The European Court of Justice, the highest court in the European Union, is kind of on a roll lately. We already discussed how they outlawed generic ISP-side internet filters, and now, in an opinion (so it’s not a ruling just yet), Yves Bot, an advocate-general at the Court, has stated that functions provided by computer programs, as well as the programming languages they’re written in, do not receive copyright protection. The opinion is very well-written, and relatively easy to read and grasp. Note: Brilliant quote from a comment over at Hacker News: “Copyright makes you write your own code. Patents prevent you from writing your own code.”
Currently, SAS Institute, Inc. is suing World Programming for copyright infringement. SAS claims that by implementing the same functionality, using the same programming language, as is present in SAS’ software, World Programming is violating SAS’ copyright. The crucial thing here is that World Programming has not had any access to SAS’ source code.
SAS creates something known as the SAS System, a set of software programs to collect, store, analyse, and manipulate data. Using the SAS Language, people can extend the functionality of the SAS System. The problem was that if a customer wanted to switch away from SAS, he had no choice but to rewrite his programs; the SAS Language only works with SAS’ software, meaning total vendor lock-in.
This is where World Programming comes in. They developed an alternative to the SAS System, dubbed the WPL System, which allowed customers to run programs written in the SAS Language without using the SAS System. They had no access to any of SAS’ source code whatsoever, so they had to write it from scratch.
As a result, SAS sued World Programming, arguing that reverse engineering SAS constituted copyright infringement – not just of the source code itself, but also the manuals for the SAS System (since the functionality was alike, I presume). In addition, SAS also contents that World Programming violated the license of the SAS System Learning Edition (probably by using it to better understand SAS, and therefore, violate a non-commercial clause in the license).
The High Court of England and Wales already ruled in July last year that SAS had no case, and that the functions provided by computer systems, or the language they’re written in, cannot be protected by copyright. The case then escalated to the Court of Justice, which is set to rule next year. Yves Bot’s non-binding opinion, published today, reiterates The High Court of England and Wales’ ruling.
Bot comes to the conclusion that under current EU law, the functionality provided by a computer program cannot form the object of copyright protection. His example to illustrate his point, interestingly enough, is not altogether different from how most programmers argue against software patents.
Let me give a specific example. Where a programmer decides to develop a computer program for airline ticket reservations, that software will contain a multitude of functionalities needed to make a booking. The computer program will have to be able, in turn, to find the flight requested by the user, check availability, book the seat, register the user’s details, take online payment details and, finally, edit the user’s electronic ticket. All of those functionalities, those actions, are dictated by a specific and limited purpose. In this, therefore, they are similar to an idea. It is therefore legitimate for computer programs to exist which offer the same functionalities.There are, however, many means of achieving the concrete expression of those functionalities and it is those means which will be eligible for copyright protection under Directive 91/250. As we have seen, creativity, skill and inventiveness manifest themselves in the way in which the program is drawn up, in its writing. The programmer uses formulae, algorithms which, as such, are excluded from copyright protection because they are the equivalent of the words by which the poet or the novelist creates his work of literature. However, the way in which all of these elements are arranged, like the style in which the computer program is written, will be likely to reflect the author’s own intellectual creation and therefore be eligible for protection.
In other words, the actual written code behind a function is protected by copyright, but the function is not. So, if you arrive at the same function but with entirely different code, you are not infringing any copyright. “To accept that a functionality of a computer program can be protected as such would amount to making it possible to monopolise ideas, to the detriment of technological progress and industrial development,” Bot writes.
Well paint me red and call me a girl scout – that sounds a hell of a lot like how we argue against software patents.
Moving on to the issue of the programming language, Bot also comes to the conclusion that it, too, cannot form the object of copyright protection.
It seems to me, therefore, that programming language is a functional element which allows instructions to be given to the computer. As we have seen with SAS language, programming language is made up of words and characters known to everyone and lacking any originality. In my opinion, programming language must be regarded as comparable to the language used by the author of a novel. It is therefore the means which permits expression to be given, not the expression itself.
Moving on to the matter of the data files SAS stores information in. To achieve interoperability with these data files, World Programming had to decompile certain parts of the SAS System. Bot argues that an inherent function of the data files is to enable interoperability, and that EU law allows decompilation in cases where the necessary information to achieve interoperability has not been made readily available. In other words, exactly because SAS did not publish the information needed for third parties to read from and write to the data files, World Programming was allowed to decompile.
However, Bot adds that “in my view, the use of the terms ‘indispensable’ and ‘necessary’ illustrates the desire of the European Union legislature to make decompilation an exceptional act. To my mind, the licensee will have to demonstrate the absolute necessity of reproducing the code or of translating the form of the code for the purposes of interoperability with the elements of his own program.”
This is reasonable, in my eyes. If the information to create fully interoperable third party programs is readily available, then there’s no need to decompile or reverse engineer anything. If such information is not readily available, however, third parties should legally be allowed to decompile the information.
Lastly, we have the manuals. World Programming only took “keywords, syntax, commands and combinations of commands, options, defaults and iterations” out of the SAS manuals. As you can probably deduce from what we’ve covered so far, Bot does not believe these elements are covered by copyright protection.
I have to say that this is the second time the EU Court of Justice has blown me away with the clarity of their rulings and opinions. The language used is not overly legalese, it’s relatively easy to understand, and the arguments made are based on technical understanding. It naturally helps that I find myself in full agreement with the opinion, but still.
We can only hope that the Court of Justice adopts Bot’s opinion, but we’ll have to wait until next year before we find out.
If there is a ruling to agree with the opinion, then what? Will developers be able to reverse-engineer software legally? What about in North America?
Since the EU does not cover North America, I’d guess that one would have to buy.. er.. get a similar ruling from a North American court. Sadly, if copyright/patent law where made less favorable to big content control lobbying; the terrorists win.
(hard not to be cynical once you start to pay attention to copyright/patent shenanigans)
Actually (if you can’t be pedantic on tech sites where can you be?! :p ), many overseas territories of the EU should have large enough integration level for this ruling to essentially apply – so it might easily apply also in quite a few ~EU islands in the Caribbean, which are considered a part of North America.
Then there are, much more clearly N. American, French islands Saint Pierre and Miquelon (though those seem like the integration might be a bit too tenuous).
Or maybe Greenland, in a way. They did choose to leave the EU, but they’re still part of Denmark …not sure how much the laws need to “synchronised” for that to work in any meaningful way. Still, the Greenlanders are full EU citizens, via their Danish citizenship.
You can reverse-engineer legally in the US (don’t know about Canada), but you have to use clean-room techniques. That means that the people decompiling the code to create the specs can’t be the same people recreating the code. That makes it easier to prove that there is no direct copying.
IANAL, but the makers of the Mac emulator named Executor employed lawyers, and then explained this in the legal section of their docs. Unless there had been a major revision in the law since then, this should still be the case.
Oh course this only applies to copyright. Patents are, by definition, a monopoly on an idea, not on its expression. The case referenced in the article above was an attempt for SAS to treat copyright law like patent law, but the rights each conveys are different, and the opinion above is that you can’t get patent-like protections from copyright. I don’t know to what extent software patents are allowed in the relevant jurisdiction, but if they exist then SAS should have used them instead. If they don’t, then they are SOL.
Disclaimer: None of the above should be taken as an endorsement of software patents. I don’t like them.
One small point of clarification; patents are in fact a monopoly on the expression of an idea, not on the idea itself. At least that’s the way it’s supposed to work in the USA.
Technically, that’s wrong. In the USA, copyright–not patent–covers expressions of ideas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright#Idea-expression_dichotomy_an…), and patents cover inventions and processes. Neither is supposed to monopolize ideas in theory, but in practice they both do all the time.
… the expression of an idea, not on the idea itself
Still, most software patents are abstract or trivial for anyone who spent at least 5 seconds on the same problem.
COPYING IS STEALING
FACT
COPYING IS STEALING
FACT
The reality is that plagiarism is theft
See, same idea, more precise but using other words.
So I said it better and I’m in the clear!
Making an imitation of someone’s work devalues their work.
If you read your history books well, you’ll find out that most so called innovators simply outdone a previous existing idea.
Examples: Apple Newton -> Palm Pilot
LG Prada -> Iphone
Nearly anonymous woman wearing her hair short -> Coco Chanel embracing the idea and turning it into a trend.
I could go on with Atari and Sony Playstation but the world is simply full of nice ideas which were later improved on to become GREAT ideas.
Replication is another nice word.
Those stealing cells of mine should pay royalties for copying me.
Sure, but can you prove that they took a copy of your cells without your consent ?
Well, the replication of everybody started without their consent (and self-terminating it intentionally is frowned upon, to say the least; attempts can generally greatly inconvene you, as far as treatment by society goes)
COPYING IS STEALING
FACT
It’s gone memetic – ideas want to be copied.
The development of ideas depends on cumulative development i.e copying and change. If copying is theft then human culture is grand larceny
Edited 2011-11-29 16:46 UTC
but this is a pretty obvious ruling, is it not?
I understand how software patents could prevent some one from reproducing the same algorithm. But Copyright covering functionality?
That’s as logical as some old school pirates who worked under the logic that they “bought” the movie therefore they could make copies and sell them for profit.
Edit: Speling before cofee makes Oatmeal cry.
Edited 2011-11-29 16:27 UTC
Unless I’m misunderstanding what’s being said, I think it’d be better to summarize it as either
“you can’t copyright an API… only a specific implementation of it”
or
“function/method signatures, protocol definitions, and file formats used for data exchange are not eligible for copyright”
I don’t think that’s quite as easy to distinguish a specific implementation of an API. In many cases, the API will tend to lead to a certain kind of implementation.
It can still result in massive battles. The case I’ve always been interested in is actually how Intel managed to keep its x86 industry protected.
I got interested in it as I discussed patents with someone who kept insisting software patents were somehow uniquely wrong, while ‘hardware’ patents were okay. I then wondered about things like VHDL where looked like ‘software’ but ‘compiled’ into hardware. I also wondered how Intel kept it’s x86 instruction set protected. At the end of the day, the instruction set is not different from an software api (function names, parameters…).
There’s a good read here on it.
http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/patent/intel-and-the-x86-archite…
It gets into all kinds of details on copyrighting instruction sets, clean room reverse engineering…
For all the flack the EU gets, and it does deserve a lot, it does do some things right.
Edited 2011-11-29 16:59 UTC
“In addition, SAS also contents”
That “contents” should be “contends” to make the sentence make sense.
And I felt just like Thom reading this. I love that crying face graphic.
As a Haiku fan, this is very reassuring as you never know where the BeOS copyrights could end up – see SCO
Copying is not automatically stealing.
The EU does not impose law on the US.
Reverse engineering is legal in the US, within the bounds of certain restrictions.
Plagiarism is not theft, nor is it a crime for that matter.
Copying is never stealing.
No kidding.
Hmm… Maybe we should give it a test?
Allow me to “copy” your bank account. Please provide information for me to verify the completeness of the copy. Then we can determine if any theft has taken place. If it hasn’t then one free puppy will be yours.
If you break into my house and copy my bank account number off on of my bank cards or whatever, then you’re committing breaking and entering (which is a serious offence). If you then use this information to plunder my bank account (which is impossible, since you’re going to need my PIN number which is only in my head), it’s stealing – you’re taking my money without my permission. However, the original act of copying my bank information is still just that – copying.
If, for instance, you were a friend of mine, and you copied my bank account information through no illegal act, then you’ve done nothing wrong until you commit the actual crime of using said information to take my money without my permission.
In none of these scenarios is the act of copying the stealing.
It’s not stealing in a sense that you take something away from someone leaving the victim with nothing.
However a digital copy is bit perfect.
Now imagine you could do this with a bottle of milk. You go to a shop, duplicate a bottle of milk and leave without paying. You claim it’s not stealing as the bottle is still in the shop, yet you have a bottle of milk and the shopkeeper has an unsold bottle and no money. If everybody does this the shopkeeper will go out of business. Is this fair?
A digital copy is an exact duplicate of a product you should pay money for, but haven’t, yet you have the full benefit of a product other people invested time and money in.
Now I’m all for making copies for yourself. If I buy a CD I see no problem in ripping it and listening to the music on my iPod. Nor should downloading be illegal, as it’s hard to tell for a customer what is and what isn’t legal and also stuff can find its way on to your hard disk without you actually meaning it to.
But digital copies… it may not be stealing in the classical meaning, but it has the same effect in a way.
In the event that someone learns how to duplicate physical objects without any inputs other than say energy or raw materials, then the economics of scarcity of physical objects collapse – it becomes simply a dumb idea to expect to get paid for physical objects (other than the raw materials and energy involved).
That means that the value creation shifts to other places, such as services like designing different tasting or nutritionally different milks.
To bring that back to various forms of information – the value becomes centered around the provision of hardware to handle the information, and the service of creating/modifying the information. It’s no longer economically viable to expect to get paid for providing copies when the copies are created at essentially zero cost (naturally, legal and contractual life support notwithstanding).
In the event of being able to copy a physical object, the physical object looses its value. Economics is about scarcity, someone can do something for me, or can provide me with something that I can’t or, creating it myself would cost me more than it costs to have him do/create/deliver it. Which is the reason one can pay someone for a service (time has become a product itself), or a skill. The shop keeper would have to find himself something else to sell instead. The creation of money as a way to pay for something stems from finding something that is DIFFICULT TO COPY OR RECREATE (hence gold, silver…).
Exactly. It’s no longer about fair at that point, its about whether the shop keeper is in the right line of business
Which goes to the question, do people have a right to make money off of whatever they want, or should they be allowed to fail if they’re trying to make money off of a fundamentally unviable business model?
I atleast do get what you’re trying to imply, but the analogy is barely limping forward on one foot; you’re still trying to apply physical properties to something that isn’t physical. And this whole article isn’t even about a finished product at all, it’s about the idea of a product.
An obvious shortcoming would be that in reality the shopkeeper wouldn’t give access to the ‘milk’ before getting paid. Sure, there would be some people who copy the ‘milk’ from someone else who’ve bought it, but the fact remains that there’d also be people who paid for it, too.
And then the ideological shortcomings: what if the shopkeeper was selling a vague description of a product, not a finished product nor instructions how to make one? Say, the description would be e.g. “a hollow carton box inside which you pour a dairy product”, would it be alright then to deny anyone else selling a product with similar properties even when the manufacturers of those products had never even heard of this shopkeeper?
Or how about this: is it right to erode rights of majority just for the misdeeds of the few?
Alas, these things are hardly ever straightforward.
I know the article isn’t about downloading music/warez/stuff, but people started about whether copying is stealing or not.
Bytes aren’t physical, unlike the milk bottle, but I’m trying to illustrate that that’s the whole point: it’s digital, so it can be copied perfectly. Hence there is no need to steal something by removing it from the owner in to your own possession. If you copy it you have it. Wether it’s music or software.
It’s also not about the owner having it and then losing it, it’s about having it, but unable to sell it because people copy it.
Now regarding vague ideas, I have nothing against people doing their own thing. I should be allowed to code my own version of OS X. I don’t think I should copy the artwork or sell it pre-installed on a computer with a piece of fruit on it, but if people have ideas I should be able to create my own version.
I have seen some generally described stuff that has been labeled IP, making it look very silly. Like the hyperlink or the one click buy. That’s stuff we can do without.
You’re clearly unfamiliar with the term ‘artificial scarcity’ – look it up sometime. Some people are currently making money selling things that have no (or little) intrinsic value. Time always eliminates these ‘jobs’, and it’s a good thing. Society shouldn’t spend more on things than what they are worth. That’s inefficiency, and pulls everybody down (except for a scant few getting rich off said inefficiency).
If you’d only pay for what something’s really worth the producer of this product can only break even if he sells all of his stock, making no profit.
It’s unlikely you can sell of of your products, unless they are iPhones or iPads, but why would someone go through all of this trouble when he can not make a profit? And part of the profit can be used to create more and better products.
So if people copy music/software it might reach a point for some producers to ask themselves “why bother?”. Companies like Microsoft can take a large amount of piracy and even arguably benefit from it, but smaller companies can’t.
I do get your point: you are worried about the people that will lose their jobs.
But thats the point! Technology advances, and made several business models and professions obsolete throughout the history.
And what happened? Nothing special. New professions arrived, with even more jobs than before.
Holding the progress in the name of protectionism of a dying business model is even worse than the jobs that will end due it.
If we protected every dying business from the future itself, we would still be using near unchanged XIX century technology, and living the horrendous lifestyle from that era.
I’m not really worried about jobs or progress, I’m merely trying to explain why I consider copying theft even though nothing is taken away from the owner.
The music business, to stay with them, started putting music on records. Then we got cassettes, cds, and now cd sales are plummeting as people start downloading (legal and illegal).
People have been copying music all those years. The copy however wasn’t near as good as the original, it took time to do a copy, it was a cumbersome process too. And at least here in The Netherlands when you bought an empty media you had to pay some extra money to compensate the music industry.
Right now we have entered an age were any idiot can copy music (most do), with only the click of a mouse button. You have an exact copy. No loss of sound quality. You can duplicate it, spread it, up/download it with almost no effort and in (very) large numbers. There is no compensation for the music industry when you buy a computer or get an Internet connection (nor would I want to pay them any money, bastards).
I think copying/stealing/whatever of music has always been around, but technology has become so advanced that pirates can do serious damage to music sales. When you download music without paying you are depriving a music provider of a sale, just like if you’d walk in to a store and steal an album. The stolen album removes the album from the store and which is unable to sell it. But I don’t think it’s much different to copying/downloading music where, like the store theft, you get the music for free and the store doesn’t get any money.
Now I don’t think this can be fixed in the current model. I think you should be able to download anything that’s downloadable and I don’t want to pay extra money for tech products because I might listen to music or watch video on it.
I think things like iTunes or Spotify can provide a platform and service that makes it so easy to acquire music that people would be willing to pay for it. People will still download music illegal, but they always have. At least thanks to iTunes and Spotify the music industry gets money they otherwise would’t have.
But whatever model we will end up up I consider copying of music basically the same as stealing.
It doesn’t really matter if the end product is physical or digital. If the original producer doesn’t get a reward for product, eventually that will drive the gifted programmer/producer away to do something completely different (no milk!). Modern society isn’t a static set of developers and occupations. It’s an organic result of behavioral models, which has been in place for decades.
So? Who gives a flying fcuk? This happens all the time. Blacksmiths are virtually gone. The horse business has collapsed completely (compared to the pre-car era). The oil industry will eventually collapse. Coal mines have been shut down in The Netherlands in the ’60s due to progress in other fields. And so on.
This is called progress. Deal with it. If a new technology makes your business model unsustainable – find new business models. Or are you in favour of taxing cars that do not run on fossil fuels just to protect the oil industry?
It also means no more Gilmore Girls.
Stop with these nonsensical sweeping statements. Despite all this downloading, the entertainment industry is still producing TV shows a million times more expensive than GG. Heck, GG has a spiritual successor in Parenthood, and it’s doing just fine on TV.
And even if it did mean no more shows like GG – well, too bad. That’s the way life goes. Something else will come up to replace it and fill the void.
I think you might have missed that the parent comment was a joke.
“Stealing” conventionally has the meaning that the victim has lost possession of whatever was stolen. Trying to extend that meaning to cover crimes without a tangible loss just confuses the issue – breaching copyright or patents is a crime, but it’s not “stealing”.
No but it still not stealing.
Having the same effect is not the same as being the same thing. A lot of actions can result in someone dying, that doesn’t mean it’s murder.
But why can’t we label this stealing?
Some basketball players never go to jail despite averaging over 1 steal per game.
It’s not uncommon to see articles about stolen passwords, credit card numbers and even ideas (which aren’t near as bit perfect like digital copies). Spies steal stuff, malware steal personal information. People read this and say, “Hey, stuff was stolen” and nobody disagrees with that. So why stick to the old fashioned definition of theft?
It may make a difference in court where they tend to be more strict about definitions, like when causing a death is murder or not. But in the normal world I think it’s already accepted that copying stuff without paying for it is considered stealing.
It is perfectly fair, the shopkeeper needs to find a new line of business because a technology has been created which makes his old business obsolete. It’s called progress.
Being a blacksmith used to be a profitable business, now that people drive cars it’s very hard to make any money as a blacksmith and most of them went out of business years ago… Is this fair?
People used to buy lanterns, candles, and various other devices to light their homes… Now we have electricity supplied to every home and many of the people who made and sold such lighting devices went out of business… Is this fair?
The mantra is adapt or die.
If someone creates a technology allowing you to duplicate milk, do you think this technology should be outlawed to artificially prop up those who make a living from selling milk?
You’re taking a theoretical unrealistic example for real, but I’ll say this:
I think there is a big difference between a number of people and companies working together to put a bottle of milk in the shop and someone walking in reaping the result of their work, but giving no compensation AND a duplication machine that would transform an industry or even the world.
Sure cars replaced horses, but that’s not reaping the benefits of blacksmiths without compensation them. If a blacksmith made a new horse shoe and you can in, copied it and walked out that wouldn’t be fair. Not liking horses and coming up with a car is progress and fair.
If an artist with a whole organization around him produces a piece of music people copy with permission for free is hardly called progress. Sure people have been doing this for years, even before the Internet, but now everything is zeros and ones you can easily create an exact copy, do it very fast and many times.
But hey, I also download music. However I also buy it, from my favorite artists or bands who deserve it. If it’s just one song I may like today, but not next week I just download it for free. If I couldn’t have downloaded it I would’t have bought it anyway. So I might not consider this legal or honest, but I can live with it as it didn’t really caused a missed sale.
You mean like this?
http://www.snopes.com/photos/technology/3dprinter.asp
Not milk precisely, but you just can’t make up obscure and impossible examples fast enough to avoid reality.
I guess 3D printers should be able to make milk bottles.
And I guess they don’t need to be able to make milk if they are able to print a cow.
And if it can print chocolate (did you notice the last line of that article?), who needs milk? 😀
If I’d buy a 3D printer that can make chocolate I would probably die within a year, but it would be worth it!
the milk comparison is retarded because if the world could duplicate food without cost everyone would do it and the world would be a better place. try again.
No, it would make everyone even fatter.
Yes it is !
In a world where you could copy a bottle of milk (aka copy the information that makes a bottle of milk a bottle of milk aka a replicator ?) it should be perfectly fine to do so.
Information (any and all of it) should be free.
You could question if a store owner has the right to allow copying in his store but the general act of copying the milk itself should be no problem.
Say you buy the bottle of milk and copy it endlessly in your home. There would be nothing wrong with that ! but still the effects for the store owner is the same.
Now in that world store owners will become redundant because if we can copy physical goods there is no need for a store owner, a store (in the traditional sense) or having an original ‘non-copied’ version of the good.
This works in exactly the same way that the car and train replaced horses and wagons. The printing press replaced scribes etc. They simply are not here anymore because we evolved further.
Also in all these cases there where people screaming that it was so bad, the work of the devil or other rhetoric.
In the end most if not everything will be replaced by something different (and hopefully better
.
With the digital age, and this is a topic that is getting old now, we created an instant and infinite way to copy things. Music, Books, Code, Ideas, etc.
And there are a lot of forces that are trying, semi successfully, to keep the world from evolving the digital age to it’s ‘perfect-form’.
We see this in content delivery, political lobby groups, etc. But eventually this all must head somewhere. It might be delayed for a while, but in the end we either must accept copying as a basic free right where it doesn’t matter what’s being copied or give up the concept and end the Internet and digital transfer mediums as we know it. (if such a thing would be even possible)
So… to make a long story even longer…
I would conclude that the problem you sketch only exists in a pre-digital-age way of thinking about information.
And that we should think differently about this information. So that in the example the shop owner would not be selling the milk anymore because that becomes pointless but it might sell replication-blueprints of a endless slight variations of the milk.
Because your 50 generation replicated milk would still tasted like the first sip, and you miss all the dynamics that comes into play with non copied milk.
I don’t think you understood the question. I didn’t mean copy credentials. I meant copy the bank account — Exactly. I figure out which bank you have, access the bank’s systems and make a perfect copy of the account. Not a hard link or soft link, but a *full* copy.
The account is really just a couple of electronic entries in a computer somewhere, right? I just make a second entry with the same ids and credentials. I didn’t steal money from you. If money was withdrawn by you with your credentials from your accounts, it would come out of one, maybe at random. You might temporarily double up the balance, but it might be a bad thing too if you can only withdraw from one and only deposit in the other. At the end of the day, with an objective measure of money, someone would be out money.
Perhaps a better analogy might be counter-fitting. Is copying a $100 stealing money?
In any case, its a stupid statement that’s always been designed to defend and justify other illegal activity by choosing a name that rests easier with the ones committing the activity. I’m not stealing ( an act prohibited by all moral codes since the beginning of time) music/moivies/video games,ect; I’m just committing copyright infringement which was not explicitly prohibited thousands of years ago in stone tablets.
Its the intellectual and moral equivalent of a young earth creationist asserting that evolution is just a theory.
Or conversely, trying to associate a certain act with a more serious crime than it actually is in the interest of profit.
I’d add that it’s not necessarily always about monetary profit, though.
Example : Freedom of speech on the Internet is used daily by terrorists, pirates and child rapists in order to organize themselves and perpetrate crimes. Therefore, to protect our nation and children, I suggest switching to a more secure alternative in which every content that is to be distributed on the internet first has to be vetted by a trusted authority, preferably a consortium of big players of the Internet which have deep insight into the question (such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and the MPAA). Said service will, of course, be provided free of charge, in sense that it will be funded by fair taxes on information storage media.
(The worst is, we are not so far from this. If you look at the iOS App Store, it’s pretty much that, but with one single player and private funds. Even the arguments are the same.)
Edited 2011-11-30 07:19 UTC
If you copied his bank account, then you would need to do that on the bank’s computer systems which would constitute hacking.
If you were to copy all of the data related to his account and duplicate it onto your own systems that would be different, although it may still require you to break into the bank’s systems in order to obtain that information to start with.
If you withdrew money from that account, you would be stealing from the bank since the bank would no longer be in possession of that money. The account itself does not hold money, it simply declares how much of the money held by the bank the accountholder is allowed to take…
Typical copyright infringement occurs against something that has already been released into the public eye… If someone was to hack into a film studio and take a copy of a movie that had not yet been released then that would be different crimes – unauthorised access to a computer system (hacking), and unauthorised access to information (taking of the movie itself)…
Copying a $100 bill is not stealing money.
Using that counterfeit $100 bill to obtain something else is fraud, ie acquiring goods by deception.
Actually it is the other way found, the terms “theft” and “piracy” are explicitly chosen because they have more shock value and provoke more of a reaction than “copyright infringement”. This is actually more closely the equivalent of comparing someone to Hitler. Comparing someone to Hitler is meant to make that person seem worse than they really are and trigger a response from the shock value, because Hitler is extremely well known, almost universally reviled and regarded as one of the most evil men in history.
Call a spade a spade… Copyright infringement is the correct term, it is not stealing, it is not piracy, and you are not as evil as hitler.
Say you are contracted to translate a still under copyright book with terms that part of of your renumeration is that you’ll get a percentage of each copy of that translated book sold.
What if someone copy that book and offer it for free to download.
How would you feel about that?
You mean, the digital version of a… Library?
More hypothetically. Say fiction stuff (not academic material which i think should be free to all).
Something regarding copyright you can kind of relate to.
Edited 2011-11-29 22:55 UTC
If you make a copy of my bank account (and implicitly the money) you havent stolen anything from me. I still have the same amount of money as before.
Actually you don’t, since copying has added more money to the overall amount of money. Thus diminishing the value of money.
Well that happens anyways… even without you copying the bank account.
In that case the people would get a bit of the power of the financial system that is currently reserved to banks and governments. Possibly highlighting a flaw that exists within the current system anyways.
Though I guess you could also argue that when the copy is made you not only have a copy of my incoming transactions also my outgoing transactions. So suddenly everything I paid for in my live with my bank account has suddenly doubled.
My mortgage payments on my house would be doubled so I would instantly pay off double whatever I did before. Same with transfers to my savings account, etc.
So I might actually be very very happy with you making the copy
I did not lose anything but I did suddenly double my net worth.
This could ripple through the system and making the effect of copy null. (or recursively and the value of money all together ?
So I think the actual effect will be far more complicated then to think that only devaluation of my money supply will happen.
Edited 2011-12-03 06:02 UTC
…that as an American citizen I can host a software project on European servers and have these new EU rulings apply to the code? I’m in no position to move right now, but this would really make me a lot safer from lawsuits.
I’d guess that generally, in the end, your code would be safe – but not necessarily you, yourself. Maybe one just needs to not reveal who they are…
Unauthorized copying of a product with a price is stealing because it devalues the copied product.
Right. So, if competition from Android forces Apple to lower its prices (devalues the product), Android is stealing from Apple?
Wtf?
No, Android is stealing from Microsoft
License fee please
axilmar,
“Unauthorized copying of a product with a price is stealing because it devalues the copied product.”
Stealing and copying are not interchangeable and have completely different semantics. If you were just being careless and swapped the two, then whatever – we know what you mean. But to deliberately assert their equivalence as you just have is inaccurate.
Say I am a real-life thief, and go take gasoline from gas stations without payment. Now if stealing and copying were equivalents, then one could say I “copied” gasoline from the gas station, which is semantically inaccurate.
Another example: one could “steal” the Eiffel tower, or one could “copy” it as casinos in Las Vegas have. It’s copying may or may not be morally wrong, but there is a logical difference.
At a street carnival, I could steal an artist’s work, depriving him of the original. or I could copy his work. Yes, if I start distributing copies it could deprive him of a sale, but let’s not write the two off as the same thing.
If you want to educate your community to the harms of unauthorised copying, then please do. However when you start out with semantic errors, it opens you up to completely unnecessary attacks that detract from your argument, IMO.
So, what you should have said is:
“Unauthorized copying of a product with a price is BAD because it devalues the copied product.”
Edited 2011-11-30 15:21 UTC
Buying it results in more copies on the market; also, for example, 2nd hand market (NVM less people wanting to get it after… they/many got it). Hence it also devalues the product.
Oh, wait, right, 2nd hand sale is what many licensing & DRM schemes really target, want to make impossible. Never mind then, carry on.
My reading of this opinion is that .h files are as subject to copyright like any another other source code. No doubt others will disagree vehemently.
I wish that the term “function” weren’t use in this article as it is. It’s just plain confusing to a programmer. “Functionality” would be far better – and it is used some of the time in the article, but not all the time. Functions – as the term is use by programmers – are copyrightable, because they’re concrete source code. Functionality, on the other hand, is not copyrightable, and it’s good to see that the courts are showing some good sense in that regard.
Functions are copyrightable?
Maybe *some* are – the functions that someone writes themselves. However, I’d be a bit concerned if someone tried to copyright the sqr() function or the trig functions. I don’t think there’s much chance of that though.
Those functions are not original. They’re also pretty much pure math. So, of course they aren’t copyrightable. But functions in general are copyrightable or source code in general isn’t copyrightable, because source code is made up primarily of functions.
Doesn’t WINE allow open source OS users to do the same type of thing – ie run programs designed for another operating system (software program) on a different operating system (software program)?
Plus I’ve just seen an ad for a $5 program to allow Mac OSX users run Windows progs within OSX.
Are these illegal, then?