Month: October 2007

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Copyright and License Primer

Recently a case involving software licensing and copyright was discussed on an engineering list. Reading the discussion it became clear to me that it is likely that a majority of people don’t know how copyright and licensing go together. So I thought I’d write a brief primer on the basics of copyright in the 21st century. The particular case in that article illustrates how the wrong choice of license can lead to the loss of some rights that the copyright holder did not intend.

But I’m getting way ahead of myself here, let me start with the basics. First a disclaimer, I am absolutely, positively, not a lawyer. If you have any doubt about any copyright issue that could cost you money consult a copyright lawyer. Second point, I only know about US copyrights, the copyright laws in other countries may be very different. Final point, in this post I’ll be using the terms work and works to indicate any writing, painting, photo, video, music, graphics, software and other types of creative output that is protected by copyright law.

For readers closing in on 50 years old like me or, already past it, I’ll start with how it was before 1978. When I first learned about it the law of the USA was the Copyright Act of 1909. This law specified that copyright was something you had to intentionally place on works if you wanted protection. If you distributed a work without attaching a copyright notice and filing for copyright protection the work was considered public domain. With the adoption of the 1976 Copyright Act, which went into effect in 1978, this situation was reversed. Since 1978 any work a person creates receives full copyright protection immediately without any filing or adding of notices. This means that even a finger paint drawing a three year old creates is automatically protected as a copyrighted work of the three year old the moment it is created.

This gives us the two ends of the copyright spectrum, fully protected and public domain. Public domain works can be used in any way by any person with no restrictions. This means that if someone wants to they can take your public domain work and sell it for money without giving you any credit or money. Full copyright protection prevents everyone from doing almost anything with the work unless they previously were granted permission by the works creator. There is an exception to this known as “fair use” that does give some limited usage rights to critics, reviewers, buyers of the work and others. Fair use is a complicated topic that I don’t have time to cover in this post, see the Wikipedia article for more information.

Often the two ends of the spectrum don’t provide a content creator with a usable option. Putting your work in the public domain makes it difficult to earn a living from your works. Enforcing full copyright on your work severely limits your distribution options because you need to individually grant rights to your customers. When you want to retain control of your works but not burden yourself and your customers with individually granting rights, the solution is to apply a license to the work.

A license for a copyrighted work is a way to take some rights away from the copyright holder and give those rights to the customer. An example of a right most software companies and developers want to give their customers is the right to make archival copies for backup purposes. Without a license granting this right it could be a violation of copyright law for your customer to make a backup copy of the CD you gave them when you sold them the software. (Note fair use doctrine may give some archiving rights to the customer)

You should put a good deal of thought into choosing a license for your works because the wrong license could turn into a big problem. You can create your own license with the help of a copyright lawyer and this is what big businesses usually do. However the costs can be large and if there is a mistake in the license you could lose some of the rights you meant to retain. So, for individuals and small businesses the best solution may be one of the pre-made licenses that are freely available. The Free Software Foundation created and maintains the GNU General Public License (GPL) for software. While this is an excellent license created by some great legal minds it is very restrictive and may not be what you want. So other licenses have been developed such as the LGPL, BSD, Apache and others. For non-software works until recently there were not many choices other than full protection and public domain release. Thankfully the Center for the Public Domain recognized this need and has created the Creative Commons licenses for non-software works.

For more information see:
U.S. Copyright Office
Copyright Law
A brief intro to copyright
10 Big Myths about copyright explained

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Blogroll update

Rob Knop of Galactic Interactions has posted that he is closing down his blog. I will miss his contributions to teaching an astronomy newbie like me about some of the coolest discoveries in the field. I will also miss reading his perspective on other issues that so often made me think more deeply about the issue. Farewell Rob and I wish you all the best in your endeavors.

There is some consolation in knowing that Phil will still be giving me great information on astronomy and that I now have room to add someone else to my RSS reader and Blogroll.

Who should I add? That’s a tough decision, there are more excellent blogs out there than I can possibly keep up with. While my inclination was to add a science blog to replace the science blog that is gone, PZ pointed me to a post today that really struck a cord with me.

The blogger who I’m adding is Greta Christina who I have read other excellent posts by in the past including this excellent post that was part of the recent Skeptics Circle. Another earlier post, Short Memories: AIDS Denialism and Vaccine Resistance, had also impressed me with her thoughtful writing and humor.

The post from Greta that I read today, Atheists and Anger, I found very informative.

I get angry when advice columnists tell their troubled letter-writers to talk to their priest or minister or rabbi… when there is absolutely no legal requirement that a religious leader have any sort of training in counseling or therapy.

And I get angry when religious leaders offer counseling and advice to troubled people — sex advice, relationship advice, advice on depression and stress, etc. — not based on any evidence about what actually does and does not work in people’s brains and lives, but on the basis of what their religious doctrine tells them God wants for us.

This really struck a chord with me because my Dad felt the same way as Greta and taught me to see the truth in this position. As I’ve written previously, my Dad was an American Baptist Minister the sect of Baptists who teach the absolute necessity of complete freedom of religion and equal rights with tolerance for all (ref. Roger Williams, Martin Luther King Jr.). He always taught everyone that mental and physical illness need to be addressed by medical and mental health professionals not religious professionals. In fact he told me that both times he moved on to new churches it was mainly due to church members too often trying to use him as a free substitute for mental health professionals. My Dad felt his proper role was to give advice on issues of faith and anyone who asked for help with non-faith issues he tried as hard as possible to get them to go to an appropriate professional.

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Skeptical comic series

Phil, The Bad Astronomer, pointed me to this great skeptical internet cartoonist, Cectic, a couple days ago. After checking out all the comics I had to add this to my RSS reader to get some more humor in my reading. As soon as I saw today’s comic (below) I knew I had to add Cectic to my blog roll.

I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

I work with quite a bit of electronic test gear and have seen many ghostly affects in the past 35 years. Every time I get mysterious affects I track them down completely, after all it’s my job to get the measurements accurately. The solutions range from the mundane, easy to track down intermittent test leads, to the difficult to locate, like defective computers emitting RF. On the other hand most ghost hunters seem to do just as this comic shows which gives me a big laugh when I see them on TV.

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IPCC and Al Gore win the Peace Prize!

As you should have heard by now, the IPCC and Al Gore have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Congratulations to the 1000’s of people working with the IPCC and to Mr. Gore. All of you deserve to be recognized for your hard work on this critical issue.

I like Scientific American’s blog post about this, Nobel committee to climate change deniers: “Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries.”

Then go see the crazed responses from denialists that Tim has rounded up for our amusement over at Deltoid: Gore Derangement Syndrome.

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Skype failing?

This weeks EE Times has an article about the poor financial performance of Skype. When eBay bought Skype for $2.6 billion I thought eBay was being overly optimistic about the potential earning power of Skype. Don’t get me wrong, I think Skype is a great service but, I only use it as a free video call provider. For my serious VoIP needs I am hesitant to use a service based on peer-to-peer technology because P2P by its nature can’t give the reliability of a dedicated VoIP service. Perhaps now that the CEO and co-founder has stepped down Skype can turn around its financial situation.

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HUD tracer legal scam

A friend of mine received the letter pictured below (click to enlarge) and asked me about it.scan0229-small

Searching around for American Data Services I found this post on the Snopes forum and this blog post. Basically this is a perfectly legal scam to get 10% of a refund that you may be owed when you refinanced and ended the HUD/FHA insurance from the original mortgage.

The people and companies sending out these letters won’t actually help you get the refund in any significant way but, they will take 10% of the amount up front to tell you to contact HUD. The better thing to do is to check the HUD database yourself and get the refund without paying the fee.

Because it is legal to try to get people to pay for this un-needed tracing service, it has also become the basis of some of the get rich quick scams on the internet. Anyone who does this should be very careful because if you represent yourself as having any affiliation with HUD/FHA you will be prosecuted be the government.

More information is available at About.com here and here, as well as this press release from the FTC.

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Embarrassed by these engineers

In my blog title above I refer to myself as an embedded systems designer rather than an engineer. This is partly due to my embarrassment at some of the insane crap other engineers post on the net and write in books. We need to remember that expertise is real and it matters, engineers are rarely expert at science, philosophy, history or any field of study other than the particular branches of engineering that they practice professionally. Sadly far too many engineers feel the need to spout ridiculous ideas that make me feel ashamed to be an engineer.

Some of the ones that drive me the craziest are the creationist engineers like Forrest M. Mims III at the DI and the fools from the posts here, here, here and, here. Some of the other ridiculous ideas I encounter nearly daily on engineering mail lists include, global warming and DDT denialism, alternative medicine quackery, perpetual motion/free energy schemes and, Google conspiracy theories. This is in addition to the irrational discussions, bordering on religious wars, that I’ve come to expect over choices in programming languages, operating systems, software applications, micros and, test equipment.

I want to make one point very clear, all of the engineering related mail lists I participate in are open to all people. This can make it unclear whether any particular member is actually an engineer or if they are just a layman hobbyist or technician. In the particular case below I believe at least one of, and possibly all, the participants are technicians/hobbyists.

I normally try not to get involved in most of the discussions because I’ve learned that regardless of how much evidence is provided, people with belief in the irrational seldom change their mind. Last week I read a bit that I just had to respond to due to its total confusion of religious thought with data. The topic was global warming and an engineer posted this:

There is no smoke without fire. Looking a little:

http://www.teachinghearts.org/dre00timeline.html

…….

That timeline is amazing. It is a major effort and I think that it deserves some
praise. It’s a great website.

I clicked the link thinking there would be something useful there but what do I find, a page titled “Time lines and bible chronology in prophecy and history.“. The page has a content description tag of, “Bible chronology, Ussher chronology, bible timelines time lines, daniel and revelation, end-time prophecy, history, time of the end, daniel, 2300 days years, 1260 days years, 1290, 1335, antiochus epiphenes“. Well I guess praise in the religious meaning is correct but as far as being useful for anything relating to climatology or any other science it is definitely useless. After all a timeline based on a 6000 year old earth, regardless of whether they get some historical dates correct, is not useful for technical purposes. So I responded to the post with this:

A religious site claiming the earth was created in 7 days, 6000 years ago, is hardly a worthy reference for anything other than a theology discussion and theological discussions should not be on the list.

The original poster replied:

This is not about religion. The timeline presented in the referenced site is useful for the period discussed in this thread, and the events presented for the relevant period are relevant and verifiable. If you have a better reference please supply it. Blindly flaming sources based on their provenience will not help a lot.

To refute the credibility of a site, please supply data that contradicts the datapoints discussed in this thread, on that site or elsewhere. I very seldomly respond to messages like yours, but now I felt like saying a few words. Also, the denomination of that site’s author has nothing to do with mine (assuming I would have one), fyi. I am finished now. Let it remain so.

I did not reply to the list because the official policy of the list administrators is theological discussions should not be on the list. Was I guilty of “Blindly flaming sources based on their provenience” ? I don’t think so, I looked at the sites data and said that a clearly religious site claiming a 6000 year old earth was not a credible source of historical data.

Then another list member sent this:

Those who consider only part of the available information are not really looking for the truth.

When you find History and Religon information in the same location, there should be a little more confidence in the information. When they are separated, one should suspect motive.

My jaw dropped when I read that, this person believes that any history that doesn’t include religious ideas taught as fact is bad, WTF! Of course I’m sure he wouldn’t feel that way if the site wasn’t his particular religious viewpoint.

The following days bring more disturbing posts, I just knew that bringing in theology would open the woo floodgates. The first is from the same person who posted the previous response.

I found the topic “Ancient scientists are involved in transgenic experiments with animals and man” to be especially interesting. One of my many interests is pursuing historical support for the people known as “Nephilia” or giants in the bible. Biblical mention is sketchy and so far I have found nothing on the web that seems any more than speculation.

As a student critical of the Bible I find it ambiguous in many places. However, if you want to study the Origin and History of Man it must be included.

This was followed up by this insanity from a new contributor to the thread responding directly to the previous message.

Zecharia Sitchin’s books are a very interesting reading.

http://www.sitchin.com

Be careful about clicking that link, to steal a phrase from Orac, “the stupid it burns”.

This biblical timeline discussion fork then had another more rational person jump in and go ahead and address the “supply data that contradicts the datapoints discussed in this thread” comment. He pointed out an inconsistency and in response there was much babbling and another biblical history site linked to discuss global warming, WTF! Then there appeared this gem from the poster who had said a few hundred words earlier “I am finished now. Let it remain so.”.

The Biblical ‘creation of the world’ time coincides with the exit from the last ice age, 6 to 12k years ago, with fair precision.

It is one thing to be open minded but you must be careful that you are not so open minded that your brain falls out. I could not find any reference to the last ice age ending < 10k years ago and many estimates are closer to 12k. So, bible 6k plus 66% to 100% is fairly precise, I am not impressed with that kind of precision. People should really avoid trying to mix religion and science it leads to really odd ideas.

Sadly, I’ve got many more examples of this type of embarrassing behavior from engineering lists that I will write about in the future. In closing I’d like to make one observation, many of the list members who make these types of posts are the same ones who have problems with circuits, components or code that nobody else seems to have. So, on the plus side I have a ready reference of engineers that would not be good choices to hire for my employer’s projects. There are enough real problems to overcome in engineering projects, we can’t afford to waste money chasing non-issues caused by engineers with poor critical thinking skills.