Bon sans nom

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/no-gpl-apps-for-apples-app-store/8046

So there has been a lot going on about Apple’s infringement of the General Public License. For people wondering about the iRail project (yes, we do GPL too) and BeTrains, I will try to explain this hassle in human words.

First of all for non programmers, GPL explained: when you write a book you will obtain copyright on it. Each author is protected as soon as he wrote something in almost any country and all rights are reserved by you. As a consequence you might want to give people the right to redistribute your book, or the right to edit your book and redistribute it yourself. This is where licenses come in: you can license anyone to make a derivative work of yours. For text (wikipedia for instance) people use Creative Commons, for programs, programmers tend to use the GPL (General Public License).

The GPL license has only one basic rule which says the freedom of both the creator and the user should be respected. There are 4 freedoms that should be taken into account:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour.
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes.

Of course this has been poured into the mould of lawyers and a pretty complex text came out which did that.

The problem with the Apple store today is that when you downloaded an application from it, you do not have freedom 3. I assume that R. Denis-Courmont (a VLC contributor and less importantly a Nokia employee) tries to change the Apple store to a more transparent system by telling them they infringed on the GPL with their VLC app and they should allow copying applications from one phone to another when they are licensed under the GPL. Instead of Apple adding 2 lines of code to their system which would allow people who downloaded GPL apps to copy those from one isomething to another isomething, they seem to have removed the VLC app from their store which resulted in irrelevant reactions, annoyed users and frustrated contributors.

So what’s the deal with iRail and BeTrains?

Good news! We are still on the appstore although we use the GPL. With the iRail npo (non profit organisation) we own 100% of the copyright on the BeTrains application and by adding it to the appstore we gave Apple the exception to put it online by ignoring the third freedom.

On one hand we do not agree with Apple’s decision. On the other hand we want to give our users the best experience. We believe that if people want to share it with friends they still can look up the source code on project.iRail.be and they still can download the binaries from somewhere else and redistribute it.

Is this the solution for the VLC app?

I don’t know. The VLC team will have to look carefully at who owns the rights to the application and they will need each and everyone’s consent to give Apple this exception and to ‘waive’ this freedom for them. On the other hand the whole point at first was the question to Apple to allow people to redistribute their application under certain circumstances. What Apple’s philosophy is? I have no clue but apparently their products won’t suffer any sales-drops anyway.

- Pieter

It’s generally known that piracy tends to have not so positive side-effects. It’s a word that victimizes one group of people and makes others the cause of injustice and misery. One thing pirates got in common with their victims: they don’t want piracy to happen at all. What if they could get a fair chance at achieving what they wanted in the first place? But… who were we talking about again? Pirates?

Identifying the pirates

Piracy in terms of intellectual property is not a neologism. In fact, it has been around since the beginning of the 17th century according to wikipedia. It meant and still means: «the infringement of exclusive rights in creative works». To my knowledge, it is only recently that people started identifying with pirates. But why would you want to be like such horrible beings? Right, the image has become ridiculous and people tend to like sarcasm.

I will not write about how copyright corporations abuse the term to shoot at… well… everyone. Instead I wanted to know how people deal with the current legislation. Therefor we can introduce the term «corporate piracy», which means «the prevention of innovation and exploration of creative works by big corporations».

X ways of being a pirate

First of all, let’s see how we can become a pirate. There are tons of reasons for corporate pirates to be calling you a pirate:

1. Download music online

Or watch some movies on a popular site like youtube or vimeo which may contain copyrighted material.

2. Organise an event

And put on a radio! Or your collection of expensive CD’s! Or your collection of downloaded audiofiles, it doesn’t matter.

3. Reuse music in new material

This is my favourite way. Take 1000 songs and mash them up into a 10 minute movie which is an entirely new story! You’ll be fined for every song and the claim might be around 1billion$.

If none of these things has ever been done by you, I’m sure you once lend your friend a CD of yours. Technically speaking this is piracy as well.

Two ways of taking this system

Ignore the system, just do what you like, if you get caught, you’re one of the unlucky.

Hm. Not a good way of dealing with injustice, is it? Also, the law won’t change very soon. At least, not in the right way, so don’t put any hopes on that.

Patch the system

Don’t be a pirate! I often compare pirates to hippies. They both hate the system but instead of helping building a better society they ignore it. Let’s make this business healthy again instead, let’s find a new balance between consumers and creative products. Let’s find a way in which consumers can become artists.

If you’re an artist, let’s rule out the middleman. In fact, if your music is any good, you don’t need any protection of your music. Your real fans will buy your CD. Others will have a listen by hearing it on the radio, getting it over the Internet, by getting a CD of a friend… But don’t say these people are pirates for being curious! In fact, these people are the most important link in the chain of mouth-to-mouth advertising. Since no middleman need to be paid, the percent of the money paid by a consumer for a CD going to you, will increase enormously. Also songs bought online will have a much higher return. This will make up for the money not gained by songs played on parties or levies pulled on empty carriers or Internet connections.

If this incentive for a new business model appeals to you, you might want to take a look at what creative commons is all about. In 2012 I hope to start an organisation in Belgium which helps artists to take their music to consumers in a brand new way.

- Pieter