But it is not. You see, Firefox is Free Software distributed under a license (a triple license, actually, consisting of the MPL, the GPL, and the LGPL) that allows people to sell copies of Firefox to anyone who will buy them, at whatever price they will buy them at. The copyleft philosophy is in no way anti-business.
So no harm, no foul, right? I mean, this should be a happy day for the officer, given that she no longer has to pursue any investigation of any sort against those people she saw selling Firefox.
Well, not so much:
Read that last sentence again. Read it until the Stupid it contains is allowed to sink in. Apparently, Free Software is making it hard for police in the UK to pursue their goal of stopping the piracy of proprietary software. The very existence of software that can be given away or sold by anyone to anyone is complicating the issue of educating businesses about the evils of copyright violation.
You are aware, Derleth, that in the UK the legal principle is “guilty until proven innocent?” (At least AIUI. UK Dopers feel free to knock me about with a clue-by-four if I’m mistaken about that.)
While there are a lot of similarities between US and UK law, and they are both based upon English Common Law - there are some very profound differences, too.
It doesn’t change the overall level of stupidity reported in the article, but it is one point to consider.
I didn’t make the ‘guilty until proven innocent’ comment, he did. The guy I quoted.
And I don’t think he intended the comment in the way you think he did. The way I read it, he’s saying that under the old régime, the fact that you had shared software with someone else was sufficient evidence that you were both guilty of software piracy. Under the new régime, some software may be legally shared, so the mere act of sharing can no longer be considered a crime.
in summary - life was pretty simple for the lads and ladies investigated software copyright crimes in the uk…until someone pointed out to them that there were actually many programs and ‘copyable’ software for which it was perfectly legal to sell and distribute.
They probably already knew all this given the subject had already been raised a few years earlier with music rights, but no doubt they still managed to screw up the occasional prosecution for adding such a program into a list of someones proposed crimes.
anyhow, Darleth is right, the writer of the aritcle is misusing ‘guilty until proven innocent’, he/she actually means ‘copying any software no matter what it is is considered a crime’
While I realize that this is not quite the same, I’d say it’s indicative of just how effective the trampling of “fair use” has been thus far. If the people whose job it is to deal with this every day can’t seem to grasp it, what about the average Joe?
Open source is so deliciously…effectual at using copyright against itself. Genius!
Exactly. Which is why I get so touchy whenever someone tries to overextend copyright protection in my presence. People need to understand that copyright is limited under the law, and that not everything people do with books, music, and so on is illegal or legally questionable.
Stallman is the genius here. He formulated the first license (the GPL) to use copyright against itself in a clever fashion. (Free Software existed before Stallman, but, one, it wasn’t called that and, two, it relied largely on the much simpler (and more permissive) BSD licenses, if it had an explicit license at all.)
I fail to see the issue when one civil servant in a outlying city doesn’t happen to know the law correctly. (Wow! News Flash! Bureaucrats sometimes don’t know the law they are supposed to enforce. Never heard that one before. :rolleyes:
Of course you can sell things that people can get for free. How about bottled water? In some cases, that just the city water supply of the bottler. They sell it. People remark on it, but no one arrests them.
You can also go in the ocean and catch your own fish. That doesn’t make fish markets illegal.
The entire issue has nothing to do with copyright issues; it’s just someone who doesn’t understand the law or computers.
Free software does nothing to disrupt the enforcement of copyright. Nothing about it changes anything. Firefox uses copyright in order to prevent someone from taking their code, tweaking it, and calling it their own, but that’s about all that GPL does. It’s actually a way to keep the software in the public domain. Clever, but nothing really new.
Yes, yes, yes, little roll-eyes boy. That’s all well and good. Except for three things: (1) the civil servant wasn’t a sewer cleaner or crossing guard, she was part of the Trading Standards department, (2) she was “incredulous” that they would allow others to sell their product, and (3) she believes that " it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation".
Yes, that’s exactly the genius of it. It does nothing to disrupt the enforcment of copyright – except correct the currently skewed view of copyrights perpetuated by various copyright holders. Furthermore, it does so by using the law against itself (in a sense); if open source is “viral”, “communist”, and “bad for business”, then the fault lies with copyright law, not open source.
No, it does slightly more than that. One cannot, by law, use Firefox code without opening one’s own code. It reverts the notion of “software” back to what, IMO, it should be: a pool of available tools and techniques available, freely, to everyone – not only to learn from, but to leverage for everyone’s benefit.
A wonderfully noble gesture that I am proud to support.
Opening the code of a derived work is required only for parties that distribute the GPLed product. Many, many organizations happily and legally modify GPL code for their own internal use.
RealityChuck, you are wrong in almost all of your statements.
[ul]
[li]She needs to know her job if she’s going to do it. This isn’t a minor point tangential to her purpose in the Civil Service, this is something central to her entire reason for employment and something she cannot do her job correctly without knowing.[/li][li]The comparison to bottled water is inapt. Nobody has ever created entire organizations to prevent people from illegally sharing water, and nobody’s job depends on their knowing what water is okay to share and what water is not.[/li][li]Same with the comparison to fish.[/li][li]Free Software does change things because it introduces a new legal classification of software that did not exist prior to 1984, and did not exist in widely-known software prior to about 1998. People familiar with the old freeware/shareware/payware régime have had problems adapting to the existence of Linux and Firefox and similar Free Software.[/li][li]Public domain, at least under US law where the GPL was invented, means a specific work has no owner. The GPL has nothing whatsoever to do with the public domain, as even a cursory understanding of the issues involved would indicate.[/li][li]The GPL is indeed new in the way it keeps proprietary concerns from appropriating Open Source code for use in proprietary software. It does this, as friedo said, without requiring people who merely modify local versions which are never redistributed to submit their code to anyone else.[/li]
Prior to the GPL, the most widely-used Open Source license was some variant on the BSD license, which provides no protection whatsoever against a company using code under that license in a proprietary product. Individual developers will donate code to a BSD-licensed project, but it’s hard to get companies to sign on the way they have for Linux development. (Or, more precisely, it’s hard to get companies to sign on without them taking the project proprietary and screwing the original developers.)
The GPL is probably the largest single thing that makes Free Software so attractive to business. Without it, it would either amount to unpaid R&D or just another ignored fringe movement.
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