501–510 of 543 posts
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Not complying with an open source license can be enforced as copyright infringement rather than a contractual dispute.
Please cite an example. Most countries' copyright law tips civil license agreement disputes back into the civil courts, not criminal, with relatively few exceptions.
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Why would a company the size of tiktok want to depend on some open source project maintaining a URL? Would they be liable if it instead redirected to malware?
Possibly. But most likely there was a bug "crashing when DirectX is not installed" and some developer hacked a silent install for DirectX in without thinking too much.
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I don’t mean any disrespect to anyone but can we go back to basics? Copyright applies to creative expressions. Purely functional expressions are not copyrightable. Regardless of license, only creative expressions within the work are protected. That said, what portions of the work are creative?
Computer programs are as copyrightable as literary works, and generally are counted as such within the context of copyright (see https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/text/295166 ). Please point out where it is determined that one has to demonstrate the "creativity" of a literary work before it is protected by copyright laws.
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Computer programs are as copyrightable as literary works, and generally are counted as such within the context of copyright (see https://wipolex.wipo.int/en/text/295166 ). Please point out where it is determined that one has to demonstrate the "creativity" of a literary work before it is protected by copyright laws.
Oh, please. 2+2=4 is not copyrightable. I’d further that any program in a CS101 textbook is equally uncopyrightable. Computer programs are only copyrightable to the degree that they contain creative expression. Purely functional expressions are not copyrightable, regardless of the creative effort to derive them. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1342160
Currently, precedent is on the side of code being copyrightable.
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Courts care about "equity" (restoring fairness). So the scope of the breach determines what is a fair remedy to make the plaintiff whole. A breach in a beta release (with lower circulation) would seem to be lower impact than a breach in a production release in that context.
Are you saying this based on actual knowledge of how this stuff works? I ask, because the person you're responding to definitely is (and also I like to keep track of who the lawyers are on HN.)
Like if you distribute one illegal copy (1) you will get a very different penalty then if you distributed 1 Million illegal copies.
In case of TickTok it being in beta does indeed not matter but what matters is that it being in beta entailed it being used by a limited amount of users for a rather short time (in this case).
(1): It should be noted here that I heard of cases where copyright lawyers liked to argue that one copy was further distributed an lead to many many more copies, and in turn damage done. I have no idea how far this is the case in practice and how far this is legally successful. Either way in this case the infringing product seems to be rather tightly bound to a non-infringing service, including some license key/beta key mechanism. So it shouldn't matter in this case, I guess.
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Given that it only affects a beta client they could: - pay damage for the violation the the client, given that's only beta that would likely not amount to much - and stop the beta program, while replacing their OBS dependency with something completely different.
This is not how it works. Courts do not care that it's a beta.
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I thought the latest lawsuit from Software Freedom Conservancy was interesting, they are suing as a third-party beneficiary of the GPL (not as a copyright holder, although they probably could do that too in this case) and seeking specific performance of the GPL violator (Vizio) and of course legal costs, but no damages. The specific performance they want is of course GPL compliance. As part of the case, they are basi…
> If any trolls try it, all they get is GPL compliance, so they have no incentive to try it. Not necessarily. The Conservancy chose not to ask for monetary damages, but that doesn't mean their legal theory inherently precludes asking for them; a troll could still do so. Though (IANAL) it seems like it might be hard as a TV buyer to prove that you were damaged in any significant monetary amount.
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The principles the FSF and Software Freedom Conservancy use when doing copyleft compliance actions encourage making legal action a last resort for when they refuse to comply. Legal action is a costly and time consuming process, so it makes sense to avoid it where possible. https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm... Legal action is a last resort. Compliance actions are primarily education and assi…
I think a "last resort" is warranted to stop such blatant copyright infringement as this or the Onyx violation of the Linux GPL.
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No it doesn't that's not how GPL (or any license) works. What happens is that it's a breach of contract (licenses are contracts) which lead to an termination that contract (1) (license) which grants the usage rights (copyright) for the software. Which leads a company to (roughly) following choices: - start complying with the license in time "before" the license gets invalidated - buy a proprietary license from the li…
In option 1, when does the license get invalidated? Is it invalidated in the first place because the offending software broke the license? Or is it invalidated after notification from OBS? Or even later, after some amount of time after notification and non-correction? If it's violated before notification, then option 1 is not possible, and option 2 is at the discretion of OBS, so option 3 is the only real legal outco…
> But if it's violated after notification
It's violated from the get to go, but it might only get terminated after notification (and a potential grace period) which can have all kinds of stage effects, like a different court being responsible or laws with "less bite" then copyright laws being the relevant laws. There was an interesting case where this happened in France not to long ago (but I forgot the name, it also seem to had other complications).