[mythtv-users] Who needs to worry about copyright? CoreAVCforLinux removed from Google Code
Brian Wood
beww at beww.org
Mon May 5 20:33:45 UTC 2008
On May 5, 2008, at 2:10 PM, Anthony R. Baker wrote:
> What I understand is that their "counsel" told them to claim
> infringement under the DMCA or risk weakening their claim of
> ownership of the code and/or copyrighted material .They now see this
> is wrong. Hence the line
> "The DMCA does allow for reverse engineering for compatibility
> purposes and hence in the end no matter what the 'other points' are
> the DMCA takedown request was wrongly sent."
> Since they realized their mistake they are now assisting the
> CoreAVC forLinux developer bring his code up to date with their
> newest release. At least thats what I got out of it. But if I were
> perfect I wouldn't need to be on any mailing lists and multi core
> processors would grow on trees.
One probable result of this sort of silliness is that more projects
will start to be hosted by non-USA based sites operated by outfits
that do not care about the DMCA.
Thus Google, which has done some good things for FOSS, will become
less of a factor in FOSS development.
In the name of "enforcement" of the DMCA the transaction logs of US-
based hosts might be subject to seizure, and lists of people who
downloaded the code might be turned over to the complainers. If you
don't think this is possible just look at what happened with telephone
records of the major operators in the USA, and the current attempt by
the government to grant ex post facto immunity to those operators for
what was clearly a violation of the law (else why would they need
immunity?).
Google is already hosting a lot of mail, and this will probably be
reduced, or at least its growth slowed, as people begin to realize
that their logs are subject to seizure by US authorities armed with
the ability to grant retroactive immunity to service providers.
Whether any of this is good or bad I'm not sure.
beww
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20080505/4083152b/attachment.htm
More information about the mythtv-users
mailing list