to the very simple "no thank you" when someone was selling something you felt gave you less than you wanted for more than you were willing to pay?
Because before the advent of recording and copyright, the rich musical culture was a result of people investing their time and labor in becoming musicians, and in learning and performing pieces. Since not everyone had the time or resources to become a musician, there was value in it, because the musician had something you couldn't do for yourself.
With recordings, anyone can enjoy the benefit of a musician at any time, with a minimal investment. The floor dropped out. If someone could wait at your job until you finished working on something that took months or even years, and could then instantly reproduce it before you'd had an opportunity to be compensated, I doubt you would accept it and move on.
This "we existed before copyright" nonsense doesn't prove anything. If recording had existed from the beginning, some form of copyright would have, too. The truth is that people only do what they love if they can afford to do so, and copyright is a big reason why people can afford to make music and can afford to listen to such an immense variety of music.
What you're missing is that this only happens where an existing project is sufficiently developed to provide a meaningful head start, and where the project squarely meets the need of the company.
If the project is similar, but not similar enough, requiring significant time and money to adapt, or if the project is too immature, such that the time of getting developers and staff up to speed on it is not worth just hiring a set of new developers to create a project, then the OSS project will not be selected.
in reality the situation will probably never really comeup where suddenly no company is behind the big OSS projects anymore...
Yes, that's exactly the parent's point--it relies on either charity or self-interest of a profitable, proprietary company to foster the growth of enterprise OSS projects, which makes it a dependent development model.
Wait. Are you referring to delivery of channels at all to non-subscribers, or delivery of local channels to cable subscribers?
If it is the former, I apologize.
Which has nothing to do with either the AC you responded to, nor does it have anything to do with your post, which said that cable TV providers don't have to provide local channels.
You are incorrect. Move on with your life.
Wrong. Cable providers are subject to a "must carry" rule. The FCC mandates that providers must provide local channels to their subscribers via the CATV connection. The cable companies eventually sued, probably hoping to compress the hell out of them to save bandwidth, and they lost. That's why your local channels in HD are substantially higher quality in terms of bitrate than Comcast's shiteous triple-packed HD channels.
The rule is part of 47 CFR 76--but I can't recall the exact citation.
That's tantamount to not voting. In most states, the write-in slot must be filled with the name of an actual person, and in order to win, that person must file with the Secretary of State. Without this step, it is equivalent to leaving the ballot blank, and it has zero mathematical impact on the election; it is exactly as if you cast no vote.
I don't mean it in the "a single vote changes nothing" sense. I mean it in the "your ballot is invalid" sense. This is the case in California, Texas, and New York, to name the big ones. It's never a waste to vote for a candidate other than the big two, but it is a waste to vote for a candidate who is not a candidate.
Ha. That would do it.
None of these make any sense. Two months will make no difference to any of them!
Are you serious? Two months makes a major difference. You think it's a coincidence that there have never been simultaneous shuttle missions?
Nor will there if it's sent 2 months later. What, if a parachute fails you think they're going to catch it?
You're just completely lost now. The difference there is between manned and unmanned, not the timing.
No, the idea that anything is going to suddenly happen to it after its 6 month journey is absurd.
Excuse me? Sandstorms? Mechanical failure? Meteorites? Corrosion? Remote navigation failure? Mid-course collision that would be recoverable if it were a manned mission? Come on, these are just the easy things.
It doesn't take up any size or weight, because it's a separate launch.
That's the point.
Why not just launch both at the same time?
Money, manufacturing limits, and op-tempo.
In fact, wouldn't it make more sense to just launch the required stuff 2 years beforehand so it's waiting for them when they arrive?
Because there's no way to assess its condition, nor is there any way for a human to take over if there is a problem on arrival. Landing a large apparatus on Mars is not like landing a rover. These failure modes are undesirable.
If, on the other hand, you're suggesting that we send the bulk of the habitats and equipment first and leave it in orbit, that's an option. But this two-year optimality interval you're laboring under is absurd. It is not worth the risk of 21-22 months of being unattended for the sake of a minor fuel savings.
There are periods of alignment, yes, and it is foolhardy to launch near the middle of the cycles. The difference of two months, however, for a large craft, is not tremendous. On a small exploration craft with a milk-jug-sized bottle of hydrazine, you get launch windows measured in weeks. On a manned mission, there's a great deal that's both more important and more significant in terms of time, money, and logistics.
Your computer can make as many copies into RAM as needed to run. If parts are paged out to disk or flash, that's ok too...
Also known as limitations in sections 107-122. What's your point?
No, the orginal EULA isn't worth the paper it's (not) printed on. The doctrine of first sale applies.
DFS does not have anything to do with the EULA. DFS allows you to resell the medium you own. It does not confer any rights in the work embodied in the medium. If you're not using the OS, the EULA doesn't apply because you're not using the OS, and nothing else.
I'd like to see any court case against a person that bought software at a retail store and didn't sign anything specific. (As long as the consumer has followed copyright law)
Any of them will do--none of the EULA cases involve any "specific signings". Kloth, Davidson v. Jung, Faulkner v. Nat. Geographic, Intl. Typeface v. Adobe, and hundreds more. No signature is necessary, and following copyright law and not the license agreement is mutually exclusive. If you have not accepted the terms under which the copyright holder has authorized the distribution of a copy, you have not received an authorized copy under copyright law.
Many times the EULA has two click boxes, titled accept and decline. That's the agent
No. An agent is a person.
You'd have to check individual state law to determine who in a company is authorized to sign contracts.
No, you'd have to check with the individual organization. State law does not control whom they designate as contracting agents. At best, it provides guidelines.
I'd like to see a test of this in a real court. Some of the EULAs are many pages long.
95% of consumer SLAs are four pages or less.
I don't worry about EULAs, as long as I'm within copyright law.
You can't be within copyright law if you ignore license terms. Obviously, you don't actually understand copyright law, so the statement is as comical as it is incorrect. The only parts of licenses you get to ignore are the independently unlawful provisions, which are well-defined, e.g., binding arbitration clauses, transferability restrictions (where an ongoing service is not involved), automatic assignment of exclusive rights.
Platform restrictions, format restrictions, number of license restrictions, prior ownership restrictions, warranty disclaimers, limitations of liability, forum selection, choice of law, and scope of license restrictions are all enforceable. I don't really know what you think you can be ignoring that falls outside of copyright law.
It's not stuff they'll need on arrival. It's stuff they will need in the future, plus the return vehicle they may need sooner rather than later. It's a recognition that a return vehicle with the initial crew prohibits outfitting the first mission with the supplies, equipment, and redundancy they need by taking up crucial space and weight.
That's not the issue. A two month change in the launch window would require a fuel premium, but at a far lower overall opportunity cost than waiting two years and hoping for the best or a half-assed initial mission.
Since most of the launch weight would be wasted with the return vehicle, and since all the essential supplies would have been launched earlier with the primary crew, the tradeoff is more than worthwhile, especially because it allows for a rescue mission within 90 days of landing should something go wrong after establishing the camp on the Martian surface. Any catastrophe immediately upon arrival is going to be non-recoverable (i.e., fatal), so let's look at optimizing for recoverable modes of failure. A second mission two months behind is roughly 8% off-optimum positioning--in other words, manageable, with acceptable fuel penalties.
Waiting until a problem occurs to begin launch preparations would result in an even bigger fuel premium, not to mention a horrific delay.
And if this were 1606, I'd agree.
However, we already have maps of Mars. We have reasonably fast communication capability and data uplinks. People "on the ground" can relay useful information without sailing two months back to the motherland (not to mention the incredibly wasteful notions of either carrying return fuel, or carrying a fuel refinery, both of which occupy space and weight that could be better used to equip the first visitors properly for their trip.
Sending astronauts to Mars to stay permanently, without any experience of the efficacy of the technology, is inviting disaster.
Sending astronauts to Mars to stay temporarily, without any experience of the efficacy of the return vehicle, is inviting disaster.
Overcomplication in mission profiles and equipment is a greater problem. The first mission there should be a simple, straight-shot delivery vehicle, loaded up with habitats, tools, and backup equipment for a one-year camp on Mars.
The second mission, which should be launched two or three months, not years, later, could include a return vehicle with additional supplies and food. The problem at Jamestown was that they brought along insufficient resources of every kind. Dedicating half of the first mission to coming home again is the repeat you fear.
This comment is so boneheaded that's it's hard to know even where to begin. We'll just start at the beginning.
Most children can't enter contracts (licenses)
Licenses are not contracts. License agreements are contracts. Documents labeled with one or the other do not make them so. Most documents labeled "license" are usually license agreements containing a license, but that's another story.
Second, the presence of terms binding on the consumer are exactly that. The consumer is responsible for being in a position to take legal possession, with its attendant restrictions. Since the child has no standing to sue, the parent often assumes the role. It works both ways. When a neighborhood kid throws a baseball through your $10,000 handcrafted leaded-glass door, you can absolutely sue. When a child purchases a electronic device, the warranty disclaimer is valid, even though the child can't receive legal notice. Having your child commit copyright infringement is, like all other ventures, not a way out. As long as you get a guardian ad litem appointed, minors are not magically off-limits.
Third, violation of license terms is not solely a contractual issue, but copyright infringement, which is not affected by ability to enter into a contract. If anything, the lack of legal authority simply proves infringement, since the party in question never received lawful possession of the work. Too often people lose sight of the fact that a copyright holder has the exclusive right to make and to authorize reproductions and distributions of his work. That means selling copies of whatever portions of his work he chooses, under whatever terms he chooses, to whomever he chooses, subject only to the specific limitations of sections 107-122.
Once you buy a copyrighted work off the shelf, you are pretty much free to read it, use it, or burn it as you see fit.
This is a common, but uncommonly stupid, notion. Such a statement is an oversimplification regarding the purchase of a work to which no other terms are attached. No court has ever held that paying money is itself tantamount to owning a copy. The question you and so many others avoid is, "what did you buy?" If it's a book, a CD, or a software title with no additional terms, then you are correct. If it is a book, a CD, or a software title in the context of specific transaction terms, you are utterly incorrect.
The big scary ELUAs haven't been tested in court.
Sure they have. Wishful thinking and willful blindness doesn't change that. What you mean to say is that no license agreement model has been categorically rejected by any court. They've certainly been tested--hundreds of them. There are dozens that have been ruled unenforceable in part. None has been ruled categorically unenforceable. Ever.
If you are presented with a contract by a company, you can cross out sections of the contract that you can't live with. If the company's agent accepts that contract, they are bound by it.
No. If you are presented with an offer to contract, you can negotiate changes. An authorized officer may enter into such an agreement. If you are presented with a form contract, you can take it, leave it, or demand an individual negotiation. There is no "company agent" to give valid assent.
If you modify a EULA, and the program accepts it, is it still valid?
The original EULA is still valid. Your modifications are meaningless. This is the Twenty-first Century rendition of tearing out the copyright notices and covers of printed books.
Oh shove it. They're not disenfranchised. They're lazy.
There is no excuse. As you point out, we're talking about roughly 40% of the adult population--more than enough to make a difference.
It is a serious error to believe that a significant number of that 40% didn't vote out of protest for the system. Mostly (1) apathetic (2) non-citizens and (3) current and former felons. In that order.
What consumer protection law poses a problem?
The device is not non-functional with a lock. A Verizon phone is functional, and it works only on Verizon.
Well, won't an official unlocking tool be a breach of their contract with AT&T?
No.
The agreement is between Apple and AT&T. In order to get an iPhone, you must sign a contract for two years of AT&T service. Once you fulfill that obligation (by completing it, or by terminating it with penalties), you can use the iPhone on any carrier that will accept you. The release of a tool to customers upon completion of the service term breaches no contract.
A not-official one would certainly not moot the case at all
And?
What about IBM and Amdahl?
Antitrust. The IBM-compatible mainframes were useless without MVS, and, given that the hardware was not infringing on any applicable patents or copyrights, IBM had no choice.
The same cannot be said of OS X and Macs, since Macs and Mac-compatible hardware can run a variety of operating systems, from Solaris to Windows to Ubuntu to OS X.
Full price does not imply unlocked. The status of its lock has no bearing on whether it functions as designed--especially since it was designed to be locked. It continues to function exactly as it did from day one. It was a functioning product then, and it continues to be indefinitely. The hyperbolic rhetoric does not generate sympathy.
I agree, from a social-normative perspective, that they should help. But from a legal perspective, they don't have to, and from a business perspective, it's a wash. As it's their product, they can follow whatever logic suits them.