University of Kansas Adopts 'One Strike' Copyright Infringement Policy 397
NewmanKU writes "Eric Bangeman at Ars Technica writes that the University of Kansas has adopted a new, and very strict, copyright infringement policy for the students on the residential network. The university's ResNet website states that, 'Violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is against the law. If you are caught downloading copyrighted material, you will lose your ResNet privileges forever. No second notices, no excuses, no refunds. One violation and your ResNet internet access is gone for as long as you reside on campus.' According to a KU spokesperson, KU has received 345 notices in the past year from organizations and businesses regarding complaints about copyrighted material downloading."
Due Process (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Due Process (Score:5, Insightful)
Cutting you off the campus net is an entirely private decision, no due process required by law.
Think of it like getting banned from a forum because the admin thinks you are a troll.
Re:Due Process (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Due Process (Score:5, Interesting)
Just because you put something in your TOS does not make it legal or enforceable. IANAL, but I am an admin on a university network and we are frequently reminded that the students are paying customers with rights and as such we cannot arbitrarily ban them from using the system. Without some kind of watertight right of appeal someone probably will get caught as a false positive by this policy, sue, and win.
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Even assuming the new rules are legal, I suspect (IANAL) that they cannot be retroactively applied to existing service contracts. So the university would have to cancel the existing contracts and probably refund or wait out any pre-paid access times.
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if you could, i could change my contract with the phone company that i pay them nothing and get a free big mac with my line rental.
the changes must be "fair" remmeber that the spirit of contract law is fairness no matter what rubbish you might have heard.
Re:Due Process (Score:5, Insightful)
They clearly place the interests of their customers first and foremost.
I'm going to send that university a letter telling them I'm not hiring any of their graduates because of their asinine behavior.
Re:Due Process (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems like you're just adding to the pile of crap the students have to put up with.
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In this case, the education of stopping an activity in favor of just a claim and showing the students that this behavior is acceptable isn't the same values of ethics I wan
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We've seen articles like this on slashdot regading Stanford, U. of Washington, etc (those KU's looks to be the harshest), and slashdotters say, "boycott the school, attend coll
Re:Due Process (Score:4, Insightful)
I didn't realize tuition was free.
No seriously, I wonder why copyright infringement was singled out. If you park illegally on campus, do they remove your parking privileges forever? If you take more than your fair share in the dorm cafeteria, can you no longer eat on campus?
Sounds just alleging copyright violations at KU carries one of the harshest penalties. I wonder if you don't properly attribute your sources in a paper if they break your fingers? Anyway, if I was on the internet at KU, I'd try to encrypt all my traffic. Some idiotic letter comes from an RIAA lawyer, and the next thing you know, you might as well leave school.
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Any guesses whether or not this new policy applies to the legacy-admit son or daughter of a wealthy alumnus donor?
It doesn't, or, if it does, it'll be a poster child case for some legacy-admit who decided eight months ago that they were going to transfer anyway.
This rule is only used in the (dreadful) event that one of those base middle or lower class students starts acing their wealthy legacy-admit "betters" in classes and hurts their fragile ego...
It's also a Plan B. Plan A, in the (dreadful) event that the middle or lower classes begin to produce students who perform better than their wealthy legacy-admit "betters
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In my opinion, even if someone signs a contract stating that evidence, not a conviction, is needed to terminate a service, that doesn't necessarily mean that is lawful.
If they cut off someone's Internet access before conviction, so be it. But if they go to court and they are NOT found guilty, don't you think the school may have a lawsuit on their hands if they fail to re-enable the student's access?
Sure, I can understand temporarily suspending (or limiting bandwidth) of someo
Re:Due Process (Score:5, Funny)
I dunno... Let's say I have this jock room mate that I hate because he always gets the girls (and brings them to the top bunk when I'm trying to get a good nights sleep) so lets just say I theoretically put P2P software on his unpassworded computer and share out some Boy George songs.
Not only will he get booted off ResNet without recourse, but all the girls will think he's gay now when they look at his MP3 collection.
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It sounds like a letter of *suspicion* from the industry is all it takes. I always thought 'innocent until proven guilty' was part of the rule of law here. ( yes, i realize this is civil and not criminal, but still, a simple letter 'we think user assigned to ipaddress xyz did something wrong' shouldn't be enough.
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Now we've got the definition out of the way,
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Your money.
Okay, they didn't have your money yet, but you didn't have the music -- and you obviously want it, else you wouldn't have downloaded it.
So "your money" is a shorthand way of saying "A legitimate expectation that you would either buy from them or do without, which you have circumvented b
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>> Riiiight. Big corporations are all corporationy anyway so I am justified. Strike me dead now if you disagree.
Gues we won't be hearing from him again
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Re:Due Process (Score:5, Funny)
Oh crap... (Score:5, Interesting)
From the universities page: (which I downloaded into my browser...)
And further down, on the same page! (Which my browser downloaded, remember)...
Wow, that is harsh! I guess that's me banned then :-)
Re:Oh crap... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. In fact, as a signatory to the Berne Convention, in the US copyright exists in every work not explicitly released into the publci domain. Which makes it a particularly stupid thing to say. I mean it is fairly obvious that they mean "no unauthorised downloading of copyright material", but if they really plan to implement a "no excuses, no appeal" policy, you'd think they'd take the 30 seconds or so it needed to phrase the thing correctly.
Even then, it's still way OTT. Half the papers on Citeseer (for instance) are there in technical violation of the copyright of the journals where they were first published. The journals turn a blind eye, which is why the site can keep on, but I can see a lot of sudents getting banned, which considering how widely used citeseer is as an academic resource, is a but ridiculous.
I suppose the only other way they could implement the policy as expressed is to rely on the word "caught". That way, if they don't look for downloaders, they don't find them, and selective enforcement becomes the order of the day. I suppose it might be useful if the they forsee needing a pretext to silence unruly students.
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Re:Oh crap... (Score:5, Informative)
*All* works, unless they carry a notice explicitly putting them into the public domain, are automatically copyrighted by the author[0]. They do not need a copyright notice for them to be copyrighted.
Now, as the author, you may make your work (web page) available for people to download for free; that is your right. And because you, as the copyright holder, are the one who has made the work available, the end users aren't breaking copyright by downloading it.
*However*, they are still *downloading copyrighted materials*. They may be doing so legally, but that is not what the rule cares about. The rule states that merely downloading copyrighted materials is grounds for account termination.
[0] Or, if it is a work-for-hire or similar, the work might be copyrighted by an entity other than the author. But it is still copyrighted.
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Linux is copyrighted too. NO UNBUNTU FOR YOU!
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If, however, someone then uses said material in a copyright violating manner, you could.
Yes. Consult a lawyer.
Re:You aren't banned, the owner is distributing it (Score:2)
Lack of Caring (Score:5, Interesting)
Pulling authoritarian crap like this in a place where people are naturally rebelling against everything and anything is a good way to get egg on your face.
Re:Lack of Caring (Score:5, Insightful)
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Everybody who buys a "class notes" book from the bookstore should write down the publisher of every work copied in the books, and confirm that the school indeed obtained permission from the publisher to make the copies, as well as noting how many people are in the class to see how many copies were made. Ditto all class handouts.
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At least at my university [ucr.edu], the need to obtain permission and license the copyrighted works appropriately is one of the reasons why course readers can be so unbelievably expensive. [I've seen 200 page reader
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You wish. Students NEED those accounts and the "drop in revenue" is NOTHING compared to what record companies may sue for.
Instead the students will behave. If they're in University, it's because they don't want to be burger flippers or janitors. Their future is at stake. They will suck it down and deal with it.
Corporate America has them by the balls.
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As a current student at another university, I can assure you that giving up quietly would not be my response to this sort of unreasonable policy. I'd be rounding up other students to determine what the most efficient protest technique would be.
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The extent to which students should be downloading pirate content on a university residential network would make for an interesting discussion. I'd love to have that discussion at some point.
This story has nothing to do with that question though. This story is 100% about due process and appropriate penalties. Even if we assume that students should be downloading zero pirate content, the school IT department shou
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Dropping internet service wouldn't make a dent in the schools bottomline, and besides, im sure the students need the access to get their assignments done so dropping it as a protest really isnt an option for them.
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Downloading copyrighted material is perfectly legal, it's distributing it without permission is what is illegal. The DMCA have made matters rather odd over there in the U.S though. I'm glad I live here in Sweden where I don't have to worry abo
Re:Lack of Caring (Score:4, Informative)
This is typical slashdot behavior. Take everything out of context so everybody can get riled up about it. Sure the front page says 'copyrighted material', you think they'd put the full legalese on the frontpage or just a blurb saying "Its Bad, mkay"?
But if anybody would take the time to actually *READ* the subject at hand, you would find this paragraph:
And even if you fail your appeal, you just lose your ResNet access, you can still use computer labs on campus.
Re:Lack of Caring (Score:5, Insightful)
We get riled up because of all the kneejerk reactions that create more problems than they solve. Sure, it might superficially seem ok, but the potential for abuse is so high, it's patently absurd.
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What part of caught makes it hard for you to understand they aren't innocent?
Either it's flamebait or you're stupid (Score:2)
And then, even if you meant "copyrighted", it still would be a completely stupid thing to say. As as been pointed earlier, per the Berne convention, everything is copyrighted. See, this message you're reading now, and which you have therefore downloaded, is copyrighted by me.
So right now, I'm calling your ISP and having your account cancelled.
Re:Lack of Caring (Score:4, Interesting)
One stupid moderation of a valid point gets your moderation privelidges removed forever.
But lets face it, if you were too stupid to make a valid poitn wouldnt you just hide behind the moderation system by using it to disagree with other people too?
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Like if I care...
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Second, not everyone who was charged actually shared copyrighted content. There have been several cases where people were charged and didn't even have an internet connection.
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"Don't download copywritten material." We're actually talking about copyrights, not copywriters (i.e. the guys who write advertisements). So I would have modded it down as "malapropism".
Baby Meet Bathwater (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA mentions that Stanford and other schools charge high "Reconnection" fees after they block your MAC for sharing files. Why don't they just do something like that and make a load of money?
"Zero-tolerance" is all about moralism, and rarely about correcting behavior, or "teaching" people anything. It'll have a good effect statistically, but the people who get their privileges pulled won't have their attitude changed, they'll just conclude the "RIAA-Nazis" blackmailed his school into screwing with his education.
It doesn't matter how true it is, rules must give the appearance of fairness in order to be respected.
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Saying "The measure changes statistics but not attitude" does not mean the measure is bad.
For example, if you have tough sentences for violent robbery, it won't change the attitude of the would-be robbers, just make them more afraid, and thus less robberies are committed.
Let's not get start on the whole "copyright infringement is not a crime" stuff, OK? Crime or no crime, it's something RIAA and co. want to root out. You can have an enti
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We aren't talking about violent robbery, we're talking about copyright infringement. You can't equate a crime against intellectual property with violence. People who copy Content without paying for it are pretty far down the ladder of malfeasance, and spending a little effort to correct them might be worth it, compared to a violent felon. Most states don't depriv
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Re:Baby Meet Bathwater (Score:5, Insightful)
Once you force someone into a corner, where the choice is "do something that you fear or die", they will choose to live, because they're more afraid of dying than of whatever you were going to do to them. In fact, the whole "overcoming fear" thing is how cave-men evolved into us. Oh, wait, you said Kansas
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"Thus less robberies are committed", eh? How about "thus robbers are more more afraid of beinbg caught, so prepared to kill rather than leave witnesses"? Equally likely it seems to me. but being *tough* is fine if all you care is about them being *effective*
And how is "being tough" working out in Baghdad? High probability
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I'm not
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sounds crap (Score:3, Insightful)
Wouldn't all/most of these innocent things violate the DMCA? wouldn't that be enough to get you royally screwed?
How will they know? (Score:5, Interesting)
Even if they are 'guilty'.. what if someone downloaded a ROM of a NES game he has in his basement at home? A track from a CD that doesn't play anymore? A no-cd patch for a game so he can play it on his laptop wherever he goes? According to their draconian proposal, all of these would mean you are cut off from the internet.. forever. Is it me or is that f&*king crazy?
A University should be fighting the powers that be, not aiding and abetting them.
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Incidentally, it also teaches, but that's in room 3b, which doesn't exist.
B.
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I don't think you've thought it through. A University is for far more than teaching - in fact I'd go as far as to say teaching is secondary to research. Schools teach, community colleges teach but a proper University must do far more than teach. It must be a community of teachers and scholars - Universitas.
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No, might try reading [ku.edu] their policies [ku.edu] next time.
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Technically, maybe. However, the two are utterly indistinguible and the law demands proof beyond reasonable doubt. The fact of having another copy of the same information somewhere in their
Preponderance != reasonable doubt (Score:2)
However, [a ROM dumped from a Game Pak and a ROM downloaded from the Internet] are utterly indistinguible and the law demands proof beyond reasonable doubt.
Copyright infringement is more often prosecuted as a civil violation rather than a criminal violation. The standard in civil cases is preponderance (51%) of evidence, not proof beyond reasonable doubt. If the defendant cannot provide a shred of evidence that he or she has had access to a game copier (which by the way is not sold in U.S. retail stores or on eBay), then the defendant cannot reasonably invoke a defense under 17 USC 117.
the 11th commandment strikes again (Score:2)
Aehm, the blurb can't be right ... (Score:2)
If you are caught downloading copyrighted material, you will lose your ResNet privileges forever.
If i surf to any website, i start downloading copyrighted material, the moment i hit go. So it must read "downloading copyrighted material without permission of the copyright owner" and how on earth will this be enforced?
Implicit permission? Explicit permission?
How should Admin Eve know, that i phoned Alan Smithee in LA, and he gave me permission to download a 5 min .avi from his upcoming film "Gay Politicans go Hollywood" to include it in my essay about the corrupt politics in enforcing IP-Crimes?
Look
Who Is More Important? (Score:2)
The students or the cooperations? I kinda would have thought that Universities would do everything in their power to aid thei students en masse. Or do they somehow see a logically connection between aiding the blunt actions of these cooperations and the overall positive development of the students.
It seems inuitive that having zero copyright law would be a bad thing, and rarely is any extreme action a good thing. But unless you are feeding young mouths with the revenue generated by these aggressive tatics
Buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy (Score:2)
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Typical Slashdot Sensationalism (Score:5, Informative)
Let's take a look shall we:
1) You get a notice
2) You get a 5 day suspension
3) You have those 5 business days to submit an appeal if it was erroneous
4) If your appeal is denied (or you didn't submit one) your ResNet access is terminated.
It's the end of the world . . . oh wait . .
So you lose your dorm access, but can walk down to a computer lab . . .
So I guess the moral of the story is, don't get caught, or don't use the schools network to download your movies
Reversed burden of proof? (Score:2, Insightful)
If you say you did the claimed things, you will get your access suspended and later sued by the copyright holder.
If you say you did not do the claimed things (if true or not), you will get your access back and later s
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So, if I understand their system, the merest COMPLAINT will get you a suspension that will turn perma-ban if you don't appeal?
Simple, people (including students, since the source of the ban doesn't have to be particularly valid) can FLOOD the U with complaints and allegations. They don't have to be PROVEN, merely asserted. Don't like the people in that dorm? A couple of hours with a computer and printer
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Have you ever taken a vacation? Have you ever gone away for more than 5 days?
Tool.
Did they think this through? (Score:5, Informative)
We've already seen that anyone outside the U.S can send a bogus DMCA takedown notice without penalty. Not often the US passes laws that prosecute Americans and give non-Americans free reign but there you go. Here are two recent cases showing how easy it is:
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20
Now Kansas University has said they'll shut down students account if *anyone* sends a DMCA notice, with right of appeal. So if someone outside the US was to take the University's mailing list and generate a bogus DMCA notice for each one, the
entire University would voluntarily shut itself down. This hole in DMCA has been suggested before, so it's hardly new.
Who dreamed up this nonsense? Didn't they think it through to its logical conclusion? Don't Universities teach critical thinking? I mean, Double Duh.
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Policy could affect research and study (Score:4, Interesting)
In my own work, I often have to fetch journal and conference papers from digital libraries, e.g. a good one [acm.org]. Often I will find a paper is not available to me because it isn't covered by my University's subscription, like many of the papers here [ieee.org] or here [springerlink.com]. That situation is supposed to force a trip to the brick-and-mortar library (if it has the document), but sometimes you can find the paper online anyway, using a search engine. It might be on the author's website or Citeseer [psu.edu]. Sometimes people seem to "accidentally" leave copies of papers where a search engine can find them. This is extremely helpful for a researcher, saving much time, and it is known that online articles are more likely to be cited [psu.edu].
However, except in special cases (e.g. the author has retained the copyright and distributed it for free), this is technically copyright infringement. The publishers want you to get everything through their paywall. That would be fine if everything was accessible, but the exhorbitant fees charged for full access by some organisations prevent that. Therefore, copyright infringement actually helps scientific research by allowing information to flow. At my University, nobody seems to notice (or care about) students digging up papers from elsewhere. But if the Kansas U management style spread here, a publisher could presumably get students instantly disconnected for "bypassing the paywall". You might lose your Internet connection -- for studying.
Is this close to a situation where research is actively inhibited by greed [gnu.org]?
"The content you requested is not part of your subscription, please pay $30 to download this 10 page article".
CommonCopyright (Score:2)
IT policy at U of Kansas is generally clueless (Score:4, Informative)
Two or three mistaken enforcements of this -- yes, that will happen with near certainty given past experience -- and the effect of this will be simply to drive students out of the dorms. Someone with an ounce of clue (necessarily, outside of ITS) will figure that it is a whole lot cheaper to stonewall the RIAA on most cases than to deal with the cost of empty rooms, the policy will be quietly dropped, and IT will go in search of something else they can screw up.
Students tend to be one step ahead... (Score:2)
What did you expect? (Score:2)
This is the state that wants to teach creationism in the classroom. This type of no tolerance = no intelligence policy is completely in keeping their right wing, my way or highway mentality.
Some remind me why secession was such a bad idea.
not very workable in the long term (Score:2)
1. This is clearly not well thought out. I believe it will become a real problem for the school in several ways:
A. First, how are they going to determine who is responsible for downloading something, (IE who was actually at the computer)?
B. Once they do, what about the other students who share the room? Are they SOL?
C. What about the student's classes? I am sure the net is quite integral, so basically they are removing a learning/research/interaction tool which I would say is nec
It is Kansas (Score:2)
We've come a long way in my lifetime. I lived in a state college dorm that had a "don't hassle the marijuana users" policy in 1970. An RA lost his job for ignoring the dorm drug dealer when the college refused to accept his logic that the users wouldn't have anything to use without their dealer. Remember that the DMCA applies to using libdvdcss to watch a legally acquired DVD on linux. So an RA could be aiding and abetting a felon for failure to
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But that's immaterial, anyhow, as you have NO idea if the other person is doing it legally or not. I don't stop everyone I see on the street and verify that they are not an escaped criminal before I let them continue down the sidewalk, right? Even if that's not my duty, a police officer doesn't do that, either. Just because someone COULD be doi
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What a socially irresponsible attitude! What would y
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Maybe if I somehow managed to clone their puppy, without for even a second depriving them of theirs, that might be a valid analogy. You'd still have to get over the legal ramifications of cloning, though, while making a backup copy of a CD is specifically allowed by the law. (Yes, I -did- make a backup copy by downloading it. The law does not specify how I should make that copy.)
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Accessing almost any web site or page would result in a technical violation.
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Why not? You're assuming that the majority of p2p traffic is legitimate. If the vast, vast, vast majority is illegal and they are running a zero tolerance policy then it would be easy to police. Set up a packet fiter to report filenames being shared against user accounts. For everyone that looks even vaguely commerical throw the book at them. If it's a mistake they'll go through the complaints procedure and a
not keep copies on your computer? (Score:2)
Encrypt all traffice so even if they can monitor traffic, all they get is garbage. And speaking of, when will all clients for *any* communication be it p2p or just instant messengers go with encryption of traffic? ( I know it doesnt stop the p2p issue of 'we see you have files shared' using a hacked client that records it for evidence, but it at least keeps the network guys out of your personal
Who is the rightful author? (Score:2)
If you have the copyright holder's permission. I think they should talk to some real lawyers before writing these notices!
Even with the help of competent counsel, that might be difficult. Because copyright vests initially in a work's authors, determining copyright ownership starts with determing authorship. But if I write a song, who is the rightful author? Am I the rightful author, or is the songwriter whose decade-old song I may have accidentally copied parts from (see the "My Sweet Lord" case) the rightful author?
Too much credit to RMS and not enough to MIT. (Score:3, Informative)
Open Source Software owes at least as much to Berkeley's liberal attitude, *and* MIT's liberal attitude, as to RMS. RMS has effectively and unfairly demonized the AI lab, and he's been given too much credit for being one of the more visible rocks in an avala
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