IFOSSLR releases Vol 5, No 1

The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review has just released a new Issue.  IFOSSLR is an open access journal, with all articles licensed under a Creative Commons licence.  I am a current and founding editor of IFOSSLR.   See the table of contents or download the whole thing. Tell your friends!

What’s in this issue?

Table of Contents

Editorials

Editorial 2013 No. 1	PDF
Daniel M German	1-4

Articles

Copyleft, -right and the case law on APIs on both sides of the Atlantic	PDF
Walter van Holst	5-14

Lisping Copyleft: A Close Reading of the Lisp LGPL	PDF
Eli Greenbaum	15-30

Platform

The Rise and Evolution of the Open Source Software Foundation	PDF
Paula Hunter, Stephen Walli	31-42

Legislative Review

FOSS in the Italian public administration: fundamental law principles	PDF
Simone Aliprandi, Carlo Piana	43-50

Bizarre IT Pricing Inquiry

The Australian House of Representatives House Standing Committee on Infrastructure and Communications is currently conducting an Inquiry into IT Pricing.  The terms of reference ask, basically, do Australians pay more for copyright materials, and, if so, why, and what can be done about it.  It’s a good thing that this inquiry is going on, although it does seem at least a little farcical.  The answer, to anyone who has ever bought any copyrighted material, ought to be obvious – yes we are paying more.  The reason ought to be obvious as well – copyright, when it hasn’t been a form of censorship, is a form of welfare support for publishers.  Its entire purpose is to inflate prices without fear of competition.  They can charge more because the Government accepts the proposition that they need to be subsidised in order to produce copyright material.  That’s why they amended the Copyright Act to define software as books.  How much subsidy? Well, as much as they choose through the price they set.  Australians are entitled to subsidise them more per capita than other people because… well, that’s what parallel importation provisions mean (ie if something is published in the US it can’t be bought there and exported to Australia by a third party).

The inquiry, in essence, is covering exactly the same ground that the Productivity Commission covered in its Inquiry into Parallel Importation. What happened there?  A lay-down mizere argument, backed by solid economics and logic was overcome by the unstoppable political power wielded by the copyright corporations.

This, though, is the kicker:

“In order to facilitate electronic publishing of submissions, the Committee would prefer them to be emailed to ic.reps@aph.gov.au in Microsoft Word^® or Portable Document Format (PDF).“

Why do we charge so much? Because we can.  Why can we charge so much? Because peeps like you require Australians to buy our products so they can access public services. It’s a network effect don’t you know?

If you want to solve this problem, you could start by creating a level playing field for alternative products in Government purchasing and in Government use of software – try an open (as in open as opposed to standardised) document format for storing files.  Next, try repealing the parallel importation provisions.  Finally, think about moving copyright from a subsidy scheme to a property scheme. This, though would mean that people own the copies they buy and can do with them what they choose.

Supersede v Supercede (Proof by Google)

I have recently shown that collectible v collectable is an English vs American English thing. I thought I’d try my hand at supercede – I mean supersede.  This is another word which dictionaries give two valid spellings for. However, running a google ngram search on their corpus shows supersede to be the clear preference:

Similar results are obtained whether or not the corpus is restricted to English or American English.  Yet another proof by Google….

Collectable v Collectible

According to Wikipedia (that fount of secondary knowledge), the OED lists both collectible and collectable as equally valid spellings.

I used Google’s Ngram viewer to track the historical usage:

So, on the faith of this graph (which shows percentages of the corpus, not absolute counts), neither was of much note until around the late 1820s (collectable having a slight edge in the teens). Collectable then held the lion’s share until around 1875 and thereafter collectible has stolen the show.

This suggests that neither is “correct”, but that collectible is certainly more popular now (by a factor of almost 3x) – at least in Google’s corpus.

Ah… restricting the searches to British/American English corpora indicates that collectable is a British preference, and collectible is a (strongly) US one (first British corpus):

Now American corpus:

And that Americans, apparently, had an earlier interest in collectables than the Brits did.

Now I am somewhat troubled by the Proof by Google that I’ve just stumbled upon.

PS: similar results are obtained if you restrict it to noun usages only

pySpaceFighto! Space war in Python

I have just released pySpaceFighto! as free software under GPLv3.  pySpaceFighto! is a two player, 2D vector graphic space fighter game inspired by the old arcade game space war.  This is a belated Christmas present to the world, which I had originally worked on in the third quarter of 2011. I had intended to release it at the OSDC lightning talks that November (and again in 2012 – but the lightning talks seemed to have disappeared last year) but I hadn’t completed the splash screen and there were a few bits and bobs to be cleaned up.  So, in the intervening year I ended up doing… practically nothing at all (I did manage a splash screen).  I decided it was time to let it free.

The game has no sound (oops!) and no AI – strictly 2P only.  However, it does come packaged with a basic vector font and some routines for designing your own ships (honest) if you’re that way inclined. I have played it with the resident games expert in the family and we thought it was hilarious.

Source code is available here: Sourceforge.

Pygame is a dependency, so it must be installed to run.

Not packaged, so instructions are:

* Download the tar file (or svn check out the trunk) then:

>tar xvf pyspacefighto_r4.tar                                                                                                                                  
>cd pyspacefighto-code/                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
>python spaceFighto.py

Fighto!

IP Issues Paper 42 – Costs

IP Issues Paper 42 – Costs

Introductory notes

The Copyright Act imposes transaction costs on everybody, not just participants in the economy. In order to work with any “content” then there is a cost involved in ensuring that the content is properly licensed. This is even present when no formal licence is necessary. For example, in July a year or two ago the University of Berkeley in California moved all of their online recordings of lectures from their own service to Apple’s iTunes product. Apple iTunes is a proprietary layer on top of the HTTP protocol and, in practice the content on iTunes cannot be accessed by users of the Linux or Android operating systems. As a result I started an archival project at archive.org to recover as many of these recordings as I could. In the process I corresponded with one person by e-mail who said that they had wanted to do the same thing but didn’t think they were allowed to. This, despite the fact that all of these recordings have been explicitly licensed under a Creative Commons licence. This person had declined to do something that he was legally entitled to merely because of the risks created by the copyright law. I have no doubt that this is not an isolated case.

IP Issues Paper 42 – Moral Rights

IP Issues Paper 42 – Moral Rights

Introductory notes

As an individual are very sympathetic towards the moral rights of attribution and against false attribution.  That said, from a policy perspective it may not be appropriate to have broad based rights to prevent false attribution or to require attribution in relation to copyrighted works. I refer in this respect to the experience of the open source community in relation to the licence known as the “BSD” licence. This licence, originally propagated by the University of Berkeley in its initial forms required that attribution be given to the original authors of the work. However, as time went by others participated in the development of the work and also sought to have attribution of their contributions recognised. Over time the community of participants using software licensed under the BSD license came to the conclusion that compliance with this attribution requirement was not justified. While they did not object to the principal of attribution per se, as a matter of practice the attribution requirement was more harmful then beneficial on balance. As a result that community lobbied the University of Berkeley and secured a change to the licence conditions removing the attribution requirement. Whether the “reasonableness” qualification  on the attribution requirement is sufficient in practice is an open question. There ought to be broad-based exceptions are to these rights sufficient to permit the emergence of a broad-based aftermarket. The right of integrity is inconsistent with an author placing the work in the public sphere.  There should be a general exception to the right of integrity where the work in question has been made publicly available.