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SubjectRe: MikeeUSA -- Notice Bruce Perens has NO response (nor does Moglen). [Was: Re: GrSecurity]
On 2017-08-03 09:13, Xen wrote:
> In Game Genie vs. Nintendo a company created a cheating device that
> would alter the operation of an existing product.
>
> They won that case and were allowed to do it.
>
> Distributing patches to be applied to an existing software product
> would really be no different than that. If Nintendo were to say "You
> can buy our product only if you agree never to modify it" I don't
> think that would make it any different.

(I'm tired of re-explaining this over and over to stupid american white
men programmers.)
(I've allready done it again and again. Bruce Perens has already done
it.)
(Your attorney can do it.)

You are simply WRONG.

WRONG WRONG WRONG.

You are a programmer and pretend you know something about the law. You
do not.

Yet you will insist that since YOU know SOMETHING about something
regarding logic (programming) that you are right,
all the attorneys are useless and wrong.

The Game Genie case is (off the top of my head) distinguishable in that
1) none of Nintendo's copyrighted works were distributed with Game
Genie.
Game Genie was not a derivative work of Nintendo's intellectual
property.
(Additionally Game Genie is a separable product from the Nintendo
system. )

COMPLETELY different here where GRSecurity team has gone into the linux
code, modified it, and then published their modifications.
See the Anime Subs cases for a similar situation: yes subs for an anime
are a derivative work of the anime.

You're simply wrong, programmer. So shut your mouth or go and study law
for a few years before giving your "opinion" on legal matters again,
understand lay person? Understand?

------

The GRSecurity patch snakes through almost the entire kernel; it really
touches everywhere
(and Brad Spengler etc have publicly attested to this as a bullet point
as it doesn't only
add features but fixes various in-place security errors); and not even
as a monolithic block,
it puts a paw here, and there, and there (so on and so on for 8MBs),
with the deft agility of a cat,
and the dexterity of a vine wrapped every which-way around the many
branches of a bush:
it is a non-separable derivative work.

A counter example would be the Nvidia GFX driver: a portion of that
driver works across platforms.
That portion which works on Linux, Windows, etc is a separable work and
thus can be argued
to be standalone before a court. Furthermore, in the Nvidia case, that
portion was likely
developed on another platform and the wrapper was then built to conform
to it.

The wrapper itself that interfaces with linux is licensed under the same
terms as linux.

Other drivers can be written in a similar way.

With GRSecurity, on the other-hand, that is absolutely impossible.
GRSecurity exists
only to give the linux kernel "self protection" (their words IIRC). They
do this
by going in with a scalpel to thousands of areas in the kernel and
making small
but important* edits and additions, as-well as by writing some new
routines to then
use throughout the kernel.

Unlike a plug-in; their derivative work does not and cannot stand alone.

The Anime-Subs cases reaffirmed somewhat recently that a derivative work
that cannot stand alone and is not authorized is an infringing work.

(Ex: You're a fan, you listen to the Anime Girl cartoon in Japanese,
you write down what they say, you distribute that: that text is a
derivative work and not a standalone one: it required the existence
of the cartoon to itself exist or have any meaning).

The situations are very different thusly and that a court
would find GRSecurity to be infringing. If the GRSecurity patch is not
a derivative work then nothing in the realm of source-code is.

As for making modifications: To create the patch Brad Spengler modified
the
linux-kernel over the course of 15 years, and to continue continually
producing
new patches he continually modifies the linux-kernel even more. Without
permission of the license he has no right to modify the kernel. The
mechanical
modification that is done by patching is a red-herring in this case
since it's
not needed to argue infringement on Mr Spengler's part once he has been
found
to have added an additional term to the agreement between him and
further
distributees of the derivative work. Once he has done that, he has
violated
the license grant, and he no-longer has a right to distribute the work,
nor
to distribute derivative works, nor to modify the work in-order to
create
future derivative works.

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