Okay, let us discuss if the database is copyrightable in the USA, Australia, Canada and the European Union for the hell of it.
First of all, USA. Oh boy, this will be the most controversial passage. It seems that there's a strange consensus that the Feist Publications Inc. vs. Rural Telephone Service Co Inc. case automagically means that freedb is not copyrightable in the US. I argue it _is_ due to several factors, such as originality and innovativity in the way data is organized and extras people have entered which constitute original, creative work. Freedb is different from Rural's phone directory in that the way the data is organized is not dead obvious and it contains information that is easily argued to be original and creative. Both of these are different from the main points of the US Supreme Court ruling Rural's database noncopyrightable. Stripping all of the creative work and abandoning all of the current organization of the data may or may not be an option to free oneself from the obligations of the license - you'd probably have to be sued to find this out conclusively. I agree that the discid may be a redundant notion in well-organized real databases, but it was an innovative solution back when the original author of xmcd had to come up with a sensible way to organize the data in a flat database so that it would be easy and fast to find entries matching the discs in the user's CD drive without scanning through the whole database (with time the sensibility of the design turned out to be questionable for what the database ended up being used for, but that's beside the point). Thus I consider the notion of a discid definitely innovative, creative and original.
Unlike in the US, in Australia, Telstra's database was ruled copyrightable alone by the hard work required to construct it without even having to consider the creativity and innovativity aspect further. The case went to Full Court of the Federal Court which ruled unanimously for the copyrightability by stating that the datasebase has originality by virtue of Telstra obtaining and listing the data. The special leave to appeal the Full Court of the Federal Court decision was denied. This was a polar opposite of the US decision and should make it quite difficult to argue that an Australian would be allowed to turn the freedb database into Public Domain as it not only contains facts laborfully gathered and made available by the community (which appears to be sufficient for copyrightability) but also an amount of creative and innovative work.
Canada appears to be somewhere in the middle (CCH Canadian Limited vs. The Law Society of Upper Canada). I haven't read up on it enough to make even a semi-informed opinion. However, I don't think things are as clear as topham seems to make them to be. I will read the relevant documents in detail tomorrow.
AFAIK the Europan Union Database Directive should make it difficult to argue that freedb is not copyrightable in the European Union. This is as much as I'll say about it, as I have not read up on its details too much yet. The relevant directive and law implementations are publicly available for everyone to read, so I'd appreciate if someone could shed some light on EU's side of things.
I would argue that making the freedb database PD even in the Western countries will be a hassle at the very least and may be considered copyright infringement in some legislations. In any case, I would advise against it due to the effect on one's reputation it could have: releasing the database into public domain would likely be followed by companies making proprietary versions of it, which a lot of people would not like. I find the GPL, while awkward in the context of a database, something that protects the freedb database from corporate interests. If it absolutely must be relicensed (assuming it were allowed), then something else than PD should be used IMO.
Depends on what you mean by reliability. The driver shouldn't cause corruptions even when writing, but refuses to create or delete files as that functionality is still unimplemented in the mainline (a fully-functional kernel driver is supposed to be released summer 2007).
She was reported to blink her eyes, track moving objects with her eyes and have a sleep rhythm. Those may not be signs of higher brain function, but they are brain activity nonetheless. Even so, there was no hope of recovery to normal due to the extent of the damage.
Actually, without brain activity she would not have been able to breathe on her own, which she did. She would have been braindead and thus dead (depending on legislation), which she was not.
Being brain dead is considered being dead because one is 1) In a state where there is absolutely no electrical activity in the brain 2) There is no blood circulation in the brain, preventing any hope of recovery - the brain is actually in a state of decay. If you are brain dead, you will never wake up - you're gone for good.
It is important to realize that both 1) and 2) are required and in most legislations these have to be confirmed by at least two doctors and a brain scan - and even this is an oversimplification of the procedure needed. People tend to mix up vegetative state and the state of being brain dead. The latter is absolutely irreversible as _all_ hope is gone - the brain has no activity or blood circulation whatsoever and is decaying - while the former state might be reversible as there is some brain activity. In any case and most importantly, the former means that the patient is not dead.
1) Ari and Joerg support some australian guy developing the "next-gen" freedb for two years
Accurate, though I must point out that the support was not financial (as some have concluded) rather than providing information and database updates directly to him, keeping him company on IRC, things like that. He also helped us with the power of his improved backend. One could say it was mutual technical support.
2) Australian guy doesn't want to release it as open/free for freedb (or all three?)
Only time will tell whether he will release it under a free license. That was what we hoped for, anyway.
3) Ari and Joerg have either been suckers or part of an attempt at pulling another Gracenote
We definitely did not try pulling another Gracenote, that's for sure. Not keeping the project completely free (as in beer and as in speech) and replicable (that is, anyone can get the database and all the software needed to run a server) would have been pointless and not living up to the name and purpose of the service.
4) Kaiser won't play ball, it's freedb or no db at all. He finally tires and goes to the source.
Yes, he eventually forcibly asked the developer to release the source to him immediately. For some reason or another he wouldn't do that yet. The argument caused a deadlock which me and Jörg tried to solve unsuccessfully.
5) The play is called, Ari and Joerg leave because the gig is up.
I don't know if that would characterize it correctly. I'd rather say that because of the way things developed - and, in retrospect, the way people seemed to misunderstand each other - mutual trust between everyone eroded.
Only time will tell whether we were gullible to work with the developer of the next-generation server software or not.
Re:Get what you paid for?
on
Freedb.org Ending
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It seems like there were three people on the project, and two of them wanted to take it non-free, one didn't
This is not true. He may have misunderstood us despite our repeated assertions that we have no intention of endangering freedb's freeness. We simply wanted to get things worked out so that all the requirements for freeness and other issues would be fulfilled so that everyone would be happy. He did something unexpected and unilateral while there was an effort to fix things which made us feel he didn't feel like discussing his actions with everyone anymore. This combined with all of the difficulties and the situation being effectively deadlocked eventually led into the decision of both of us leaving.
Now having slept on it, I am not sure about whether it was right for me to feel that I couldn't continue with the person left. It is strange how one finds oneself blaming oneself over hastiness even though the decision took three days to make when faced with the need to make one. I'll see how things turn out. Things may or may not get well again.
In any case, see this. It may help clear things out a little bit as it contains input from everyone involved. Also, the full front page of freedb.org contains some of our reasoning. The person left removed our response to his allegation that we wanted to make the project less free giving a somewhat distorted image of us to the general public, which has prompted me to make this response to make sure that misinformation doesn't turn into something everyone regards as the undisputed truth.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL, but I am always right nevertheless. ;)
Okay, let us discuss if the database is copyrightable in the USA, Australia, Canada and the European Union for the hell of it.
First of all, USA. Oh boy, this will be the most controversial passage. It seems that there's a strange consensus that the Feist Publications Inc. vs. Rural Telephone Service Co Inc. case automagically means that freedb is not copyrightable in the US. I argue it _is_ due to several factors, such as originality and innovativity in the way data is organized and extras people have entered which constitute original, creative work. Freedb is different from Rural's phone directory in that the way the data is organized is not dead obvious and it contains information that is easily argued to be original and creative. Both of these are different from the main points of the US Supreme Court ruling Rural's database noncopyrightable.
Stripping all of the creative work and abandoning all of the current organization of the data may or may not be an option to free oneself from the obligations of the license - you'd probably have to be sued to find this out conclusively. I agree that the discid may be a redundant notion in well-organized real databases, but it was an innovative solution back when the original author of xmcd had to come up with a sensible way to organize the data in a flat database so that it would be easy and fast to find entries matching the discs in the user's CD drive without scanning through the whole database (with time the sensibility of the design turned out to be questionable for what the database ended up being used for, but that's beside the point). Thus I consider the notion of a discid definitely innovative, creative and original.
Unlike in the US, in Australia, Telstra's database was ruled copyrightable alone by the hard work required to construct it without even having to consider the creativity and innovativity aspect further. The case went to Full Court of the Federal Court which ruled unanimously for the copyrightability by stating that the datasebase has originality by virtue of Telstra obtaining and listing the data. The special leave to appeal the Full Court of the Federal Court decision was denied. This was a polar opposite of the US decision and should make it quite difficult to argue that an Australian would be allowed to turn the freedb database into Public Domain as it not only contains facts laborfully gathered and made available by the community (which appears to be sufficient for copyrightability) but also an amount of creative and innovative work.
Canada appears to be somewhere in the middle (CCH Canadian Limited vs. The Law Society of Upper Canada). I haven't read up on it enough to make even a semi-informed opinion. However, I don't think things are as clear as topham seems to make them to be. I will read the relevant documents in detail tomorrow.
AFAIK the Europan Union Database Directive should make it difficult to argue that freedb is not copyrightable in the European Union. This is as much as I'll say about it, as I have not read up on its details too much yet. The relevant directive and law implementations are publicly available for everyone to read, so I'd appreciate if someone could shed some light on EU's side of things.
I would argue that making the freedb database PD even in the Western countries will be a hassle at the very least and may be considered copyright infringement in some legislations. In any case, I would advise against it due to the effect on one's reputation it could have: releasing the database into public domain would likely be followed by companies making proprietary versions of it, which a lot of people would not like. I find the GPL, while awkward in the context of a database, something that protects the freedb database from corporate interests. If it absolutely must be relicensed (assuming it were allowed), then something else than PD should be used IMO.
Depends on what you mean by reliability. The driver shouldn't cause corruptions even when writing, but refuses to create or delete files as that functionality is still unimplemented in the mainline (a fully-functional kernel driver is supposed to be released summer 2007).
She was reported to blink her eyes, track moving objects with her eyes and have a sleep rhythm. Those may not be signs of higher brain function, but they are brain activity nonetheless. Even so, there was no hope of recovery to normal due to the extent of the damage.
Actually, without brain activity she would not have been able to breathe on her own, which she did. She would have been braindead and thus dead (depending on legislation), which she was not.
Being brain dead is considered being dead because one is 1) In a state where there is absolutely no electrical activity in the brain 2) There is no blood circulation in the brain, preventing any hope of recovery - the brain is actually in a state of decay. If you are brain dead, you will never wake up - you're gone for good.
It is important to realize that both 1) and 2) are required and in most legislations these have to be confirmed by at least two doctors and a brain scan - and even this is an oversimplification of the procedure needed. People tend to mix up vegetative state and the state of being brain dead. The latter is absolutely irreversible as _all_ hope is gone - the brain has no activity or blood circulation whatsoever and is decaying - while the former state might be reversible as there is some brain activity. In any case and most importantly, the former means that the patient is not dead.
Only time will tell whether we were gullible to work with the developer of the next-generation server software or not.