Down the Hatch
Friday, June 20th, 2003 01:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturnerIt seems that Orrin Hatch, the senator mentioned earlier who wants to allow music companies to ba able to destroy the computers of people who download music, is himself guilty of software piracy. An article in Wired.com explains how his website included some Javascript code for managing menus which had been taken from a commercial product without Hatch paying for or registering the product (registration is free for non-commercial use).
Now I am all for software being free as in both speech and beer, but this is worse than piracy, it's plagiarism. I'm not saying you should give references for every bit of code you write. Most code is pretty generic, and javascript is such a limited language, it would be almost impossible to write anything useful in it without duplicating somebody's code. For example, one piece of javascript on one of my websites has no acknowledgement, since it's the javascript equivalent of "Hello World" (see my earlier spoof on the SCO case for more about this). I can't even remember where I first saw it. On the other hand, another script was downloaded from a free script site and modified, and lo and behold, what do you see in the code of the web page but
<!-- Original: Ricocheting (ricocheting@hotmail.com) -->
<!-- Web Site: http://free.prohosting.com/~ric -->
<!-- Modified by Robin Turner -->
(Incidentally, I've just noticed that URL is out of date, so I've emailed the author in order to update it - see what a nice guy I am?)
Of course Hatch is not the only person to foam at the mouth about piracy while being an accomplice to it. Two years ago, Microsoft were fined three million francs in a French court for copying the code of one of their former associates. This is particularly ironic, since apparently the term "software piracy" was coined by Microsoft. I wonder if they also registered it as a trademark? It would be amusing to see the CDs you can buy on the street here bearing the message "This is Pirated Software ®".
Now I am all for software being free as in both speech and beer, but this is worse than piracy, it's plagiarism. I'm not saying you should give references for every bit of code you write. Most code is pretty generic, and javascript is such a limited language, it would be almost impossible to write anything useful in it without duplicating somebody's code. For example, one piece of javascript on one of my websites has no acknowledgement, since it's the javascript equivalent of "Hello World" (see my earlier spoof on the SCO case for more about this). I can't even remember where I first saw it. On the other hand, another script was downloaded from a free script site and modified, and lo and behold, what do you see in the code of the web page but
<!-- Original: Ricocheting (ricocheting@hotmail.com) -->
<!-- Web Site: http://free.prohosting.com/~ric -->
<!-- Modified by Robin Turner -->
(Incidentally, I've just noticed that URL is out of date, so I've emailed the author in order to update it - see what a nice guy I am?)
Of course Hatch is not the only person to foam at the mouth about piracy while being an accomplice to it. Two years ago, Microsoft were fined three million francs in a French court for copying the code of one of their former associates. This is particularly ironic, since apparently the term "software piracy" was coined by Microsoft. I wonder if they also registered it as a trademark? It would be amusing to see the CDs you can buy on the street here bearing the message "This is Pirated Software ®".
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no subject
Date: 2003-06-20 01:27 pm (UTC)