“Patent trolls want $1,000—for using scanners | Ars Technica”
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/patent-trolls-want-1000-for-using-scanners/
On Tuesday, a New York state appellate court made a curious decision in a matter being litigated between Grooveshark parent company Escape Media Group, Inc. and UMG Recordings, Inc. The court ruled that due to an oddity in copyright law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act does not apply to songs that were licensed under state law before February 15, 1972. As such, for these recordings, Grooveshark is not eligible for what is known as safe harbor—an immunity to liability if users upload copyrighted works without the website’s knowledge
Many citizens and politicians are against the ACTA Agreement[1] but here is a movie that could be the perfect advertising in favor of the ACTA Agreement 🙂
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement
This post is based on my understanding of legal discussions. As I’m not a lawyer I already ask you to forgive me for the mistakes. It is clear that this post will be updated depending on the input of the readers or my offline discussions with legal experts.
A few months ago I wrote this post: Will gpl die at european administration now that eupl is available? where I asked if the European Commission will introduce a real competitor to the GPL in Europe thanks to its Open Source Licence. A licence that will be transposed as laws in the 27 European Union Member States.
I knew that the European Commission was dealing with the translation of the EUPL because my company dealt with the process.
After a first proposal from the translation service of the European Commission, we requested to more than 40 “Open Source Licence” experts all over Europe to review, comment and propose amendment (if needed) to the Licence based on their national law.
Adapting the Licence to a Member State means that the public or private organisations wanting to use the EUPL in its language have the advantage that the Licence will preserve their national rights (copyright, obligations of the licensee, Chain of authorship, Warranty, Liability, Termination of the licence…).
Except the French Cecill licence, no other Open Source licence adapts its content with any national law!
The translations of the EUPL are translated in 22 languages. We are 27 Member States. We know that several countries recognise the same languages: French is used in Belgium and France; German is used in Germany, Belgium and Austria; Dutch is used in the Netherlands and Belgium…
Today, for me it is still unclear how the French version of the EUPL reflects the Belgian and/or the French law ?!? I have the same question for the other “shared” languages.
I assume that the transposition of the directive in the different laws will definitely address my incertitude
25 January 2008, Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens (IDABC) organised a workshop during which all legal experts and OSS practitioners from across Europe have met to discuss their experiences with the EUPL.
A presentation of
Last topic of the day was the preparation of the next version of the EUPL by discussing with the legal experts of the possible amendments to be made to the current version of the licence.
Main discussions topics were the following:
As most of the open source applications are “server based” it should be essential to include it
EUPL says the following: “Distribution and/or Communication: any act of selling, giving, lending, renting, distributing, communicating, transmitting, or otherwise making available, on-line or off-line, copies of the Work at the disposal of any other natural or legal person.”
the Finish law gives this priority for the verbs presented in bold:
This prioritisation is important but still vague for me. Apparently this is linked with, for example, the difference existing between “watching the television” and “using a User Interface of an application”. Physically speaking you do the same: you watch a screen; but legally speaking there is a difference. As soon as I get further information I will update this post.
The EUPL says this (section 1 definitions): “The Original Work or the Software: the software distributed and/or communicated by the Licensor under this Licence, available as Source Code and also as Executable Code as the case may be.
– Derivative Works: the works or software that could be created by the Licensee, based upon the Original Work or modifications thereof. This Licence does not define the extent of modification or dependence on the Original Work required in order to classify a work as a Derivative Work; this extent is determined by copyright law applicable in the country mentioned in Article 15.
– The Work: the Original Work and/or its Derivative Works.”
The expert explained us that there is a difference between the “environment” and the “software”.
The environment encloses everything that allows software to run: the software, the files associated (like XML Schemas, scripts…), the database software…
The Software is just the piece of code that could run on a specific environment.
The expert requested to add new definition describing the concept of the environment.
EUPL says this:
The verb “to use” must be understood as “to run the program”.
Apparently the 3rd paragraph poses problem: “This disclaimer of warranty is an essential part of the Licence and a condition for the grant of any rights to the Work.”
The question by the German expert was “what happens if there is a problem with the national law?”
Apparently a change in the wording will be needed (unfortunately I didn’t write it down to share it inside this post)
Section 7 paragraph 3 says: “This disclaimer of warranty is an essential part of the Licence and a condition for the grant of any rights to the Work.”
Section 13. Miscellaneous says: “Without prejudice of Article 9 [Additional agreements] above, the Licence represents the complete agreement between the Parties as to the Work licensed hereunder. If any provision of the Licence is invalid or unenforceable under applicable law, this will not affect the validity or enforceability of the Licence as a whole. Such provision will be construed and/or reformed so as necessary to make it valid and enforceable...”
Effectively, Section 7 says that the “disclaimer of warranty is an essential part of the Licence” where the Section 13 days that “[if some] provision of the Licence is invalid or unenforceable…this will not affect the validity … of the licence as a whole”.
Section 7 should be updated in Italian because the clauses limiting the warranties must be signed by the licensor and the licensee: Reading and clicking on a button demonstrating your acceptance of the licence is not sufficient!
A legal expert correctly mentioned that the section 7 Disclaimer of Warranty says this “The Work is a work in progress, which is continuously improved by numerous contributors. It is not a finished work and may therefore contain defects or “bugs” inherent to this type of software development.”
This sentence presumes that Open Source Software quality is such that bugs are inherent to this type of software. Meaning that other types of applications (read closed source applications) are not subject to bugs 😉
This sentence will be removed in the future.
What means “reasonable” in the Section 13 Miscellaneous?
Section 13 says this: “The European Commission may put into force translations and/or binding new versions of this Licence, so far this is required and reasonable.”
Reasonable adjective is too vague. People could imagine that the European Commission can change the type of the Open Source classification of the EUPL to a closed source classification.
Off course, this is not the vision of the European Commission!
German expert proposed to change the adjective “reasonable” by something like “Open Source licence” or “Copyleft licence”.
This is not my first meeting with legal experts but it is maybe the first time that I could understand each word of an Open Source Licence thanks to the translations that was made available.
Off course, the GPL has been translated by people without any warranty of quality and completeness but here, we discussed with people wanting to translate an Open Source Licence that can be used in Europe and be used in its own language.
A lot of money has been used to translate this Licence but the advantage for the European Public or Private organisations that don’t need to translate it individually is such that our money has been perfectly used.
Today, people are working on the comments made by the experts in order to propose a new version of the Licence. It will take months before the version 1.1 will be released and everybody is free to make comments on this licence to make it the most used Open Source licence in Europe!
European Union Public Licence v1.0: http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/6523
Council Directive 91/250/EEC of 14 May 1991 on the legal protection of computer programs: http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/lvb/l26027.htm
For the first time an Open Source Public Licence will have the power of law. The European Union Public Licence (EUPL) has been published the 9 January 2007.
The licence is currently translated into the 21 European Union languages, the first ever Open Source licence translated legally and not only “for information” purpose!
European Union Public Administrations can now release their software under a licence that “takes care of their national specific copyright terminology and their provisions related to information, warranty or liability exclusion respecting consumer’s rights”. This is also related to “applicable law and competent court, as the EUPL guiding principle is based on trust towards Member States’ parliaments and judges without restrictions or exceptions”.
Does mean a threat to the GPL? Off course not, the writers of the Open Source Licence demonstrated an openness of mind by authorising the re-distribution of derivate works under the compatible licence:
Should the licensee’s obligations under the compatible licence conflict with EUPL’s obligations, the obligations of the Compatible Licence shall prevail. If other similar licences could be inspired by this open mind, the « free licence wars» and resulting incompatibilities would rapidly end!
SAP is proposing a new product, A1S, targeted to SMEs having a turn over between 25 to 150 millions Euros. The solution”… will deliver the benefits of enterprise SOA under a new “try-run-adapt” model leveraging the Internet and telesales, and can be managed entirely remotely, from day-to-day operations to upgrades...” [1].
Basically nothing new, the customer design his process and he hopes to deploy it quickly. Previously this task needed many consultants, customisations and money.
Today, SAP CFO, Dr. Werner Brandt, says that A1S will “…reduce the TCO by 90%…” [2] by removing the need of the customisations by well paid consultants. SAP proposes a “…suite in a box…” that can be customised by the end user with the help of a telesales person. This summarises the process of deploying an SAP solution to some BPM 2.0 concepts developed by Ismael Chang Ghalimi (Zero code, Used by Process Analysts, One-click deploy) [3]. Here the SAP A1S added-value [2]:
Ismael Ghalimi says that BPM 2.0 [4] is also “…Free of charge…“, “… [uses a] Web 2.0 user interface…“, “... [is] loved by ABAP… Folks…” Those assumptions will have to be verified when SAP will present his product to a broader audience and after some first user experience feedback’s.
Two questions come to my mind:
Is SAP A1S an output of the cooperation with Intalio or, more correctly, the fact that SAP ventures funded Intalio [5]?
Is a 90% reduction of the TCO means “Free of charge” for SAP?
[1] http://www.sap.com/company/press/press.epx?pressid=7227
[2] http://www.sap.com/germany/company/ investor/pdf/WB_UBS_March14_Final.pdf
[3] http://www.intalio.com
[4] http://itredux.com/bpm-20/BPM20.pdf
[5] “Workflow, Document and Business Process Management”, http://www.conspectus.com 2004
Open Source Observatory and Repository project (OSOR), an European Commission IDABC initiative meets some QualiPSo members.
The aim of this meeting was to try to find synergies between two European Commission projects:
In short, to setup a repository for Public Administrations we need (i) Quality Software factories reviewing the quality/reliability of the free softwares available on the forge, (ii) best practices concerning the development of Open Source Software are shared accross organisations, (iii) state of the art stacks reliable and usable by any organisation; many deliverables that will be delivered by QualiPSo team during the next 4 years.
A few days ago, I’ve expressed my concern about the attribution clause (not longer available on their website) added to the MPL 1.1 in the Alfresco ECM. Today, Alfresco released the Alfresco 2.0 Community Release of their ECM under the GPL 2.
Their branding is now so huge that the attribution clause became obsolete, they effectively started to market their software before they had any huge install based and fully functional packages (thanks to the well known VC and their experienced team).
The European Union Public Licence 1.0 (EUPL v.1.0) was approved by the European Commission on 9 January 2007. This page contains the official versions in English, French and German together with a preamble explaining the purpose of this Open Source Software (OSS) Licence. A study on the compatibility mechanism foreseen in the EUPL v.1.0, has been included.
Studies and Drafts are also available.
Alfresco, the Entreprise Content Management uses an Alfresco open source licence that has not been accepted yet by the Open Source Initiative (http://www.opensource.org) due to one attribution clause added in the Mozilla Public Licence v1.1. Before deploying Alfresco be sure that the User Interface guidelines of your customer match the attribution clause constraint!
“….II. Alfresco and logo.
This License does not grant any rights to use the trademarks “Alfresco” and the “Alfresco” logos even if such marks are included in the Original Code or Modifications.
However, in addition to the other notice obligations, all copies of the Covered Code in Executable and Source Code form distributed must, as a form of attribution of the original author, include on each user interface screen (i) the ” Alfresco Community” logo, (ii) the vendor disclaimer “Supplied free of charge with no support, no certification, no maintenance, no warranty and no indemnity by Alfresco Software, Inc or its certified partners. Click here for support. And certified Versions” and (iii) the copyright notice in the same form as the latest version of the Covered Code distributed by Alfresco Software, Inc. at the time of distribution of such copy. In addition, the “Alfresco Community” logo and vendor disclaimer must be visible to all users and be located at the very bottom left of each user interface screen. Notwithstanding the above, the dimensions of the ” Alfresco Community ” logo must be at least 176 x 26 pixels. When users click on the ” Alfresco Community ” logo it must direct them back to http://www.alfresco.com. When users click on the vendor disclaimer it must direct them to http://www.alfresco.com In addition, the copyright notice must remain visible to all users at all times at the bottom of the user interface screen. When users click on the copyright notice, it must direct them back to http://www.alfresco.com.”
Abdelkrim... yes it's me 