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 Thursday, 26 בAugust 2010 13:52:23 geoffrey mendelson wrote:
> On Aug 26, 2010, at 1:23 PM, Oron Peled wrote:
> >       Now try to convince a judge that publishing in some  
> >       manufacturer's  web-site is equivalent to this.

> That's an interesting point. What exactly would you sue for?

Copyright infringment.

> In Israel you can only claim damages equal to the amount you were
> actually damaged.

IANAL, but it's obvious you didn't bother to read the law:
 * item 56 - up to 100,000 NIS without proving any damage.
 * Also look at item 53...

And even if you were right. Who said the damage is defined by the price
of the software bits? This is a straw man which was tried at the USA and
was thrown by the court to were it belongs...

> Not only that, but buying an infringing work is not illegal  
> in Israel.

Yes. Also the sun is shining now and the water are wet. What does
it has to do with the *seller* of an infringing product?

> AFAIK there is no requirement for the GPL notification, offer of  
> source code, etc to be in any particular language.Can you say with  
> 100% certainty that it is not included in the Chinese documentation  
> you (or the importer) threw out unread?
> Or that if you went into setup  
> and clicked on ABOUT, you would not see such a message?

Yes, all licenses are in English (in all products I've seen) but the GPL
was translated to Chinese and hidden in the ABOUT box without
providing the English original.

Show me a product like this, and I'll settle ;-)
[or better phrased -- when pigs fly]

> Finally why not? Almost everything I have bought here that includes a  
> GPL notification does so in English (not Hebrew) and points to a web  
> site for information on how to obtain source code.

IANAL, but AFAIK English is one of Israel's official languages.

I've done with this thread, since you are obviously looking under the rung
for irrelevant arguments -- there is a huge market of GPL infringing
products. The infringments are so big (both in quantity and level) that 
bothering ourselves with some rare-earth arguments is wasting time.

Cheers,

-- 
Oron Peled                                 Voice: +972-4-8228492
oron at actcom.co.il                  http://users.actcom.co.il/~oron
Free software: each person contributes a brick, but ultimately each
person receives a house in return.
           -- Brendan Scott