> From: Alan Cox <alan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> . . . . > On Wed, 4 Jul 2007 08:09:42 +0000 (UTC) > Thufir <hawat.thufir@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > On Tue, 03 Jul 2007 21:17:12 -0700, David Boles wrote: > > > > > > > I am not with Fedora but just a Fedora user for a long time. Fedora has > > > said this has to do with USA laws *and* company policy to only provide > > > FOSS. Which I think is a really goo thig.None of the third party sites > > > that I, myself, know of are in the USA. You can read that as you wish. > > > > Well, now I'm curious. What possible US law could apply? Aside from GPL > > issues none come to mind. Do you have more specific info? > > See 2600 Magazine v USA (the decision over linking to DeCSS) > > It's a common confusion that the US has "free speech". The US has "free > political speech" (mostly) and the two are quite different. It's not a free speech issue; it's one of inducement to copyright infringement. It's very controversial. For a long time, if you distributed a device that could be used to infringe someone's copyright, but which had other non-infringing uses, you were not liable for copyright infringement, even if one of your customers used your device to infringe on copyrights. This resulted from a lawsuit against Sony, which made the original Betamax video recorder. Sony convinced the court that, since you could do a lot of things with a VCR besides steal movies off the TV, that they could not be held liable if a few customers did just that. I've seen the Betamax case described as a "safe harbor" -- it gave guidance for manufacturers if their devices might be used to violate copyrights (and they wanted to avoid being sued). A later decision, I believe it was against Grokster, a file-sharing service, went the other way. Grokster was found to have based their business model on allowing customers to steal copyrighted materials, which isn't legal. The court didn't buy the argument that customers weren't being forced to steal files -- they could share legal files just as easily. This decision put the "safe harbor" back in question. I understand that the Fedora project wants to take a principled stand for free software, and this is very admirable. But with the Betamax safe harbor not so safe anymore, it's no wonder that Fedora doesn't link to any sites for non-free software. The argument might be made that by linking to sites for non-free software, Fedora was inducing its users to violate the law. Perhaps it's violating someone's copyright, violating some patent rights, or inducement to infringement -- it's all a risk. I'm not an attorney, although I am interested in such things, and you can find much more on Google about this if you are very interested. If you have access to the magazine _Communications of the ACM_, you'll find the "Legally Speaking" column by Pamela Samuelson. She is an attorney, and provides an informed opinion about such matters. Erik
