
Accident Forgiveness Comes to GPLv2 - szczys
https://hackaday.com/2017/12/13/accident-forgiveness-comes-to-gplv2/
======
crankylinuxuser
Ok, I understand that this is trying to be decent and reasonable people here,
in cases where it's truly an accident of including some GPL code. Shit
happens, clean it up.

If I were to do this with commercial code or assets, would they be so flexible
in working with me, or do they go straight to shakedown? I'll give ye all a
hint: go look at the MPAA and RIAA's views on that.

I remembered when friends were back in the Napster times shook down for a few
grand. Same with Bittorrent's earlier years. There was no amicable "Plz quit
this and were good". In fact, they've lobbied multiple times for laws to
permanently disconnect after X copyright claims.

So, why should the Open Source community be so damned forgiving when we're
surrounded by entities who'd eat every last one of us for lunch if we so much
as accidentally used a copyrighted resource?

(I'm thinking no further than Netflix ripping off a photographer
[https://petapixel.com/2017/11/27/netflix-stole-vhs-
cassette-...](https://petapixel.com/2017/11/27/netflix-stole-vhs-cassette-
photos-stranger-things-boxed-set/) . Good luck for an Australian citizen to
navigate international copyright law to become whole in this regard. )

~~~
tzs
> I remembered when friends were back in the Napster times shook down for a
> few grand.

RIAA asked infringers for about $2 per infringed song. That seems a pretty
fair price--it's only about twice what it would have cost for the people to
legitimately purchase copies of the music.

~~~
yebyen
Really? CNN said it was closer to $80,000 when the Napster cases were
breaking.[1]

Maybe they offered $2/song for the settlement, but according to this article
the settlement offer was $5000 for 24 songs. The 2009 article says the
statutory penalties were between $750 and $150,000 per willful infringement. I
don't know where you're getting $2 from.

[1]: [http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2009/06/19/downloading-mom-
fine...](http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2009/06/19/downloading-mom-
fined-80000-per-song/)

~~~
tzs
$2 or so (up to maybe $4 in some cases) per song is what they asked for when
they sent an initial settlement offer to infringers, before taking any legal
action.

If the person would not settle and the RIAA went on to actually sue the
person, the RIAA would only sue over a small fraction of the infringed songs.

In the case the article you linked is talking about, they caught her
infringing over 1700 songs, and asked for $5000. $5000/1700 = ~$3/song.

When she would not settle, and they sued, they sued over 24 songs. I don't
think I've ever seen an official explanation of why they only sue for a
handful of songs, but a couple plausible reasons come to mind:

1\. They will ask for statutory damages rather than actual damages [1].
Statutory damages are normally a minimum of $750 per infringed work, although
that can be reduced to as low as $200 per infringed work if if the infringer
was not aware and had not reason to be aware that they were infringing.

They only need 7 songs to win the amount they were willing to settle for when
they sent their first letter, or 25 if they think there is any chance the
defendant might get the reduced $200 rate.

2\. For each song they include in the lawsuit, they have to make sure all the
paperwork is in order with the copyright office proving ownership. Copies of
that have to be introduced into evidence at the trial.

The defense is going to attack every one of these. The defense is going to ask
for all the contracts with the artist and try to prove that the RIAA does not
have the right to represent them.

All of this takes time and costs money for no real gain.

In the particular case you cited, the damage award went way above the minimum
largely because the defendant tried to destroy evidence, tried to blame her
children for the copying, and blatantly lied on the stand. The jury has wide
discretion to pick the statutory damage amount from a range, and they picked
from the high end of the range.

And do you know what the RIAA did _after_ the jury awarded that large amount?
They _again_ offered to settle for a relatively small amount. (I don't
remember the exact amount--I think it was around $15000, which based on 1700
songs they caught her infringing would be around $9/song).

That's been the pattern for every RIAA case that went to trial, I believe.
(Only a handful went to trial, because most infringers were smart enough to
realize that (1) they had no defense, and (2) minimum statutory damages were
going to be way more than the RIAA was asking for, and so they settled early).

[1] Actual damages are very hard to determine in most non-commercial copyright
infringement cases (and actually they are often very hard to determine in
commercial infringement cases, too).

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carussell
For anyone wondering about the image in the header with a stylized Stallman as
a Vishnu-like being, it's from Hackaday staff artist Joe Kim.

[http://theartofjoekim.tumblr.com/](http://theartofjoekim.tumblr.com/)

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yarrel
Alternate title: doubling down on not just doing the right thing and using
GPLv3.

~~~
__s
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU)
Torvalds on GPLv2 vs GPLv3

~~~
mempko
I found his arguments either dishonest or ignorant. He basically said "Look, I
don't have an ideology to push, I chose the license because it served MY
needs, FSF is pushing an ideology is GPLv3 and I don't like that.". However,
he certainly has an ideology which I call "The roman conception of freedom".
It is favored by laze-faire free market types. This is not an "ideology-free"
argument.

He is pushing an ideology just as much as the FSF is. At least the FSF is
honest and clear about what that ideology is.

~~~
Analemma_
Torvalds has always been very upfront that he doesn't care about software
freedom. Note that choice of words very carefully: not "opposes" but "doesn't
care about", one way or the other.

He has said from the beginning that the choice of GPL for Linux was a
_technical_ one that he thinks produces the best code, and that the GPLv3
offered no technical gains and thus wasn't worth switching to. Presumably if
he thought switching to a different license altogether produced better code,
he'd do that.

Is not having an opinion on software freedom an ideology? I don't have an
opinion on most political questions in, say, Mongolia. Does that give me a
particular ideology on whatever political spectrum Mongolia has?

~~~
Phrodo_00
Also, Linux code is owned by whoever wrote it (or paid to have it written I
guess), so it'd a major effort to try and change its license.

~~~
TrashMacNugget
True, but Linux originally used the GPLv2, but IIRC never said anywhere
whether it was GPLv2-only or GPLv2 or any later version, or just "GPL".
According to the GPL, that means:

> If the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may
> choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.

So Linux could've theoretically upgraded to the GPLv3 (or GPLv2+). However,
Linus didn't like that idea, and in 2006 edited the COPYING file to say that
it was GPLv2-only. If you really wanted to, you could take the 2006 source
code and make a GPLv3 fork of Linux.

~~~
kelnos
> If you really wanted to, you could take the 2006 source code and make a
> GPLv3 fork of Linux.

You certainly theoretically _could_ , but maintaining, updating, and
modernizing such a beast would be out of the reach of most people and
organizations. 11 years of progress can't be replicated so quickly, especially
when you consider you'd need to do it in a clean-room sort of fashion to be
entirely aboveboard, which means many people who are already well familiar
with the Linux kernel couldn't even work on it.

At any rate, I think your estimate of the timing is off: I found references to
the "GPLv2-only" language in the kernel's COPYING file as far back as
linux-2.4.0-test8, which was released sometime in 2000, and I didn't really
try to go farther back.

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geokon
Doesn't this clause seems not backwards compatible with GPLv2?

At face value GPLv3 seems more constrained - so it's easy to relicense an
existing v2 project. You just tell everyone working on it, okay, now every
addition we make has extra requirements (if you want the looser version, you
can grab an older copy of our project from when we switched licenses)

Loosening the license on pre-existing code is sorta like if you wanted to make
the project (like the Linux kernel) BSD. You'd have to have everyone who has
already contributed to agree to loosen the license on their work. If one
person thinks "Hell no! I want people to be severely punished" then you're in
for a headache.

So then GPLv3 isn't a "superset" and compatible GPLv2? Or did am I
misunderstanding something?

~~~
racer-v
No, GPLv3 and v2 have always been incompatible. v2 forbids placing additional
restrictions on distribution, whereas v3 adds more requirements (e.g. patent
grants). So if you receive code under v2, you can't distribute it under v3,
nor can you distribute v3 under v2, nor can you combine them.

[https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1778](https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/1778)

------
racer-v
The GPL ship has sailed. It used to be every free license could be converted
to GPL, so it became the "universal recipient" license. Then Stallman forked
it and created two incompatible GPL's, effectively killing his own dream of a
copyleft ecosystem. So the only sane thing now is "universal donor" licenses
like MIT - or straight public domain. I'm stealing all of this from Rob
Landley.

[https://ia601008.us.archive.org/7/items/OhioLinuxfest2013/24...](https://ia601008.us.archive.org/7/items/OhioLinuxfest2013/24-Rob_Landley-
The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Copyleft.mp3)

------
yuhong
The fun thing is that many projects are already GPLv2 or later.

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Blazespinnaker
The funny thing is that gpl is mostly used by per profit companies creating a
two licensing system. Gpl is great to test drive before buying a commercial
license, but other than it’s pretty much ignored except maybe in academia.

~~~
comatose
well, safari, chrome, osx, iphone, iPad, amazon, android, appletv, and a large
number of routers and car systems all use gpl under that license singly. the
fact that it's mostly due to linux and khtml seem unimportant when you say so
much gpl is dual licensed ( all of those contain software that is gpl only)
but, yes, dual licensing is popular too, ie the immense popularity of qt

~~~
racer-v
Eh, what? Safari and Chrome are not GPL - they're Apple / Google freeware
built on BSD and LGPL. OSX is proprietary based on BSD. Android is notable for
refusing to include GPL components other than Linux. Not sure what you're
trying to say here.

