Monthly waste of time :-) Has anyone been able to buy a Digital TV USB stick in Israel and get it to work under Linux?

[Oron Peled]

On Wednesday, 25 בAugust 2010 23:39:43 geoffrey mendelson wrote:
> As far as I know the manufacturer of the box has to publish the code,  
> not the OEM or importer, who just sticks their name on it.If they have  
> a site in China in Chinese, with no other languages, with the code  
> available for download, or a comment  that you send them ten dollars  
> for postage and producing a disk, they will send you the code, they  
> have fullfilled the GPL requirements.

Hey, hey, not so quick:

 * Importers are not exempt from copyright law:
   Please check http://www.jnul.huji.ac.il/heb/docs/IL-copyright-2007.pdf
   An imported copyright infringing work is handled just as if
   the infringment was done in Israel (page 2, "definitions")

 * Also, from item 1 in the license (GPLv2):
      "... and give any other recipients of the Program a copy
          of this License along with the Program."
    You can bet every sold device has nice page from company lawyers
    with tons of copyrights messages regarding *their* rights.

    Failing to include a copy of the *GPL license* is a violation in itself.

 * If you check item 3 in the license, you'll see that for commercial
    distributor the only valid options are:
     - Supply the source with the program
     - "Accompany it with a written offer..." to supply the source code.
        Now try to convince a judge that publishing in some manufacturer's
        web-site is equivalent to this.

I haven't seen a company waive its rights away so easily as you just did
for Free Software projects... Let's be more carefull next time.

-- 
Oron Peled                                 Voice: +972-4-8228492
oron at actcom.co.il                  http://users.actcom.co.il/~oron
There are only 10 types of people in the world-
Those who understand binary, and those who do not.