Has anyone, either the author or any of the commenters here, actually read this patent? I'm taking a quick look at it, and I'm not seeing any obvious reason why this patent is "ridiculous".
Maybe it's the mention of Paris Hilton. Or maybe it's some baseless idea that patents only apply to things made out of gears. I'm really not certain. I don't get it.
(And it's not that I don't "get" patents: I've been paid to read, and write, them professionally.)
"Everybody" does not "own every line of GPL code."
Only the author, i.e. the person whose name is on the copyright line (legitimately) owns the code. If a company were, say, to take GPL code, use it in a product which they shipped to consumers, and fail to provide the source code, the author could go after the company for copyright infringement, and the case there is extremely clearcut: the organization has infringed on the author's copyright. (Harald Welte of gpl-violations.org, and the author of iptables, has gone after a number of companies, successfully...)
Consumers who received the device could (as AFPA did in France) go to court to force the vendor to adhere to the terms of the GPL, but they would not have the legal standing to make a copyright infringement claim...
It's difficult to fit cases like these into nice, comfortable taxonomies, since there's little existing case law around "naked licenses", such as the GPL, i.e. a license without an associated contract.
Guerby has it right: as a condition of the terms of the GPL, anyone provided with a binary (as AFPA was, by Edu4) has the right to demand the associated sources and the provider of the binary (Edu4 in this case) has the obligation (as a condition of _their_ having received the source code under the GPL terms) to provide it to them, for no more than the cost of putting the data onto media and shipping it...
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I'm Curious
Has anyone, either the author or any of the commenters here, actually read this patent? I'm taking a quick look at it, and I'm not seeing any obvious reason why this patent is "ridiculous".
Maybe it's the mention of Paris Hilton. Or maybe it's some baseless idea that patents only apply to things made out of gears. I'm really not certain. I don't get it.
(And it's not that I don't "get" patents: I've been paid to read, and write, them professionally.)
And Another Thing!
"Everybody" does not "own every line of GPL code."
Only the author, i.e. the person whose name is on the copyright line (legitimately) owns the code. If a company were, say, to take GPL code, use it in a product which they shipped to consumers, and fail to provide the source code, the author could go after the company for copyright infringement, and the case there is extremely clearcut: the organization has infringed on the author's copyright. (Harald Welte of gpl-violations.org, and the author of iptables, has gone after a number of companies, successfully...)
Consumers who received the device could (as AFPA did in France) go to court to force the vendor to adhere to the terms of the GPL, but they would not have the legal standing to make a copyright infringement claim...
"Copyright" versus "License"
It's difficult to fit cases like these into nice, comfortable taxonomies, since there's little existing case law around "naked licenses", such as the GPL, i.e. a license without an associated contract.
Guerby has it right: as a condition of the terms of the GPL, anyone provided with a binary (as AFPA was, by Edu4) has the right to demand the associated sources and the provider of the binary (Edu4 in this case) has the obligation (as a condition of _their_ having received the source code under the GPL terms) to provide it to them, for no more than the cost of putting the data onto media and shipping it...