While reading customer reviews of her book on writing
successful Internet business plans at Amazon.com recently, author Lynn Manning
Ross was shocked to find a scathing review purportedly written by "[email protected],
Seattle, WA," a clear reference to Amazon.com president Jeff Bezos.
"Stupid Book--Don't Waste Your Time!" the review declared.
"Ask yourself one question. Did Jeff Bezos need a book like this to create
amazon.com? NO! Neither should you. Save your money. " Manning Ross'
experience illustrates a tough dilemma: One of the most popular facets of the
Internet--the freedom to air opinions far and wide with the click of a
mouse--also creates the most potential for abuse.
An embarrassed Manning Ross, afraid people would be
dissuaded from buying her book by a fraudulent review, quickly e-mailed
Amazon.com expressing her concern. Leah Ball in the merchandising department
responded by promising to investigate, but it wasn't until five days later,
after several more e-mails from Manning Ross, that the review disappeared.
Manning Ross was outraged at the delay in removing the
review, and even more so by her discovery that reviews are not prescreened.
"If you're not minding the store, you're damaging the whole publishing
industry" she said. "Hackers have been permitted to go on Amazon and post
anything they want." Amazon.com is far from alone in letting people post
comments online without vetting them. Internet-wide, portals such as Deja.com
encourage visitors to rate everything from authors to luxury cars. E-commerce
sites such as Amazon.com and CDnow solicit customer reviews. And the most
popular feature of many financial Web sites is message boards where users can
post their opinions of various stocks.
The problem is that anyone with access to a plugged-in
computer can sign in to a chat room or onto a bulletin board under an
anonymous screen name. Forums generally provide guidelines for postings, but
don't filter comments.
"People used to say things around the water cooler," said
Daniel E. Johnson, an attorney with McKenna & Cuneo in Washington, D.C., who
has a number of high-tech clients. "But now, with e-mail, everyone has a much
easier opportunity to spread their opinions far and wide." Amazon.com
spokesman Paul Capelli said the huge volume of reader reviews makes it
impossible to screen them. "It's a self-policing community," he said. "Our
policy is, if an inappropriate review is brought to our attention, we'll
investigate, we'll look at it, and we'll remove it if it's not appropriate."
He said that although Amazon.com encourages visitors to follow guidelines,
abuse is inevitable on a site that features 2.5 million reviews.
Judith Platt, spokeswoman for the Association of American
Publishers, said she hadn't heard of any trend of abusive online reviews and
didn't think it was a widespread problem. Maureen Donnelly, publicity director
of Penguin Books, agreed, but speculated that such a situation could
potentially hurt a smaller publisher.
Online chatters share the same First Amendment right to free
speech as the water-cooler crowd, but also the same legal restrictions. In the
Amazon case, for instance, Bezos could press fraud charges against the
reviewer who pretended to be him, said McKenna & Cuneo's Johnson.
Expressing opinions online also exposes users to the laws of
other jurisdictions outside their own, Johnson said. "A statement that's not
defamatory in your hometown could be [defamatory] in the jurisdiction where
someone picks up the e-mail or the chat room," he explained.
Malice is another key consideration in measuring whether a
statement has legal implications.
"If a statement is made maliciously about the person, then
the author might have a claim against the critic," explained Johnson, using
the bookselling industry as an example. "If, on the other hand, the statement
is regarding the author's work, it's unlikely it's actionable." In the
financial arena, inappropriate online statements can have serious
repercussions. Two Raytheon employees resigned earlier this year after they
posted what the defense contractor called "proprietary and confidential
information" to Yahoo message boards. Last September, Itex Corp., which
operates an online trade center, sued 100 "John Does" for allegedly posting
untrue and defamatory statements about the company on a Yahoo board.
The National Association of Securities Dealers regulates
brokers' online statements, and the Securities and Exchange Commission has
created an Internet enforcement unit to prosecute fraud on the Net.
"Every employee has a duty of loyalty to his or her
employer," Johnson said. "If the employee is spreading false information
intentionally, or spreading proprietary information, he can be found liable
for breaching that duty." But Johnson said people often don't have a financial
or malicious motive when they make potentially litigious statements online, he
said--they just like to talk. "That's the danger of the Internet," he said.
"The blabbermouth in the office now has an audience that stretches far beyond
the company itself." The Telecommunication Act of 1996 protects Internet site
providers, saying they aren't responsible for information provided by others
as long as they have no reason to believe posted information is false or
libelous. "But a provider may be held liable for defamation if it knew it was
defamatory and failed to take action or has reason to know it's defamatory,"
said Johnson. Moderated chat rooms, therefore, place themselves at slightly
higher risk than unmoderated ones.
From: Jason Hammerschmidt [email protected]
Open Source Licensing, and the latest craze to go public
(such as RedHat's IPO) sometimes have conflicting values. When public, you
have to cater to your stock holders, this can easily conflict with the open
source communities goals. Although you can build a business model around
secondary and tertiary services such as support and manuals, etc. there will
still be a conflict of interest at the center of it all. Most important, the
philosophy and integrity of our community can be easily compromised and
undermined by stock holders. The fact that our community has the same
ability to acquire stock means little unless we own the majority of stock, and
this is unlikely to happen. What, Bruce Perens, is your view on this
subject? And how can we ensure the safety of our beliefs?
yes I know this is two questions :) and I also know this
isn't a strictly licensing question, but it is very closely related.
Jason,
You'll notice that a some of the companies that are already
participating in free software development have been public-stock companies
for a long time: IBM, and Apple, for example. Yet, these companies found a way
to participate in Open Source. In IBM's case, it's making something of
research-derived products it might not have been able to continue in
development or market otherwise. In Apple's case, they're attempting to keep
up with Linux - truly a daunting task - by being open too. Also, they are
trying to return benefit they've already gotten from the community, and they
might be able to open some secondary markets in the future from ports of their
free software. You'll notice that when we had a problem with Apple's and IBM's
original licenses, we used publicity to influence them. Public-stock
companies are very sensitive to publicity because their stock price can go up
or down depending on what people are saying about them. If their strategy is
one that will prevent them from getting effective participation from the
community, that won't help their bottom line and the market will notice.
There is no conflict of interest here - it's a quid-pro-quo.
If the participation of the community is not important enough, the company
will exit the free software arena.
Every for-profit company that participates in free software
development will have to find a balance between its own needs and those of the
community if it is to participate at all. I have a scale that I use to
describe free software participants that runs from benefactor to
symbiotic to parasite. I'd put Red Hat in the symbiotic
position right now, NASA is a benefactor, and the parasites know who they are
:-). Parasites eventually lose because the community is too eager to help out
their competition.
----------------------------
from [email protected]
To what extent have the various "free" and not-so-free
licenses been evaluated by people with serious legal expertise? I hear charges
against, e.g. the GPL that it won't stand up in court, that it's too vague,
and other things of that ilk. Has the FSF ever had a crackerack patent (or
whatever area of the law is involved) go over their license with a
fine-toothed comb?
Adam,
The GPL has actually had a good deal of evaluation. Richard
Stallman has an MIT law professor who helps him, and there has been a law
school thesis and some private analysis. There are definitely holes, but
there's also evidence that it could be enforced. Ironicaly, the UCITA, a
proposed U.S. "uniform state law" that poses us problems because places a ban
on reverse-engineering, also has provisions that make the GPL and other free
software licenses much eaiser to enforce.
One of the biggest problems with the GPL and all other free
software licenses concerns the definition of a derived work. The definition of
a derived work in copyright law is mostly concerned with print, film, and
sound works, and was formulated before software came along. Thus, it doesn't
say anything about how reference should be treated. For example, if you
copy my function into your own program, it's a derived work. If you simply
call my function without copying it, it's not a derived work according to
U.S. copyright law, although you are having the exact same effect that you
would if you'd copied the function. It's trivial to make any program a shared
library or a callable object through object brokers like CORBA or COM, so you
can easily circumvent license restrictions about derived works if you are
considering copyright law alone. However, licenses are a combination of
copyright law and contract law, and under contract law you can be
restricted from performing certain activities that the software author might
consider the creation of a derived work, activities that you would otherwise
be permitted to do under copyright law. And of course, if you don't except the
license, you have no right to use or copy the software at all. The problem is
that the GPL doesn't really define what those activities are. That
should change.
However, we don't generally have to go to court to enforce
licenses, so they aren't getting tested for enforcibility in court, which is
the only real test. Publicity is our primary enforcement tool, and it's
surprising just how effective that has been so far.
I am soliciting attorneys to do pro bono work
(donated work for the public good) to help address problems with licenses.
There's a BOF about this at the LinuxWorld conference in August.
---------------------------
from [email protected]
Hi Bruce,
I recently started programming open source software for
Windows (due to my unfamiliarity with Linux programming), and organized
various OSS projects under the title of "Neon Goat Productions". However, I
don't feel that I have a good grasp on the ideas behind some more advanced
licensing techniques. First of all, if I release software under the GNU GPL,
or other licenses, do I (as the sole owner of the copyright) have the option
to change the license later on, either to another OSS license, or a closed
source license? I don't intend on doing anything like this, but I definitely
want to have the ability to control the future of my work. Also, if I release
a project under the GPL, am I allowed to use portions of my GPL'd code in an
independent, commercial program? I don't want to end up rewriting the same
code for another job, just because the licenses aren't exactly the same.
Finally, I am a bit unclear on releasing software under two licenses (for
example, having the choice between either the GPL or the Artistic licenses).
Since the Artistic license is less restrictive than the GPL, what would be the
difference if the software was only released under the Artistic license
instead of having an either/or clause?
Sincerely,
David Parker
David,
If you are the copyright holder of a program, you may issue
that program under any number of licenses simultaneously. While you can't take
the GPL back once you release a GPL-ed version, there is nothing that compels
you to release later versions under the GPL. But this is all ignoring
the issue of other people's contributions to your program.
The situation is much more complicated when other people
contribute. They own the copyright to their modifications.
You can deal with this in several ways if you want to keep
the option to distribute your work under a different license:
1. Simply don't use their contributions in your commercial
product.
2. Insist that they sign the copyright of the modifications
over to you before you before you will put any of their modifications in your
main source thread. This is what FSF does, so that they have the option to
revise the GPL later on without having to go to everybody who made a
modification and ask their permission.
3. Use a license like the Netscape Public License
that gives you the right to distribute contributed modifications under other
licenses. Note, however, that the NPL only requires that for
modifications to your files, and that if somone creates a separate file and
links it in, they are not required to give you the right to distribute that
file under other licenses. Of course you can write your own license that says
something different.
Regarding the Artistic license, I'd suggest that you do
dual-license with the GPL if you choose to use the Artistic, becuase that
makes it absolutely clear that your work can be united with other work that is
already under the GPL to make one product. I also don't like the language of
the Artistic license. I discuss why near the end of
my article on the OSD.
-------------------------
from: John L Grantham [email protected]
I note that the companies that you say deserve praise for
their efforts, Apple and IBM, are both hardware companies that in effect
happen to produce software. In both cases, they make far more money from their
hardware than they do software, so in effect they have less to lose by giving
an open source license a shot, but have much to gain in the form of increased
sales of hardware.
But what about companies that are primarily in software? How
do you see them making money off of open source, when that is after all their
main motive--earning cash? In other words, why buy an open source package when
you can download or copy it for free? Finally, are there any large
"traditional" software companies (ones from before open source became a
buzzword) that you see making commendable moves like IBM and Apple? Best
regards, John a.k.a. Ethelred
John,
Obviously, it's easy for companies that vend free software
as an accessory to hardware to make money, because it's a lot easier to
copy a disk than it is to copy a PC! Companies like VA Linux Systems
come to mind.
If your business must primarily be software, not support,
not anything else, you can't make everything free. This, for example,
is the strategy of Sendmail Inc., which makes proprietary add-ons for
the free sendmail mail delivery agent. Digital Creations, makers
of the Zope web content management software, aren't quite a software
pure-play: They give away their core software, and they sell services to
customize that core to vertical markets for specific customers, newspapers for
example. Some of that customization work may not make its way back into the
free product. They have also announced some proprietary add-ons for Zope.
Yes, there is a large traditional software company making a
commendable move. Unfortunately, I can't tell you who they are yet. It's not
nice for me to pre-empt other people's announcements - I did that to Troll
Tech once and they got (justifiably) very annoyed with me.
----------------------
from: Bill Gladen
With all of the companies that are coming up with Open
Source Definition compliant licenses, it is getting difficult to keep track of
what the various licenses actually contain. Is there any work being done on a
template license that companies could just post a delta of?; For instance, if
you had an Open Source Base License O, which contained clauses A-N, then
companies could just draft their license which stated "This license modifies O
in the following ways: remove clause B, replace clause C with clause C', and
add clause T."
I am certainly encouraging new entries to use one of the
existing licenses rather than complicate the situation with another
incompatible license. However, when the choice is having them make their own
license or not release the software under an Open-Source-Definition-compliant
license at all, I'd obviously rather see them release the software.
We are still in the learning period where companies are
figuring out how to meet their own needs while participate in free software
while meeting their own needs at the same time. This is sort of winding down
now, and in a year or so we'll be able to get together and draft some standard
licenses. I'd prefer not to have companies release deltas to a license,
because that isn't much better than having them make their own licenses if the
delta gets big. I'd just want some check-boxes for license options that would
all be qualified under the Open Source Definition.
