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Re: [News] SFLC Responds to Copyright Misconceptions, Presents Moglen Ta


From: RJack
Subject: Re: [News] SFLC Responds to Copyright Misconceptions, Presents Moglen Talk
Date: Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:19:51 -0500
User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 (Windows/20090812)

Hyman Rosen wrote:
On 2/10/2010 10:39 AM, Alexander Terekhov wrote:
Erik Andersen's alleged (and fraudulent in fact) claim of ownership


<http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Gaiman_v._McFarlane> In addition to
the copyright notices, McFarlane registered copyright on the issues
and the books. ... McFarlane’s registrations no more revealed an
intent to claim copyright in Gaiman’s contributions, as distinct from
McFarlane’s own contributions as compiler and illustrator, than the
copyright notices did. The significance of registration is that it is
a prerequisite to a suit to enforce a copyright.

GPL skeptics are so wrong, in so many ways.

1) The Best Buys et.al. suit filed by the SFLC is in the Second Circuit
not the Seventh Circuit of the Gaiman_v._McFarlane suit.
2) The Gaiman_v._McFarlane suit was about a declaration of ownership,
not a copy infringement suit.
3) You're mixing out of context apples and oranges issues:
"POSNER, Circuit Judge. Neil Gaiman brought suit under the Copyright Act
against Todd McFarlane and corporations controlled by him that we can
ignore, seeking a declaration that he (Gaiman) owns copyrights jointly
with McFarlane in certain comic-book characters."


Erik Andersen signed a *Complaint* explicitly claiming that:

"20. Mr. Andersen is the author and developer of the BusyBox computer
program, and the owner of copyrights in that computer program. BusyBox
is a single computer program that comprises a set of computing tools and
optimizes them for computers with limited resources, such as cell
phones, PDAs, and other small, specialized electronic devices."

Erik Andersen is *not* "the author" of the "single computer program"
know as BusyBox -- this is a patently false statement.

"23. Under the License, Mr. Andersen grants certain permissions to other
parties to copy, modify and redistribute BusyBox so long as those
parties satisfy certain conditions."

Notice that "*Mr Andersen* grants..." -- doesn't say "*the developers*"
of BusyBox grant...

"31. Mr. Andersen is, and at all relevant times has been, a copyright
owner under United States copyright law in the FOSS software program
known as BusyBox. See, e.g., “BusyBox, v.0.60.3.”, Copyright Reg. No.
TX0006869051 (10/2/2008)."

Here is the release of busybox-0.60.3 that Erik claims he authored.
http://www.busybox.net/downloads/legacy/

Decompress it and see if Erik claims a compilation copyright on the
arrangement and selection of the source code. Let's grant that he does
have a copyright on the arrangement of that specific tarball release.
Remember that the copyright resides in the specific arrangement and
selection of the constituent elements in a compilation. That was on
27-Apr-2002 (735K). Are you seriously claiming that the fourteen
defendants in the pending SFLC suit are infringing *that* particular
arrangement “BusyBox, v.0.60.3”? The last 2008 release is
busybox-1.13.2.tar.bz2-31-Dec-2008. The source tarball with more
efficient compression is 2.0M -- three times as large with thousands
of patches.

The current SFLC lawsuit is so fucked up it doesn't even deserve the
label "wrong". Eben Moglen is an incompetent socialist moron.

Hyman Rosen sez, "The Captain's scared them out of the water!"
http://www.fini.tv/blog/finishing_line_files/a44f9390355368f87dc47b7ec094f93e-36.php

ROFL. ROFL. ROFL.

Sincerely,
Rjack :)










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