BitKeeper, Linux, and licensing disputes: How Linus wrote Git in 14 days (Graphite blog)
BitKeeper, Linux, and licensing disputes: How Linus wrote Git in 14 days (Graphite blog)
Posted May 25, 2024 12:46 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: BitKeeper, Linux, and licensing disputes: How Linus wrote Git in 14 days (Graphite blog) by mb
Parent article: BitKeeper, Linux, and licensing disputes: How Linus wrote Git in 14 days (Graphite blog)
> The copyrighted tool that required the license agreement was not used to make the request.
You don't need any tool to conduct copyright violation. Just reciting something publicly would require a license.
> The license was not in effectYes.
> not neededYou always need a license to copy something. Even to just copy program from your SSD or HDD to memory you need a license.
If would be tedious to get one each time you want to run a program thus there are notion of implied license: license to do something to legally owned copyrighed work which is needed to meaningfully use it.
It only happens if there is strong eveidence that copyright owner intended copyrighted work to be used in that fashion.
And there are zero evidence that BirMover inteded their servers to be used with unofficial clients and plenty of evidence to contrary.
> A public server had been queried with a different tool.Which is an instant copyright violation in the absence of license.
Sorry, but that's how copyright works.
Posted May 25, 2024 13:03 UTC (Sat)
by mb (subscriber, #50428)
[Link] (6 responses)
There is no copyrightable work, apart from the GPL'ed kernel, in the transferred data.
>It only happens if there is strong eveidence that copyright owner intended copyrighted
Talking to a public service does not need a copyright license. That is just ridiculous.
Posted May 25, 2024 13:42 UTC (Sat)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (5 responses)
Why do you ignore central part again and again? Intent matter. Legislation doesn't even try to answer the question of whether talking to a public service requires license or not! Web Spider may send the exact same packets my browser sends, but Intent would be different and the decisions, from the law POV, may be different, too! On the contrary: it's normal and obvious. To every normal person, but, for some reason, not for technogeeks. If Andrew would have send random packets to random servers on the internet with the Intent of doing some latency research and misconfigured server would have sent to him whole Library of Congress — it's on them. If Andrew sends specifically selected packets designed to authorize the making of
another copy of copyrighted material — it's on Andrew. You couldn't say whether talking to public server is legal or illegal without first discussing the reason for that communication. Evidence of what? Of the fact that you need a license to make a copy of copyrighted material? Just look on the copyright law and look on all these numerous “Limitations on exclusive rights”. Exceptions to do things like a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner that you are permitted to do without explicit permission to make an additional copy or adaptation wouldn't be even needed if it were legal to make copies willy-nilly in general. Why the heck you try to find answer to the question whether some thing that your computer does is legal is not while entirely excluding yourself from the equation? Computer is just a tool, what you do with computer matters, not what computer does! Computer doesn't have a free will (at least law believes so).
Posted May 25, 2024 13:55 UTC (Sat)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link] (4 responses)
(1) Your link to "Intent" is for *criminal* acts, not civil torts.
Posted May 25, 2024 14:21 UTC (Sat)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (3 responses)
Every copy of copyrighted material is a copyright infingement without a license (or special-case in the law). Sometimes it's subtle (e.g. browser can cache content if there are no And for some reason lots of people in that discussion assert that random servers attached to public internet are exception to that rule… What? Why? How?
Posted May 25, 2024 14:29 UTC (Sat)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link]
Thank you for conceding that if something cannot be copyrighted, then copyright infringement cannot occur.
Posted May 26, 2024 0:48 UTC (Sun)
by jjs (guest, #10315)
[Link]
And every bit of the kernel code on the Bitkeeper server was covered by GPL2.
Posted May 26, 2024 21:47 UTC (Sun)
by dvdeug (guest, #10998)
[Link]
The question would be if a browser can cache content if there is a Cache-Control: no-store line. I'd expect the answer would be yes, that "Cache-Control: no-store" has no legal effect and anything you can download you can cache. (I could argue from the "Betamax case", for example.) I'm pretty sure no one can produce a court decision one way or the other.
> random servers attached to public internet are exception to that rule… What? Why? How?
There is a case where a company made money suing downloaders of its NSFW films uploaded to The Pirate Bay. They're now in jail, because they uploaded their own films to The Pirate Bay, and suing people for downloading stuff you made available on The Pirate Bay was considered fraud. If someone asks a server for a file via the public internet, and the server gives them that file, the presumed intent of the people who set up that server was to make the file the available. There's a bunch of hacking laws and computer trespass laws that complicate things, and I can't argue in this specific case, but if you put it online, and there's no password or encryption or the like, it's fair game.
Posted May 27, 2024 9:25 UTC (Mon)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link] (2 responses)
He connected to a public server, and made a query. The *server* sent him the copyrighted material, over a private connection.
Where is the public recitation?
Posted May 27, 2024 10:22 UTC (Mon)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted May 27, 2024 10:53 UTC (Mon)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
Reverse-engineering clause is, indeed, unenforceable because law includes explicit permission to do reverse-engineering for interoperability purposes. What is enforceable is non-competing clause. In fact Russia law (which I refered to, back then, because US law got that exception later) even explicitly says the following: “информация, полученная в результате декомпилирования, может использоваться лишь для достижения способности к взаимодействию независимо разработанной программы для ЭВМ с другими программами, не может передаваться иным лицам, за исключением случаев, когда это необходимо для достижения способности к взаимодействию независимо разработанной программы для ЭВМ с другими программами, а также не может использоваться для разработки программы для ЭВМ, по своему виду существенно схожей с декомпилируемой программой для ЭВМ, или для осуществления другого действия, нарушающего исключительное право на программу для ЭВМ” (translation: information obtained as a result of decompilation can only be used to achieve the ability to interact with an independently developed computer program with other programs, and cannot be transferred to other persons, except in cases where this is necessary to achieve the ability to interact with an independently developed computer program with other programs, and also cannot be used to develop a computer program that is substantially similar in appearance to the decompiled computer program, or to carry out other actions that violate the exclusive right to a computer program, emphasis mine). Weirdly, if you don't straight-out decompile a program then other means are perfectly acceptable, but again, it all is contingent on being in possession of a license… and if even law itself talks about non-competing rules then we may easily assume that they are perfectly legal to have in a license.
BitKeeper, Linux, and licensing disputes: How Linus wrote Git in 14 days (Graphite blog)
>Which is an instant copyright violation in the absence of license.
>work to be used in that fashion.
Please provide evidence.
> Talking to a public service does not need a copyright license.
BitKeeper, Linux, and licensing disputes: How Linus wrote Git in 14 days (Graphite blog)
BitKeeper, Linux, and licensing disputes: How Linus wrote Git in 14 days (Graphite blog)
(2) You can't be penalized for violating a contract that you aren't a party to.
(3) If something isn't copyright infringement to begin with, your "intent" doesn't matter.
> If something isn't copyright infringement to begin with, your "intent" doesn't matter.
BitKeeper, Linux, and licensing disputes: How Linus wrote Git in 14 days (Graphite blog)
Cache-Control: no-store line in server answer… that doesn't look like a typical license, but from court POV it would be declared “an implied license” because of exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis rule).BitKeeper, Linux, and licensing disputes: How Linus wrote Git in 14 days (Graphite blog)
> Every copy of copyrighted material is a copyright infingement without a license (or special-case in the law).
BitKeeper, Linux, and licensing disputes: How Linus wrote Git in 14 days (Graphite blog)
BitKeeper, Linux, and licensing disputes: How Linus wrote Git in 14 days (Graphite blog)
BitKeeper, Linux, and licensing disputes: How Linus wrote Git in 14 days (Graphite blog)
BitKeeper, Linux, and licensing disputes: How Linus wrote Git in 14 days (Graphite blog)
BitKeeper, Linux, and licensing disputes: How Linus wrote Git in 14 days (Graphite blog)