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FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub

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Re: FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub

#91

Post by agumonkey »

pico303 wrote: post #89
meindnoch wrote: post #78

[flagged]

Maybe I’m not smart enough to grasp all these flowery words, but is this suggesting if I spend a few years writing some code, you should get to copy it for your own interests and without compensating me as long as your sales and marketing is better than mine? I don’t think Rockchip learned from the ffmoeg code. They simply copied it outright without attribution.

I think both of you are right. But OP may think of the larger picture. A bit like 'move fast and break things', that sort of things where you blur the lines when it's valuable enough. Not that I agree with this ethical stance, but surely there's some sclerotic aspect of being too stiff on rules. It's a weird balance.

Re: FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub

#92

Post by martin-t »

meindnoch wrote: post #78

[flagged]

So progress is always good, no matter how many people's work you exploit without their consent? You have a nice car, can I just take it and use it myself? Why is code any different? Is slavery OK too?

A much more interesting problem is how to create prosperity without throwing people under the bus - with everybody who contributed profiting proportionally to their contribution.

Re: FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub

#93

Post by martin-t »

iinnPP wrote: post #83
cryptica wrote: post #66

The law doesn't seem to work anymore. There are so many cases where someone can do illegal stuff in plain sight and nothing can be done about it. Not everyone has tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to spare to get a lawyer. By the time you manage to save up the money, you realize that this system is absolutely crooked and that you don't trust it to obtain justice anyway even with the lawyers and ev…

I recently had to deal with a ministry in Canada, where a worker who had been there since 20 years ago failed even a basic test of competence in reading comprehension. Then multiple issues with the OPC (Office of Privacy Commissioner) failing entirely on a basic issue. Another example exists in Ontario's tenant laws constantly being criticized as enabling bad tenant behavior, but reading the statute full of many mont…

Incompetence is a taboo. It shouldn't be.

I think it should be perfectly OK to make value judgements of other people, and if they are backed by evidence, make them publicly and make them have consequences for that person's position.

Re: FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub

#94

Post by AshamedCaptain »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #75
idle_zealot wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely they do sometimes?

A 26-sided die reproduces chuncks of source code. What's the dividing line?

This is a multi-terabyte sized dice that is not at all random AND has most definitely copied the source code in question to begin with.

Re: FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub

#95

Post by iLoveOncall »

meindnoch wrote: post #78

[flagged]

This perfectly summarizes my feeling about software licenses.

I've always found it beyond ridiculous. Either you post your code in public and you accept it'll be used by others, without any enforceable restriction, or you don't. It's as simple as that.

The rest is self-importance from bitter old men.

Re: FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub

#96

Post by AshamedCaptain »

alienbaby wrote: post #59
bfrog wrote: post #39

I wonder how this will work with AI stuff generating code without any source or attribution. It’s not like the LLMs make this stuff up out of thin air it comes from source material.

Llm's do not verbatim disgorge chunks of the code they were trained on.

You can still very trivially get entire chunks of code from Copilot including even literal author names (simply by prodding with a doxygen tag).

Re: FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub

#97

Post by habibur »

LGPL allows compiling the whole of ffmpeg into a so or lib and then dynamically linking from there for your closed source code. That's the main difference between LGPL and GPL.

But if you change or add something in building ffmpeg.so that should be GPLed.

Apparently they copied some files from ffmpeg mixed with their propitiatory code and compiled it as a whole. That's the problem here.

Re: FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub

#98

Post by adev_ »

meindnoch wrote: post #78

[flagged]

> The LGPL is a product of a very specific moment: European legalism meeting American corporate compromise

If I tend to agree with the general message of the post, this specific point does not make any sense.

The LGPL and the GPL are 100% American products. They are originally issued from the the American Academic world with the explicit goal of twisting the arm of the (American) copyright system for ideological reasons.

That has zero relation to any European legalism.

Re: FFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub

#99

Post by kelseyfrog »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #94
kelseyfrog wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 26-sided die reproduces chuncks of source code. What's the dividing line?

This is a multi-terabyte sized dice that is not at all random AND has most definitely copied the source code in question to begin with.

The die is certainly not multi-terabyte. A more realistic number would be 32k-sided to 50k-sided if we want to go with a pretty average token vocabulary size.

Really, it comes down to encoding. Arbitrarily short utf-8 encoded strings can be generated using a coin flip.

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