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Relicensing and rebasing LibreOfficeRelicensing and rebasing LibreOfficePosted May 29, 2012 5:41 UTC (Tue) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093)Parent article: Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice
This raises an interesting philosophical conundrum. If two pages of code are *identical*, but they have different provenances, can one simply move the license around without having to regenerate the code?
Does libreoffice actually have to delete text and type it all back in again in order for the license change to take effect?
Consider: if two people (A, B) both buy the same CD of a piece of music, then it's legal for A and B to each independently rip the CD to their own PC. It is apparently not legal for A to rip the file, and give B that copy, even though the end result is identical!
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Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice Posted May 29, 2012 6:54 UTC (Tue) by Seegras (subscriber, #20463) [Link]
That does not apply.
While it might be illegal for A to give B the file (which is highly disputeable, since A does not "publish" it, it gives it only to B), it's absolutely legal for B to get the file from A -- It does not even matter from where A got the file from.
Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice Posted Jun 2, 2012 0:25 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] While it might be illegal for A to give B the file (which is highly disputeable, since A does not "publish" it, it gives it only to B), it's absolutely legal for B to get the file from A -- It does not even matter from where A got the file from. Is the distinction you're making whether A is guilty of a crime or B is guilty of a crime? Because a crime does occur (as well as a civil injury) in both cases, assuming in the latter case B permits A to get the file, as in by putting it up on an FTP site. You don't have to publish something to violate copyright. You violate copyright when you make a single copy -- unless it's for fair use, like backup. None of the fair uses involve giving the copy to someone else.
Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice Posted Jun 2, 2012 0:43 UTC (Sat) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
> None of the fair uses involve giving the copy to someone else.
Some do. Parody and educational use, to give two examples.
Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice Posted Jun 2, 2012 1:34 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] Some do. Parody and educational use, to give two examples. I stand corrected.
Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice Posted Jun 2, 2012 1:05 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
If it is legal for the final recipient to have the bits, does it really matter the exact method that that user got the bits?
I know that the big media companies want to make it so, but they are not always getting their way.
An example of this is the comcast remote DVR.
It's clearly legal for a person to have a DVR in their house and time-shift or space-shift programs. Comcast introduces a 'cloud' DVR where the bits are not stored on hard drives in the house, but instead on hard drives in a Comcast datacenter. networks sued to block this and Comcast won.
There are other cases that sound somewhat similar where the networks have won, so it's not a slam dunk, but there's enough sanity here to say that the big media companies are not getting their way.
Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice Posted Jun 2, 2012 1:55 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] If it is legal for the final recipient to have the bits, does it really matter the exact method that that user got the bits? If you mean legally, than it pretty clearly does matter. It matters mainly because copyright law is based on traditional hardware copying, and legislators have been slow to adapt it to the complex world of software. This causes some crazy results, but a) courts are bound by law even if it's crazy; and b) it's hard to come up with laws that avoid the crazy outcomes without also avoiding the intended ones. It's a complicated area. I read about a company that runs a building with hundreds of little antennas in it, providing a separate feed of TV broadcasts to each of its customers. This was because some smart lawyers determined that would be legal where simply splitting the signal from one antenna would be a copyright violation. I also read about a service where customers make fair use copies of their music CDs and transmit the data to a company which stores the data for backup and other fair uses. I suppose the company kept a thousand identical copies of the same album because smart lawyers determined that was legal where having one shared copy isn't. And I wonder if it makes a difference if they store them in a modern compressing storage system that stores those thousand copies with pointers to the same area on a disk platter. But you don't have to get that weird to see copyright law doing the wrong thing in an individual case. Just look at the simple case of a teenager copying a music album that he absolutely would not have bought himself. Nothing really wrong with that, but clearly illegal. Worse: a company spends $20K independently developing some code that someone else already wrote, because that other person refused to license it. What a waste. But all good rules come with collateral damage.
Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice Posted Jun 4, 2012 12:46 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Of course, all bad rules *also* come with collateral damage. You cannot use the presence of unintended side-effects to argue that a rule is good.
Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice Posted Jun 4, 2012 15:55 UTC (Mon) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] You cannot use the presence of unintended side-effects to argue that a rule is good Well nobody could argue with that, but how is that germane to the current discussion? Did someone say copyright law is good because it sometimes does the wrong thing? By the way, the term "unintended side effect" may be ambiguous. To a lot of people, that refers to something unanticipated, but it could also be something that was fully expected, but just not a goal. Here, I believe legislators and judges were fully briefed on most of copyright law's shortcomings and accepted them as a tradeoff, so in a sense they intended them to exist.
Totally Off-topic! Posted Jun 4, 2012 17:18 UTC (Mon) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
BWAHAHAHAHAHAH!
> Here, I believe legislators and judges were fully briefed on most of copyright law's shortcomings and accepted them as a tradeoff, so in a sense they intended them to exist.
Sorry for the OT post, but this made me LOL and all my coworkers are looking at me right now.
Disclaimer: I work at a state legislative house, and for the last fifteen years I have been married to a district attorney.
Laws are like programs... but the "machine" that will interpret those programs are the lawyers, attorneys, juries, judges, and justices. And each machine interpret the program as they damn well please. And what we call "The Law" is actually some kind of "mean value" of the many runnings of the program (i. e., the program self-modifies each time it is "run"). And for a single execution of the program (a "lawsuit"), the result always depend on when and where the program is being run.
So, no: most probably nobody has briefed nobody on those shortcomings, and probably nobody even saw they existed.
Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice Posted May 29, 2012 8:09 UTC (Tue) by gioele (subscriber, #61675) [Link]
> This raises an interesting philosophical conundrum. If two pages of code are *identical*, but they have different provenances, can one simply move the license around without having to regenerate the code?
> Does libreoffice actually have to delete text and type it all back in again in order for the license change to take effect?
I suppose this falls under the "What colour are your bits?" question: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 (must read 2004 article about law, provenance and computer science).
Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice Posted May 30, 2012 0:44 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]
You might be able to do that, but if you got sued the onus would be on you to prove that you could distribute your version of the code under the MPL.
This would probably be more work than taking the released Apache licensed code and re-deriving the LibreOffice code base from that through patches with the appropriate license.
Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice Posted May 30, 2012 7:43 UTC (Wed) by shmget (subscriber, #58347) [Link]
"You might be able to do that, but if you got sued the onus would be on you to prove that you could distribute your version of the code under the MPL."
I'm confused... it is to the defendant to prove its innocence now-a-days ?
Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice Posted May 30, 2012 8:03 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]
The lawsuit would be of the form "you do not have a license to distribute the code under those terms". Since LibreOffice is obviously based on existing work, the primary defence would be to show that they do in fact have a license for what they're doing.
In such a case, it would be pretty obvious that LibreOffice was derivative of the LGPL'd OpenOffice.org code from Sun/Oracle. It would be more work to prove that their work is derived from the Apache licensed release.
In contrast, if they had version control history that shows how a new version of LibreOffice was derived from the Apache licensed release, then the defence would be a lot easier.
I don't really know the specifics of US law, but in my country civil cases like this are decided "on the balance of probabilities" rather than "beyond reasonable doubt", so not offering a defence could easily lead to the case being decided against you.
Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice Posted May 31, 2012 0:40 UTC (Thu) by shmget (subscriber, #58347) [Link]
"The lawsuit would be of the form "you do not have a license to distribute the code under those terms"
1/ the suing party would have to have standing... so essentially Oracle
PS: no party could make such a blanket claim... just like, if you publish a book I cannot just 'claim' that you are not the author, I'd have to point to a least a part of your book for which I can prove that I am the author... and that I did not license that part in a way that allow you to re-use it.
Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice Posted May 31, 2012 8:42 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]
So, Oracle (or whoever else holds copyright) could point to the public version control history of LibreOffice and show that it was clearly derived from the LGPL'd OpenOffice.org code they released. Therefore, they must be relying on the LGPL to distribute modified versions of that code. If the defendant is not complying with the LGPL, then that could be enough cause for the law suit.
The "What colour are your bits?" essay that was linked earlier is an interesting read and might give some perspective for this kind of concern.
Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice Posted Jun 7, 2012 13:26 UTC (Thu) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link]
I think that copyright law makes illegal the act of distributing code without a license, and perhaps the act of receiving that distribution or enticing that distribution (i.e. starting a download) in some jurisdictions.
I don't think the law is concerned with you merely owning a copy of some copyrighted work, except as proof that the above actions took place.
Of course if you signed a contract as part of receiving the copyrighted work, then you would be bound by it in your actions relative to the received copyrighted work.
IANAL though.
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