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A Beijing trip reportA Beijing trip reportPosted Feb 29, 2008 1:48 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)Parent article: A Beijing trip report
...their little habit of copying proprietary software without much regard for details like license agreements. There are no license agreements here to regard. What they have little regard for is copyright.
One topic which never came up [wrt free software] ... was license compliance. Again, there is no license with which to comply. The issue is respecting copyright -- i.e. getting a license in the first place. A copyright license doesn't order anyone to do anything, so you can't not comply with one. The only thing you could say is that unless you comply with the conditions of a license, you don't have it.
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A Beijing trip report Posted Feb 29, 2008 6:16 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] The USA did not recognize foreign copyrights or patents until 1891. As Lawrence Lessig points out, we were a pirate nation when it paid, only deciding to change our ways when it became profitable to do so.Charles Dickens was the most-read author in America in his day. American publishers never paid him a dime. Compared to American behavior, the Chinese are quite respectable of American copyrights, because they sometimes pay, and sometimes beats never.
Copyrights in China Posted Feb 29, 2008 17:19 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] Yes, any suggestion that Chinese people should respect copyright on Windows and Linux because it's the moral thing to do is just wrong. Copyright isn't a basic human right, it's just business.Any serious discussion about this Chinese copyright problem is based on getting Chinese people to do what's in China's interest. For example, the USA may be willing to offer import access to China in exchange for working copyrights. Incidentally, though I'm really fuzzy on this, I believe the Chinese government has already technically accorded the respect of copyrights the other countries asked for and the problem today is just Chinese people breaking Chinese law and getting away with it.
A Beijing trip report Posted Mar 1, 2008 11:22 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] I think our editor is worried basically about GPL license compliance. You don't have to do anything special to get the license -- it is embedded in the software, but you have to comply with it in order to lawfully take advantage of it.The proprietary equivalent would be when you buy one copy of Windows and then install it 1000 times. You are violating the terms of the license agreement that comes with the software. Of course, you are also disregarding copyright.
license compliance Posted Mar 1, 2008 19:01 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] My point is there is no such thing as "license compliance." A license isn't an order, it's permission. It doesn't make sense to say "comply with a license." What you can say is "comply with the conditions of the license," but even then it's a stretch of the word. "Meet the conditions" is more accurate. The license that comes with GPL software is a license to copy in certain ways. The issue is people copying in other ways. GPL is totally irrelevant to that copying. I think one way to word what our editor is saying is that there is a problem with people doing things that would be permitted by GPL, except for the fact that they aren't meeting its conditions. But really, a better way to describe that behavior is simply to say they're copying the code without permission.
The proprietary equivalent would be when you buy one copy of Windows and then install it 1000 times. You are violating the terms of the license agreement that comes with the software. When you make those 999 copies, the only thing you're violating is Microsoft's copyright, because Microsoft didn't give you a license to make those copies. MS did give you a license to make a copy on one machine's disk, and a backup copy, and maybe a few other kinds of copies, but that's irrelevant to those 999 copies.
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