Licensing Resources on Port 80: Shoreline: issues

licensing open source: compare GPL, with Red Hat's license, with Microsoft's license, with shareware license, with MIT's OCW license.

Show, describe, and characterize the license -- not the whole site. Be prepared to discuss how the other licenses compare to yours.

Big 5's music services' licenses, terms, usage policy or whatever they may call it

When Microsoft finally closed the door on its previous licensing structure and opened another on a new pricing scheme earlier this month, the move represented a significant change in how Microsoft sells and upgrades software. It was, perhaps, the most significant business model change the company has initiated in the past five years.

If books were sold as software and online recordings are, they would have this legalese up front: ...

You do not own this book, but have acquired only a revocable non-exclusive license to read the material contained herein. You may not read it aloud to any third party.

However, because of licensing issues, the operating system will lack software to play the popular MP3 audio format. Red Hat's release documentation recommends that users opt for an open source alternative to MP3, Ogg Vorbis.

The licensing terms of Thomson and the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, who are the owners of the mp3 patents, have changed. Now not only mp3 encoders but also mp3 decoders require a license. This page lists the fees -- it's $0.75 per decoder. As a consequence, Red Hat has already removed all mp3 players from the Rawhide development version.

Seems to me that Ogg isn't really the issue here.

MP3 is an integral part of MPEG1/2, any opensource project capable of decoding MPEG video is the target of this attack.

Mplayer,etc, etc cannot afford to front $15000/$50000 to continue to distribute.

The alterations to FhG's licencing terms are solely targeted at 'free' decoders which for the most part means opensource decoders.

FhG must know that all these little projects cannot afford to pay these fee's and will simply be forced to shut up shop and go home.

Many have suggested that the RIAA has had a hand in this although it strikes me as more likely to have been the doing of the MPAA (or perhaps M$).

What really needs to be done here is for all the big players to get together (IBM, Redhat, Suse, Mandrake, Debian etc) pay the one of fee and release an LGPL decoder that everyone else can link to or even simply to act as a distribution channel for everyone else's decoders.

Screw FhG, this isn't a move designed to improve profits, it's a move designed to drive the opensource guy's to the wall.

Education revolution

"I genuinely think there was an 'a-ha' moment when they said our mission was actually to enhance education," said Anne Margulies, Executive Director of OCW.

"Why don't we, instead of trying to sell our knowledge over the internet, just give it away."

Over the next 10 years, MIT will move all its existing coursework on to the internet.

There will be no online degrees for sale, however. Instead, it will offer thousands of pages of information, available to anyone around the globe at no cost, as well as hours and hours of streaming video lectures, seminars and experiments.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. MIT wants to start nothing short of a global revolution in education.

"Our hope and aspiration is that by setting an example, other universities will also put their valued materials on the internet and thereby make a truly profound and fundamental impact on learning and education worldwide," said MIT's Professor Dick Yue.

MIT admits that getting OpenCourseWare ready for its internet debut has been a huge challenge.

Staff have spent months clearing up complex copyright issues.

Look at the three courses in the Sloan School of Management. Even mid-terms and finals are there.

Meanwhile, Jack Valenti ignores all that and reduces everything to a false dichotomy: "Protect their valuable works by not making them available in digital formats ..., or lose all control over unauthorized reproduction and distribution"

With talk of preemptive war all the rage on Capitol Hill, it seems that such posturing has extended into the world of digital copyright law.

On Thursday Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) and Rep. John Doolittle (D-Calif.) introduced the Digital Media Consumers Rights Act to preserve specific fair-use rights to copy digital works as well as "circumvention" rights to bypass copy protections. With no chance of passage this year, the bill's introduction prepares the ground for battle in the next session of Congress.

Supporters are an unlikely coalition of electronics and computer interests, consumer groups and academics.

"It's just time," said a beaming Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association. "Consumers have been pushed up against the ropes. This is the first time in 20 years in which consumers are going on the offense rather than on the defense."

Content owners, meanwhile, rolled their eyes.

"If this bill were to be enacted, content owners would be left with two unhappy choices: Protect their valuable works by not making them available in digital formats such as DVD, or lose all control over unauthorized reproduction and distribution," said Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America.

The entertainment industry seeks to squash what it sees as rampant and illegal copying of digital content and, consequently, supports a bill introduced in July by Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.).

The Berman bill would give copyright owners the legal right to disrupt the unauthorized use of their copyrighted works on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks and exercise other content controls.

Mickey Mouse's days at Disney could be numbered and paying royalties for warbling George Gershwin tunes could become a thing of the past if the U.S. Supreme Court sides with an Internet publisher in a landmark copyright case this week.

The high court will hear the case Wednesday that could plunge the earliest images of Disney's mascot and other closely held creative property into the public domain as early as next year.

If upheld, the precedent-setting challenge could cost movie studios and heirs of authors and composers millions of dollars in revenue as previously protected material becomes available free of charge.


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modified: November 20, 2002 by Douglas Anderson http://RicciStreet.net/port80/shoreline/copyright/licenses.htm

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