To be fair to them... thats a brave step for a startup to take. So many would try to stay quiet and fix the issues behind the scenes (hell, giant companies try this attempt all the time!). They made the right move here.
NB, I don't use Hive and have no interest, I moved to Mastodon because I want to be in control of my data moving forward.
It's incredible to learn from the responses in this thread how widespread and systemic this problem is, not just in software but seemingly every industry. Thank you for these examples.
Perhaps it will be beneficial in the discussion to add examples of other orgs e.g. IETF, Unicode. Unicode spec is fully available[1] and their funding comes from a membership-model rather than a pay-model[2].
ISO's argument is compelling but we see other standards organizations taking different approaches and more or less still finding success.
Also ECMA (C# and JavaScr... er, ECMAScript) which provides standards at no cost vs ANSI (no notable language specs since C and Pascal) which charges a fee.
Last year I finished the school year early because of the coronavirus lockdown and had too much free time - so I wrote an interpreter for CLR bytecode (https://github.com/Leowbattle/clr_lite). The ECMA-335 standard contained everything I needed to know for that project: documentation of the EXE format, VM instructions, etc.
I learned a lot doing this project, and I would never have been able to do it without free access to the standard. So I think Tim is right to recognise the value open standards provide to hobbyist programmers.
ECMAScript is nowadays amusing because the ISO standard for it is literally a single page document… that normatively references the ECMA published document.
OASIS is good but there member orgs need to pay membership dues and do it every year. I think ISO encourages independent experts from public sector and academia to provide expert feedback without paying for membership.
Though, I think that ISO can be fully funded by the national standards bodies on an annual basis just like OASIS is funder by companies and not charge for PDFs.
I'm afraid that you are comparing apples and Walmart.
Unicode is a standard for encoding characters.
ISO is an organisation that _creates_ standards for just about anything.
Unicode became a standard as a result of beating other competing standardisations.
ISO declares that whatever they came up with is the standard, no competition required.
Hence the effectiveness of the business model.
> I only wish it could detect when asshole newspapers do that last minute mutation of the DOM to put bullshit divs in front of the article. It makes me play a button-click race to beat the rendering of the bullshit div to reader mode.
More often than not, going into reader mode, then hitting refresh will fix this! (works for NYT)
You used this website template (http://html5up.net/hyperspace) which has a Creative Commons 3.0 license, and you scrubbed the author's name and attribution from the template. Please respect the license! http://html5up.net/license
Attribution is a fine line; removing the attribution from where it was in the template and plastering "All Rights Reserved" copyright over it is a very clear violation of the creative commons license.
In some situations, it's difficult to place attribution along with the media, but in this case, it's not - it's a webpage - and having the attribution be in the source code is not really acceptable, because it's not reasonably accessible for someone looking for it.
If you look at that page and only that page, what leads you to believe that this is built of off a CC-BY work? Nothing. Sure, you can add "for copyright and license information, visit this link" in the footer, with a link to the github readme page that has the attribution, but removing it all together and only leaving scraps of it in the source code is just careless, reckless misuse of the original author's work.
He's not selling a website or a template though. The "All Rights Reserved" refers to the product, ie. Tokamak, which he indeed owns.
He didn't obfuscate the source, and indeed the attribution is the very first thing you see in the source (and when it comes to HTML, the source IS the website). And while he didn't comply 100% with the 'default' CC license (which reads that you should state the changes made), he did comply 100% with the 'rules' given by the author. He gave credit, and linked to the website, as well as the specific licensing terms given by the author.
Tl;dr - since he's not selling a template, the copyright at the bottom obviously refers to his own product and not the web template. The attribution is in the correct spot, at the top of the source.
What are the norms for attribution when it comes to software? You include a LICENSE file if you're distributing the source, or you display it in your software (like iPhones and Androids).
What are the norms for attribution when it comes to images, videos? The footer. A bar over the bottom of the image. A CC logo. Anything visibly displayed along side the image.
What are the norms of attribution when it comes to website design? The footer, or an About page.
The point is that attribution is made as accessible as possible. It's what keeps the Creative Commons community strong! Deleting the template author's attribution section and relegating it to the SOURCE CODE of the website means that anyone who doesn't know what the source code is (a lot of people) don't know that "hey, this is a template that I can use too!" The attribution is _missing_. It needs to be present with the work, i.e. the web page, and hey, how do you do that? You put the link in the footer, where it was before you deleted it.
Legally speaking, the source code IS the website. There is no difference. If I were to open up the website in a plain text editor, what would I see? It's the same as for any other program - the license resides in the code, not the 'output'.
As for the website template and CC license, it's not an image or a video. It's a collection of CSS, Js and HTML. It's code.
I'd argue that maybe the template should have a code license like the GPL, and not a CC license. And while I'm aware that the CC license is common for website templates, I'm also sure you could convince most courts that it's not an 'image or video'.
Anyhow, I'm sure this could be solved if the creator of the template asked for a little more recognition. Not dragging this guy through the mud for something that's irrelevant to what he actually created. He's not trying to pass off the website as his own, only the actual project itself, which IS his!!!
The template author is selling an attribution free version of his template - if you click download it will say:
"Need an attribution-free version?
Check out Pixelarity, my latest and greatest side project that offers attribution-free usage of all of my templates, exclusive new templates, and support (from me) for just $19."
The license says to "keep intact" all copyright notices. My layman's assumption would be that means scrubbing is a violation. It also says a lot of words that seem to come down to "if you put your copyright notice in, then their attribution has to be at least as prominent."
All said, though, it's sketchy practice no matter what the license says literally. A main purpose of CC is to give you a license that can be followed common-sensibly. Playing "lawyer' with the wording isn't reciprocating the goodwill of the author.
I disagree--dual-licensing is absolutely a thing, as is white-labeling. The author is putting a price on hiding his involvement. Why is that not a valid thing to do?
Just because they've trademarked "kik" doesn't give them complete control over all instances of that 3 letter string in the world. See the 8 factors of trademark infringement, and trademark law in general; this is just a kik lawyer being threat happy.
> Just because they've trademarked "kik" doesn't give them complete control over all instances of that 3 letter string in the world.
Agreed - hence why I looked up the actual trademark in the first place. I wasn't expecting to find out they were in the software development business too.
1. The marks appear very similar, with the possible exception that kik the company appears to have no meaning behind "kik". Similar enough that I have to specify "kik the company."
2. Both appear to provide services aimed at developers.
3. The plaintiff's mark appears to be strong enough to fill the first page of Google, and for overprotective parents to overreact to.
4. I was momentarily confused which kik I was clicking through to at least once.
Am I misweighing or misinterpreting things to think that the first 3 points, at least, point towards infringement? Do you agree that these appear to be among the more important ones?
"The first five of these factors are examined in every trademark infringement action."
"Of these eight factors, the first two are arguable the most important."
> ... and trademark law in general
If you have any recommendations, feel free to share.
US trademark is what's dangerous to NPM Inc., the US company running NPM. We don't know anything about how they "handled" it before it came to this, except that they did decide against the article author. What should they have done differently?
It's not good that NPM-the-piece-of-infrastructure is vulnerable to this, maybe a registry like this shouldn't be under control of a single company, but we don't know enough to decide what options NPM Inc-the-company had.
I hope they clean up/better communicate their policies around this, once they have them figured out (e.g. the package dispute page doesn't discuss trademarks).
Not given them control over his code just because it had their name on it. They could have taken it down, but they didn't, they just gave some company ownership of his module, not cool.
