Portions of the software in question are licensed under the Free Software Foundation General Public License version 2.  Pursuant to section 4 of that license, the parties in violation of the license have had their rights to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute those portions of the software terminated.

Judge Kimball has ruled in SCO v. Novell that SCO does not own the Unix copyrights, and therefore most of SCO’s claims against Novell are dismissed. SCO has to waive claims against IBM and Sequent, and also owes Novell a lot of money (in fact, more money than SCO has) for licenses SCO sold to Sun and Microsoft.

I expect SCO will find some really obscure point that they didn’t lose, and issue a press release claiming victory. I have no doubt that they will appeal the decision.

[h/t Groklaw]

It seems obvious that this is just more of their plan to run a protection racket, which is why they so vehemently oppose net neutrality. What they really want is to only transport “legitimate” content from providers that pay them for the privilege. Nevermind that the end user and the content provider are already paying AT&T for the privilege of having their broadband internet connections; AT&T wants to be paid again for the content. “That’s a nice video you’ve got on your web site; it would be a shame if no one could watch it.”

Note that copyright law only protects creative works, while Ed Felten observes that “There is nothing creative about this number — indeed, it was chosen by a method designed to ensure that the resulting number was in no way special.”

The number is also not a “circumvention device” within the meaning of the DMCA.

Now that Congress is considering specific “pretexting” legislation, the LA Times reports that the MPAA and RIAA are asking to be exempted from it.  In other words, they are asking Congress for permission to commit fraud.  [via Slashdot and The Inquirer]

Copyright law is hard. It used to only govern relations between giant industrial players. Copyright didn’t regulate reading an interesting tidbit from the newspaper for a friend. It didn’t regulate watching movies. But now, sharing a newspaper article with a friend (by blogging it) involves copying, and so triggers copyright. Now watching a movie (by downloading it) involves copying, so it triggers copyright. The rules that are supposed to be interpreted by lawyers at Fortune 100 companies now apply to every single kid working on a project for her class’s website.

This is like having to file with the SEC every time you loan a buddy $5 for lunch.

Even the MPAA and its member companies can’t avoid violating copyright.

[...]

Is it any wonder that everyone with a computer is practically guaranteed to be a copyright criminal?

I was somewhat startled to see the high rates of plagiarism that are claimed, but upon reflection I suppose I am not actually too surprised. People are always looking for a quick and easy alternative to tasks they don’t want to perform. I have never turned in plagiarized work, and have no desire to do so. In fact, I’ve never really considered plagiarizing until I was forced to use Turnitin. Even absent the use of a service like Turnitin, I would be far too worried that plagiarism would be detected, and that I would fail the course, be expelled, or have a degree revoked. The potential penalty for detected plagiarism is simply far too costly to justify saving a bit of time now.

However, I am very unhappy about having to submit my work via Turnitin, and their storage of my work in a database. Supporters of Turnitin generally claim that their use of student’s works is not copyright infringement, based on arguments that are dubious at best. Here is the response I posted on Slashdot to such claims:

The argument that Turnitin is not infringing is flawed for at least two reasons:

1. Copyright infringement doesn’t require publication. If you rent a DVD and make a copy of it, you have almost certainly infringed copyright, even though you haven’t “published” the work by making your copy available to any third party. In a copyright infringement lawsuit relating to a work with a registered copyright, publication may result in a larger award of actual damages, but has nothing to do with whether infringement occurred.
2. As I understand it, Turnitin does republish the work, or at least fragments of it. If someone submits a paper, and Turnitin finds some degree of match with another paper in their database, reportedly Turnitin will supply the matched paper or excerpts from it to the course instructor.

I am currently taking a course that requires me to submit my papers to Turnitin. My objection to Turnitin is that they are not only infringing my copright, but that they are doing so for commercial profit. If they want to make money from storing my paper in a database, they should pay me for a license.I carefully read the Turnitin terms and conditions when I signed up for the account. I was particularly concerned that I might be forced to agree to terms that grant them a license to my work, although arguably if I was forced to enter the agreement in order to take a college course, the agreement might not be legally binding. However, there were no such terms in the agreement. The agreement primarily said that I would not make improper use of Turnitin’s intellectual property, something that I have no interest in doing.

Every paper I submit to Turnitin contains the statement “Copyright 2006 Eric Smith. All Rights Reserved. No part of this work may be stored in a database or electronic retrieval system without explicit written permission of the author.”

After the course is over, and I have received my degree from the college (expected in December), I plan to send a registered letter to Turnitin demanding that they delete my papers from the database and provide some evidence that they have done so. I expect to either get no response, or a response stating that they will not comply. At that point I’ll consider legal action.

Another claim of Turnitin’s non-infringement is that their storage of student’s papers in their database is covered as Fair Use. This argument fails also, as pointed out by various other Slashdot commentators, including jackbird:

It fails two of the four pillars of fair use on its face – Commercial use (yes) and Substantiality (all of it).

Stanford University offers a great resource on Copyright and Fair Use, including a detailed description of the Four Factors (pillars).

Other commentators point out that a service like that of Turnitin is necessary because of the immensity of the plagiarism problem. That argument makes no sense. The fact that there is a problem with unauthorized copying of student papers does not justify the existence of a commercial enterprise whose business model consists of unauthorized (and unlawful) copying of student papers.

Some Universities are subscribing to plagiarism detection services despite serious misgivings by their own faculty.  Several faculty members of Grand Valley State University wrote a paper “Issues Raised by Use of TurnItIn Plagiarism Detection Software” describing their concerns.  They point out that a student at McGill University actually succeeded in a legal challenge to the requirement that his papers had to be submitted via Turnitin.

I’ve previously mentioned the Gannon case in Nashua, where police charged a man with violating the state wiretapping laws through the normal use of his own security camera (despite a posted warning). Despite all charges being dropped, the police refuse to return his tapes.

Now the state Supreme Court has ruled that the police may keep or destroy seized property they claim to be contraband, even if they fail to prove such an assertion in court. In 2003 the police arrested Michael Cohen, owner of a record store in Concord, and seized 500 CDs they claimed were illegally copied. The police dropped six of seven charges, and Cohen was found not guilty of the seventh charge. Yet the police refused to return the CDs, and now the state Supreme Court has ruled that they do not have to return them.

DRM is intended to prevent unauthorized copying of music, movies, and software. However, it also prevents copying and use that is within fair use rights provided by copyright law. In many cases, DRM is also harmful to computers and other equipment. For instance, the Sony CDs with DRM installed a rootkit on user’s computers, even if they declined the license agreement, rendering those computers vulnerable to malware. Other CDs with DRM have been known to cause physical damage to car CD players.

Products which support DRM are thus considered to be Defective by Design, and the campaign is intended to educate the public on the problems caused by DRM. If people vote with their wallets by purchasing products that do not use DRM in preference to those that do, sales of DRM’d products will decline, and manufacturers will have more incentive to provide non-DRM products.

Media companies have been trying to get Congress to mandate DRM (beyond the existing DMCA legislation), and we need people to tell Congress that DRM is harmful.

I dreamt that I went into a bookstore to browse. I pulled a book from a shelf and opened it, only to find that the pages were all blank. Thinking that this was a printing error, I looked at another copy of the same book, but it was blank as well. Hmmm… looked like a whole print run might have been defective.

I found a different book in another section of the bookstore. It was blank too! I ran around checking random books throughout the store; they were all blank.

I found an employee and asked about it. He explained to me that these are the new and improved electronic books with DRM. When you buy the book, they activate it and you provide a thumbprint on a spot on the inside cover of the book. From then on, the content becomes visible when you scan your thumbprint on that spot again, and disappears when you set the book down.

I pointed out that this was ridiculous, and that I couldn’t decide which book(s) to buy without examining some of the content in the store. I ended up in an argument with the store employee, who tried to convince me that it was unfair to the author and publisher for me to be able to see any of the content before I’d purchased the book, or if I let other people read the book without paying. He said that if they didn’t have protection like this, authors and publishers wouldn’t have any incentive to write and publish new books. He also pointed out that the new books had the great feature that they only had to have their batteries recharged every week or so, and that the charging system (a plate that you set the book upon for a few hours) was available for only $49.95, with a $20 mail in rebate if I also bought three books.

I decided to buy one book just to see how it worked. It was some sort of technical book. I went home, thumbed the cover, and started reading. The phone rang. I set the book down (open, pages down), and answered the phone. When I picked up the book again, it had gone blank, and I had to thumb it again.

I found some useful information in the book, and I wanted to share it with a friend. I figured that the easiest way to do that was to scan one page, crop the scan, and email it to my friend. I put the book on the scanner, but the resulting scan was just a blank page. I tried to take a photo of it with my digital camera, but as soon as the camera tried to focus on it the page went blank.

I decided that I’d just tell my friend the information when I next saw him. But when we met, I couldn’t remember the information. As soon as we parted, I could remember it again.

I was upset, and took the book back to the bookstore to complain. The store employee swiped the book past the activation system, punched a few buttons, then told me that I couldn’t have a refund because I’d already read part of the book.

I took the book home again, thumbed it to make the pages visible, then tried to subvert the DRM to make the pages permanently visible. That would be illegal under US law (the anti-circumvention prohition of the-DMCA), but if I just did this in the privacy of my own home, who would ever know?

When I started trying to hack the book, the pages all went blank, and thumbing the cover would no longer bring them back. Worse yet, police arrived at my door minutes later and arrested me.

I woke up very scared and angry.

What happened in the dream may seem like a ridiculous fantasy. Unfortunately the technology needed to make all of this happen (except forgetting the content when I saw my friend) already exists and is in the process of being commercialized. Pages that can be blanked are quite possible with digital paper, which appeared in some products in 2004. Finger recognition technology has been available for several years. Inductive charging systems have been demonstrated for notebook computers and other electronic devices. Various tamper-proofing systems have been used in consumer products. Blanking the pages when you set down the book can be accomplished using low-cost three-axis accelerometers, though they would also blank the book if you hold it too steady. And blanking if the book is scanned or photographed can be accomplished with infrared sensing (most cameras use infrared for autofocus).

In 1997, Richard Stallman wrote a fictional account of DRM of electronic books viewed on computer displays in the mid 21st century, in his short story The Right to Read. When I first read the story, I thought that it was completely implausible. Unfortunately events since that time seem to indicate that we are moving in that direction, and technology developments are such that the scenario he describes may soon be possible with actual physical books, not just computer displays, because a physical book may actually be a computer display.

In the film The Princess Bride, the grandfather (played by Peter Falk) at one point explains to his grandson “When I was your age, television was called books!” Will my grandchildren believe me when I tell them that in the good old days, you could lend books to friends, and that there were even organizations that purchased many books for the express purpose of lending them out?