http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/02/ruling-foss-devs-can-collect-damages-from-license-violators.ars

Robert Jacobson, the developer behind the open source Java Model Railroad Interface (JMRI) project, finally prevailed in a long-running open source software license enforcement lawsuit against Matthew Katzer, the owner of a company that sells commercial model train software.

Katzer initially threatened Jacobson and JMRI with a patent infringement lawsuit in 2005, and demanded hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing fees. Upon investigating Katzer’s claims, Jacobson was surprised to discover that Katzer had misappropriated significant amounts of JMRI code, using it without attribution in a commercial software package. Jacobson retaliated against Katzer’s patent suit by filing a copyright infringement suit.

The case has attracted considerable attention within the open source software community because it has broad ramifications for open source license legality. A federal appeals court that heard the case in 2008 ruledthat violating the terms of an open source software license constitutes copyright infringement, not just breach of contract. The distinction is important because the legal remedies for copyright infringement are generally stronger.

After the 2008 ruling, the case was passed back to the district court so that the appropriate remedy could be determined. In a summary judgement issued in December, the district court ruled that Jacobson is entitled to collect monetary damages from Katzer. The judgment also declared that Katzer’s removal of attribution and copyright information from the JMRI code constituted a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Although the ruling won’t set a broad precedent due to the fact that it emerged from a district court, it’s still a significant victory for open source software licensing enforcement. The threat of having to pay monetary damages will give software companies a big incentive to refrain from abusing or misappropriating open source software code. In response to the ruling, Katzer finally agreed to settle with Jacobson last week. The conflict, which originally started five years ago, has reached an end.

This story is particularly strange but the fundamental problems with artificial intellectual monopolies shines through. FOSS works not because of copyright but because it’s a better form of development for many software products. With regards to  the usage of the code against the terms of the license Jacobson was in no way harmed. No theft or coercion. He spoke aloud and complains others remembered his speech.

The only way to enforce so called intellectual property laws is by infringing on the actual property rights of others. By releasing source code to the world you’ve created in effect an economic free good. It has no scarcity. It’s use can not naturally be monopolized. By doing so artificially you slow progress, harm consumers and infringe on the property rights of those who wish to utilize the freed good.

For more on anti-intellectual property check out the various works at http://libertyactivism.info

http://www.prisonplanet.com/…

You Tube has expanded its zealous copyright crusade by suspending the popular C-Span Junkie user channel, and in doing so has pulled hundreds of viral Ron Paul videos, which are now completely dead.

The C-Span Junkie user channel, a non-partisan archive of short clips taken from C-Span broadcasts of events in the Congress and the Senate, has been the home of the vast majority of You Tube videos you have seen of Bernanke, Geithner, Paulson and others being confronted in Congress, as well as Ron Paul’s speeches on the House floor. A total of more than 6400 videos in all have been pulled, hundreds of which featured the Texan Congressman.

Whether or not C-Span itself requested that You Tube pull the channel is not known, but it is clearly in the public interest and constitutes fair use to show a clip less than 10 minutes in length of what the people who are supposedly our Representatives are saying in Congress on our behalf.

http://cspanjunkie.org/

YES! Youtube has suspended my CSPANJunkie & VotersThink accounts :(

I told You this was coming!

I will be making an attempt to get the 6400 videos now not available back online.

I’m afraid that’s probably not very likely.

The new Youtube account is… http://www.youtube.com/user/MoxNewsDotCom

I hate 2009 (so far)

But You can’t hold a good man down!

I will do my best to make the new video page the best yet!

I could REALLY use some encouragement, to help me snap back the best I can.

I don’t know if You can imagine what it’s like to in a moment see 6400 videos gone…

Figure 6400 hours (easily) poof GONE! I did this for the common good and now it all gone :(

Like I said I could really use some encouragement!!! So please consider clicking the donate button so I can know it is worth it to put all that time into something that can just disappear. I want to keep doing this but I make about 5 dollars a day in advertising, I have not had a donation for over 30 days (I did get ONE for 2.50$ last week) I want to do this! I REALLY DO!

I just need a little something to pull me out of this ditch. And Hopefully 2009 will miraculously turn around big time!

I can always hope! But I want to fight! So please click the donate button and let me know You think I should keep up the good fight! And I will do my best by You.

Thank You For Your Continued Support!

Speaking of intellectual property law… so much for fair use.

http://www.wired.com/…

The operators of The Pirate Bay launched a long-awaited VPN service Monday, promising to make file sharers and other internet users more anonymous online.

The IPREDATOR Global Anonymity Service, at about $7 monthly, is named for Sweden’s IPRED law that went into force in April. That law empowers copyright owners to acquire data from ISPs identifying people linked to file sharing.

The four operators of the Pirate Bay are staring down a year in prison each, and millions of dollars in fines, after being convicted in a Swedish court for facilitating copyright infringement. They run the world’s most notorious BitTorrent search engine. Their fines and imprisonment are pending appeal.

On Monday, The Pirate Bay announced that 180,000 people have signed up for the service. Invitations to the first 3,000 who signed up in April went out Monday.

“There’s been some small issues but it’s being resolved right now,” the Bay announced Monday on its blog. “Then we’ll invite more people in… We’re hoping that all will have their invite within a month’s period.”

TorrentFreak notes that the IPREDATOR service, announced in April, likely would be more secure than rank-and-file virtual private networks, which encrypt a user’s traffic stream, making it theoretcially invulnerable to interception by a local ISP, or intermediate carriers.

“The weak link in any VPN/anonymity service is always their willingness (or otherwise) to hand over your customer data when pressured under the law. However, with IPREDATOR this should not be an issue since the service is promising to keep no logs of user activity whatsoever,” TorrentFreak said.

Pirate Bay administrators Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde were found guilty in April, along with Carl Lundström, who was accused of funding the five-year-old operation.

In addition to jail time, the defendants were ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) to a handful of entertainment companies, including Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Bros, EMI and Columbia Pictures, for the infringement of 33 specific movie and music properties tracked by industry investigators.

The April verdicts are on appeal amid allegations the judge who presided over the case was biased because he was a member of pro-copyright groups.

I wish them all the luck. I wonder what kind of hardware they have backing it all up and what kinds of speed people will be seeing. Should be interesting.

http://arstechnica.com/…

The Pirate Bay “spectrial” has ended in a guilty verdict, prison sentences for the defendants, and a shared 30 million kronor ($3.5 million) fine. According to the Swedish district court, the operators of the site were guilty of assisting copyright infringement even though The Pirate Bay hosted none of the files in question and even though other search engines like Google also provide direct access to illegal .torrent files.

These two points formed the basis of The Pirate Bay’s defense, but the court found them ultimately unpersuasive in its 107 page verdict. “By providing a site with, as the district court found, sophisticated search functions, easy upload and storage, and a website linked to the tracker,” the defendants were guilty of assistant copyright infringement, the court said.

In an Internet press conference this morning, defendant Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi compared the whole trial to (of all things) The Karate Kid, a movie in which the good guy is roughed up by bullies, goes through a long training process, learns to “wax on, wax off,” encounters his bully again in the final round of a karate tournament, and kicks him in the face with his “crane technique.” Kolmisoppi sees parallels. In the end, he insists, “we’ll kick their ass.”

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