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Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Posted Jun 2, 2009 12:10 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185)
In reply to: Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions by knan
Parent article: Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Because, as has been explained many times before:

* it is demanded by the standard
* there are users who need these bits
* it is a basic courtesy towards the content generators to abide by their license, just as we expect
others to abide by our licenses.


to post comments

Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Posted Jun 2, 2009 12:34 UTC (Tue) by knan (subscriber, #3940) [Link] (9 responses)

* it is demanded by the standard

It's none of the standards business. Those flags can never be more than advisory.

* there are users who need these bits

Default to off, let them turn it on. Kiosk mode. Don't inconvenience everyone.

* it is a basic courtesy towards the content generators to abide by their license, just as we expect others to abide by our licenses.

So if I write in my document that you need to wear a pink fedora while reading it, you'd want a program to enforce that by default? It's silly. Let the reader decide whether what the author demands is acceptable or not.

Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Posted Jun 2, 2009 13:06 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (8 responses)

You wanted to know the reasons: these are the reasons, so now you know the reeasons.

You may disagree with the authors of okular and xpdf, but, well, your disagreement is irrelevant. You're not doing the work, nor are you adding any well-considered well-formulated opinion, you are merely playing dummy and were asking a rather fatuous rhetorical question, to which you now have the answer.

And that's what you'll have to live with.

(And, of course, you should realize the complete equivalence of " Let the reader decide whether what the author demands is acceptable or not." and "Let the developer decide whether what the library author demands is acceptable or not", and that you have just given everyone a free pass on license violation of all the software you have ever written. If any.)

Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Posted Jun 2, 2009 14:04 UTC (Tue) by sergey (guest, #31763) [Link]

> it is demanded by the standard

> You wanted to know the reasons: these are the reasons, so now you know the reeasons.

This is a very poor reasoning, especially in the light of "standards" such as OOXML.

Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Posted Jun 2, 2009 14:18 UTC (Tue) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

Consider the following page:

http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/play.html

I'm quoting from it:

> To access my Debian play machine ssh to
> play.coker.com.au as root, the password is

[password ommited]

> I give no-one permission to distribute
> this password. If you want to share
> information on this machine you must
> give the URL to this web site

I'm not completely sure that the password here is long enough to be protected by copyright, but even if it isn't, it's easy to make a similar example that is enforceable. Thus I could have easily used my browser using my browser to circumevent the license of that page. But out of respect to the author of that page I avoid that.

In fact, most common browsers include functionality such as "send page" and that help you violate copyright licensing and easily publish the results. The sky is not falling, AFAIK. The internet is alive and kicking.

Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Posted Jun 2, 2009 14:29 UTC (Tue) by rjdymond (guest, #51625) [Link] (5 responses)

(And, of course, you should realize the complete equivalence of " Let the reader decide whether what the author demands is acceptable or not." and "Let the developer decide whether what the library author demands is acceptable or not", and that you have just given everyone a free pass on license violation of all the software you have ever written. If any.)
You seem to be saying that if I choose to ignore/violate the licence restrictions on somebody else's work, then I am (morally?) obligated to allow others to ignore/violate the licence restrictions on my own work(s). Which is entirely wrong, because it doesn't take the details of the licences into account. Whether violating licence A is as acceptable as violating licence B surely depends on those details. (And yes, the answer will be a matter of opinion, but that's beside the point.)

Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Posted Jun 2, 2009 15:32 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (4 responses)

Yes, I'm saying that you should behave unto others as you would like them to behave towards you.
If you're not prepared to do that, you forfeit the other's consideration for you.

Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Posted Jun 2, 2009 16:39 UTC (Tue) by rjdymond (guest, #51625) [Link] (2 responses)

Yes, I'm saying that you should behave unto others as you would like them to behave towards you.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, behaving unto others as you would like them to behave towards you (which is a good idea that I can agree with) does not imply abiding by someone else's licence because I expect them to abide by mine. To suggest it does is to render the fine phrase meaningless. To translate into the narrow realm of licences:

Yes: You should comply with the GPL (on somebody else's work) if you expect others to comply with the GPL (on your own work).

No: You should comply with an absurdly restrictive licence (on somebody else's work) if you expect others to comply with the GPL (on your own work).

Again, the devil is in the details (of the licences).

Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Posted Jun 2, 2009 18:59 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (1 responses)

At the risk of sounding like a broken record...

No, your personal interpretation of the relative importance and
reasonableness of the restrictions imposed by a content creator aren't
absolute values. What you think is reasonable might be unreasonable in the
eyes of another. And you haven't got any right to force the other into
giving up their position. And that's the problem: you are demanding that
people who have a more reasonable position (by default we do the right
thing, but people can override that) than you give up that position.

Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Posted Jun 2, 2009 19:59 UTC (Tue) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

Take your own advice for a change. Even assuming we all agree that no one has the right to demand that another abandon their position, the reasonableness of applying restrictions by default is no less your *merely subjective opinion* than rjdymond's assessment that some licenses are more reasonably adhered to than others.

Personally, I think the entire discussion is pointless. Enforcing copyright claims through coercion is both immoral (IMHO, though that classification is far from arbitrary) and ineffectual, and claiming copyright sans coercion is simply ineffectual. Better to just accept reality and move on.

Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Posted Jun 2, 2009 16:54 UTC (Tue) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

I respect copyright and usage license. But what does this have to do with the technical limitation of the DRM bit?

Does it imply I'm allowed to freely distribute anything that is not protected by technical measures? Such as standard GPLed code?

Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Posted Jun 4, 2009 1:31 UTC (Thu) by JoeF (guest, #4486) [Link] (3 responses)

Then do things as every decent browser does wrt cookies.
They are also "demanded by the standard".
There are also "users who need these bits"
It is also "a basic courtesy towards the content generators"

Yet, the browser pops up a dialog asking what to do with the cookie.

Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Posted Jun 4, 2009 10:37 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (2 responses)

The thing is, I don't know of any browser that does so by default. By default they all just accept it, unless you change a configuration option. This sounds familiar to me...

Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Posted Jun 6, 2009 19:31 UTC (Sat) by Hawke (guest, #6978) [Link] (1 responses)

Konqueror does, in my experience.

Okular, Debian, and copy restrictions

Posted Jun 11, 2009 12:17 UTC (Thu) by oblio (guest, #33465) [Link]

Maybe this (together with various other issues) is what's holding Konqueror back. Check out Linux Hater's blog for the KDE 4 rant ;)


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