Copyright

Combining GPL and Proprietary Software

Bruce Perens has written an interesting article about combining GPL with proprietary software the main point of discussion concerns the problem of combining software under different licenses in embedded devices. The article ends with a paragraph on what not to do:

Don’t assume that you can put proprietary kernel drivers in a run-time loadable kernel module. The legality of such a practice is dubious, and there have not been sufficient cases to say reliably what would happen if you were to get sued.

Also, don’t look for, and use loopholes in the Open Source licenses. Nothing makes your company look worse than taking unfair advantage of people who provided their work to you without charge, expecting in good faith that you’d honor their license. It also tends to make Open Source folks reluctant to cooperate with your company, the next time you need help with their software. And it looks bad to judges, too.

Don’t try to do what I’ve discussed without legal counsel to advise and review your actions.

This is a particularly tricky subject and every time a writer tackles it we slowly move towards a better understanding – but there is still a long way to go. In fact that shortest answer to the problem of combining GPL & proprietary software in one device may be “don’t do it if you are not sure” but not many are going to follow that advice since free and open source software is too much of a competitive advantage for developers to ignore.

(via Slashdot)

Posted on by mklang

Scooby Doo is ancient and Chinese

Scooby-Doo was a childhood favourite of mine the cowardly, hungry dog always getting into scary situations provided lots of memorable occaissions. Common knowledge was that the characters in the series were created by Hanna Barbera in 1969 but I have made an important discovery on the streets of Göteborg today.

Photo Chinese Scooby Doo by Wrote (CC by-nc)

This stone statue of the great Scooby was, according to its dating certificate, fired somewhere between 1500 – 2400 years ago according to the Thermoluminescence Analysis Report. So here finally the massive conspiracy has been unmasked 🙂

Posted on by mklang

Popeye and friends

Elzie Crisler Segar died in October in 1938 – as of 1 January this year he has been dead for 70 years which means that his artistic works have now entered into the public domain. Among the best known of Segar’s work is Popeye the Sailor and now the famous spinache eating strong man and all his friends and enemies are free to use. The strangest of the characters must be his friend and cowardly straight-man Wimpy

wimpy-from-popeye1

More details over at Cearta.

Posted on by mklang

Ten years with the DMCA

Its been ten years since the implementation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and in order to commemorate this decade the Electronic Frontier Foundation has released a report entitled Unintended Consequences: Ten Years Under the DCMA. A collection of disturbing real life stories, the report reads like “a trip down memory lane for those who have followed digital freedom issues over the past decade”.

Wow, ten years! Time flies when we are having fun.

Posted on by mklang

The history of cultural diversity

Today is a busy day! In another Swedish newspaper there is an article that claims, already in it’s title, that copyright gave us diversity (Upphovsrätten gav oss mĂĄngfald). The article is a short burst of twaddle that attempts to state that copyright is necessary for litterature and ends with the bombastic but incredibly false statement that:

To believe that an internet free from copyright protection will contribute to a rich cultural diversity over the long term lacks history and is naive. Copyright is the very basis for diversity – irrespective of technology – in every modern civilized society. (My translation original follows)

Att tro att ett internet fritt från upphovsrättsligt skydd långsiktigt skulle bidra till ett rikt kulturutbud är historielöst och naivt. Upphovsrätten är själva förutsättningen för mångfald – oavsett teknologi – i varje modernt och civiliserat samhälle.

The author is a fool. He lacks any knowledge of literature and the effects of copyright. This is pure marketing without any knowledge of the facts. It is counterfactual (an ugly word if there ever was one).  Let me explain this slowly and simply so that the slow witted author may understand.

The earliest modern copyright legislation came in 1710. This is a short burst from wikipedia:

England’s Statute of Anne (1710) is widely regarded as the first copyright law. The statute’s full title was “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned.” This statute first accorded exclusive rights to authors (i.e., creators) rather than publishers… (Wikipedia History of Copyright Law)

According to the article author there was no diversity before copyright and therefore there was no diversity before 1710… This means that: Homer (ca 850 BC), Ovid (43 BC – 17 AD), Augustine (354 – 430), Boethius (480–524 or 525), Snorri Sturluson (1178 – 1241), Petrarch (1304 – 1374), Boccaccio (1313 – 1375), Dante (1265 – 1321), Chaucer (1343 – 1400), Machiavelli (1469 – 1527), Paracelsus (1493 – 1541), Rabelais (1494 – 1553), Cervantes (1547 – 1616), Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), Racine (1639 – 1699), Moliere (1622 – 1673), John Locke (1632 – 1704) & Samuel Pepys (1633 – 1703)… just to name a few…Did not provide the world with cultural diversity ?!?!?!?…  So what can the author mean when he writes that copyright is a prerequisite for cultural diversity? My only conclusion is that the author of the newspaper article is a fool…

Update:

In the comments section Henrik points out that Bo-Erik Gyberg (the author of the newspaper article) was appointed Chairman of the Swedish lobbying group Filmallians in in June 2007.

The shocking thing is that the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet does not present this information but allows him to write an article which is plainly a political position and part of his lobbyist work.

Shame on you Svenska Dagbladet! The concept of journalistic integrity seems to be lost on you completely… Are you being paid for this political advertising?

Posted on by mklang

Open debate, free speech & copying

On Thursday last week a group of Swedish artists and writers spoke up in an op-ed on the topic of file sharing. Their motives and point of view are clear. Their timing is also to act out in support of the coming parliamentary vote that will create a harsher environment around illegal file sharing.

The op-ed begins with the idea that they [the artists/writers] had been too silent in their opposition to file sharing. The reason they state for this silence is the fear of “hate attacks from notorious file sharers” (my translation from: “hatattackerna frĂĄn notoriska fildelare”).

This is an incredibly interesting position. These artists/writers are public figures and as such have a position from which they can easily publicise any and all opinions they may have. They are the media elite – when they talk reports listen. And yet they are asking for sympathy from the public since they are the victims of a group which does not have the same platform. The very fact that they have written and published an op-ed in one of Sweden’s largest and most important newspaper should suffice to prove this point.

This false humility, this wringing of hands, this wearing of sack-cloth and ashes is irritating but it could also be seen as a rhetorical move. Even so, the position of the poor-little-me-I-am-just-a-pop-star attitude is patently false and more provocative than they seem to understand.

The group of artists/writers who signed the op-ed seem to desire a world where they have the ear of the media, the platform to publish and to be discussed (in polite terms) but are not ready to meet criticism from the broader public – from those who they are selling to!

Whether it is culture or whether it is hamburgers the seller must be able to accept the criticism and choices of the buyers. I am a vegetarian and I will criticize any attempts meat sellers make to portray happy livestock. If an artist/writer makes an uniformed/stupid statement from the platform of fame and position of importance they have achieved, then I have the right to criticize them from below – without this being referred to as a hate-attack. If you speak out in public you must expect a reply. You may not like that reply but if you are unable to cope with the reply then you should not have entered the public arena.

This post was going to be about the content of the opt-ed but as you may have noticed I got stuck on the introduction and could not move beyond. So I take the easy way out and quote from the Industrial IT Group and a blog post they entitle: Stupidity in the age of information

…digital products are, by definition, open for being copied. This is the essence of the notion of digital. While some see this as a curse many of us see this as a blessing. Reinforcing laws surrounding filesharing comes at a prize and I see it as neither possible nor desireable to fight filesharing.

To this I would just like to add the schizofrenic position of encouraging and praising the importance is consumerism through digital gadgets and widgets while attempting to limit their use…

To the politicians about to vote on the coming legal proposals, a question: When you give your child an 120GB ipod – what are you expecting that they will do with it?

Posted on by mklang

New Book: Terms of Use

A couple of months ago I mentioned that Eva Hemmungs Wirtén was soon publishing her second book on the public domain. Her production, writing and depth makes her one of the foremost public domain scholars around today. The very fact that she is a Swedish humanities scholar publishing in the English market seems to make her an exotic addition to the scholarly publication. This should not be so considering the ability to think and writes exists widely outside the larger universities and the web provides and excellent infrastructure for the spreading of knowledge. So could it be that there is a bias towards certain universities and university publishers?

Anyway her second book Terms of Use: Negotiating the Jungle of the Intellectual Commons (University of Toronto Press) is now out and it has already been reviewed by David Bollier on his blog. Bollier gives the book a glowing review and writes about Eva:

WirtĂ©n, a professor at Uppsala University in Sweden, is developing a sophisticated new frontier of public domain scholarship… WirtĂ©n’s book is a welcome addition to the literature on the public domain... Terms of Use is highly readable and even entertaining.

And she deserves this praise. I read Terms of Use with fascination, letting the author guide me from the familiar early history of property theory – a story populated with white colonialists declaring the right to take land from natives who did not use it. This reminds me of the comic Eddy Izzard who has the following sketch in his Dress to Kill tour

We stole countries. Thats how you build an empire. We stole countries with the cunning use of flags. You just sail around the world and stick a flag in.

“I claim India for Britain”.

And they go: “You can’t claim us, we live here, 500 million of us”.

“Do you have a flag?”

“We don’t need a bloody flag, this is our country you bastard”.

“No flag, no country – you can’t have one. That’s the rules”.

(check it out on youtube in particular this version which has a lego animation). Anyway back to the book. Eva then boldly goes where the familiar story has not gone before. Exploring the parts of the public domain which should be familiar but are not. The history of lopping as a right, the imperialistic problems with Kipling, the origins and political significance of botany, botanical gardens and taxidermy.

From these wide sources she deepens our area of study, forces us to go beyond the simplistic terms and understanding of the public domain as a modern romanticization of a confusing past. We need work like this to be able to understand what it is we are actually talking about. Go get the book and read it. Oh, and if you have not done so read her first book as well No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization.

Posted on by mklang

Positive Procrastination

While procrastination is often seen as a negative act it does have a positive side. Of course if the procastination we enjoy turns out to be positive and leads to a result – is this really procrastination at all? Hmm an academic Zen koan… but I digress and possibly procrastinate.

Since returning to Göteborg from my Open Access project in Lund there has appeared a small window of opportunity to begin doing something more substantial and long term. So based upon this premise I happily ignore a bunch of more pressing, but smaller, tasks in order to create a meaningful long term project.

Thus far I have located and area, a vague plan of action, a whole bunch of related work and now I am formulating a thesis to be presented, argued and defended. So with the risk of jinxing the project by talking about it at this early stage my idea is to write a book (not very original since I am an academic) on the connection between copyright, culture and innovation.

There! It’s out now. So all I need to do now is to fine tune the thesis and begin purposely bashing the keyboard. Who said that procrastination is all bad?

From Bizzaro by Piraro

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More than a commodity

While browsing around for a starting point on my next project I came across an article I had forgotten. The article “Copying Kill Bill” is written by Laikwan Pang (Social Text 2005) and is an exploration of the connections between copyright and cultural borrowing, or stealing depending on the perspective I suppose.

A film is not only a commodity but also a complex system of cultural representation, in which cultural exchanges are so complex that today’s copyright discourse can never clearly differentiate between copyright infringement and cultural appropriations, as clearly shown in Kill Bill.

This was just the type of article I was looking for to inspire me to move forward. We have to take a step back and look seriously at the larger picture which is infinately more complex and much more interesting.

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CC photos of Göteborg on Flickr

Flickr has over 2 billion images – that’s a lot. If you type in the search term ”Göteborg” – my home town – suddenly you have the more manageable number of 66 804 hits. Of these 13 820 images are available under one of the six Creative Commons licenses which allow others to reuse the images.

The reason I know these numbers is that I have been doing some preparatory work for a project. I have looked through the 13 820 images and chosen 279 of them.

Posted on by mklang