Susan Pinochet sdp0@identi.ca

The spring ran dry 4 months ago, and finally started flowing this week. The cistern is full, hurrah! Was down to ~1 month water.

URL: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/nov/09/gpl-tpp/

A Blog post by Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen M. Sandler

GPL Enforcement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Many people have criticized the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty since the text was released. In particular, some of the terms in the agreement are bad for software freedom and other social justice causes. Despite the TPP's stated intention to bring "social benefits" in addition to economic growth, the terms of TPP work against social benefits and awards too much power and control to large multinational corporations, including proprietary software companies.

The agreement text is lengthy and complex, filed with bad provisions. A few days ago, the Free Software community uncovered the following text from the TPP:

1. No Party shall require the transfer of, or access to, source code of software owned by a person of another Party, as a condition for the import, distribution, sale or use of such software, or of products containing such software, in its territory.

2. For the purposes of this Article, software subject to paragraph 1 is limited to mass-market software or products containing such software and does not include software used for critical infrastructure.

3. Nothing in this Article shall preclude:

(a) the inclusion or implementation of terms and conditions related to the provision of source code in commercially negotiated contracts; or

(b) a Party from requiring the modification of source code of software necessary for that software to comply with laws or regulations which are not inconsistent with this Agreement.

4. This Article shall not be construed to affect requirements that relate to patent applications or granted patents, including any orders made by a judicial authority in relation to patent disputes, subject to safeguards against unauthorised disclosure under the law or practice of a Party.

The revelation of this clause has confused our community, as it appears as if this provision, once adopted, might impact or restrict the international operation of copyleft licenses. Below we explain that, while everyone should reject and oppose this provision — and the rest of TPP — this provision has no dramatic impact on copyleft licensing.

First, as others have pointed out, Party is a defined term that refers specifically to government entities that sign the treaty. As such, the provision would only constrain the behavior of governments themselves. There are some obviously bad outcomes of this provision when those governmental entities interfere with public safety and ethical distribution of software, but we believe this provision will not interfere with international enforcement of copyleft.

Copyleft licenses use copyright as a mechanism to keep software free. The central GPL mechanism that copyright holders exercise to ensure software freedom is termination of permission to copy, modify and distribute the software (per GPLv2§4 and GPLv3§8). Under GPL's termination provisions, non-compliance results in an automatic termination of all copyright permissions. In practice, distributors can chose — either they can provide the source code or cease distribution. Once permissions terminate, any distribution of the GPL'd software infringes copyrights. Accordingly, in an enforcement action, there is no need to specifically compel a government to ask for disclosure of source code.

For example, imagine if a non-US entity ships a GPL-violating, Linux-based product into the USA, and after many friendly attempts to achieve compliance, the violating company refuses to comply. Conservancy can sue the company in US federal court, and seek injunction for distribution of the foreign product in the USA, since the product infringes copyright by violating the license. The detailed reasons for that infringement (i.e., failure to disclose source code) is somewhat irrelevant to the central issue; the Court can grant injunction (i.e., an order to prevent the company from distributing the infringing product) based simply on the violator's lost permissions under the existing copyright license. The Court could even order the cease of import of the infringing products.

In our view, the violator would be unaffected under the above TPP provision, since the Court did not specifically compel release of the source code, but rather simply ruled that the product generally infringed copyrights, and their distribution rights had fully terminated upon infringement. In other words, the fact that the violator lost copyright permissions and can seek to restore them via source code disclosure is not dispositive to the underlying infringement claim.

While TPP thus does not impact copyright holders' ability to enforce the GPL, there are nevertheless plenty of reasons to oppose TPP. Conservancy therefore joins the FSF, EFF, and other organizations in encouraging everyone to oppose TPP.

Help support Conservancy and its efforts to defend the GPL by becoming a Supporter today.

Posted by Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen M. Sandler on November 9, 2015. Please email any comments on this entry to info@sfconservancy.org.

joeyh interviewed about his life after Debian, bye :'(

10 tiny torx screws and masking tape. That's what I hate about taking a laptop apart. The fan yesterday developed a slight burr, almost unnoticable until you do and then annoying without end.

Had to work on it for 2 solid hours. My smallest torx bit didn't quite fit; lived in fear of stripping the screws. Rehearsed everything on my same-model parts laptop, and still hated every minute of it. Eventually I disconnected the fan, for now. Its cable was held down by a spot of masking tape. That's new; they must have changed cable lengths and this was some engineer's quick fix.

And that's what I hate about taking a laptop apart, I see the shortcuts, the screws that bite into plastic, the ribbon cables with their latches surely rated for < 100 cycles, the bits of tape. Once I've had a laptop apart I can never look at it quite the same way again, as a hunk of consumer electronics that is going to work for a while, until entropy eats it and it doesn't. I know , and somehow, when it comes to consumer hardware, I don't want to.

Software is so different for me, I had no problem PEEKing and POKEing away at the fan controller's bits last night, although I have not managed to adapt http://github.com/blan4/lenovo-yoga-fan-control/ to work with this model so far, and only managed to get the fan stuck on high, rather than turned off.

I want a bunnie laptop. If it's designed to be taken apart, it wouldn't bother me.

I've had several recent blog posts on the front page of Hacker news. Generally the Sunday after I write them.

Often they get 30k page views and not a single comment (on the blog or HN), which is understandable since my blog has been somewhat esoteric lately. (My poor mum, trying to make sense of monads)

But then there's comments on 8 year old blog posts. Like http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/dealing_with_dialup/#comment-fbe83263f7eb32a36a35ce24f4cd73ef

This is something that worries me about the pump network BTW, discoverability for old posts is not very good. Most posts don't seem to be getting into the Internet Archive; it visits my identi.ca page only a few times a year, and Evan's only a little more often. I'll bet that google doesn't much notice when pump posts are shared and popular unless a traditional website links to them, either. This is likely not good for both long tail effects and network growth effects.

On the porch swing in the sun, in bare feet and a t-shirt. Almost like it's not January. In 2 days, it might well be snowing.

The most clear sign of insanity available is that you're using M-x ansi-term in emacs because you're too lazy to open a real terminal. Looks like I'm insane, then.

Are there many words worse than "webinar"?

I'm seriously considering running for the state legislature wherever I move to next.