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Conservancy BlogDisplaying posts
by Denver Gingerich
by on October 26, 2020
We learned on Friday that GitHub removed youtube-dl's primary collaboration forum and code repository from their site, which had been hosted at https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl. The action was in response to a DMCA Section 512 notice that the RIAA sent demanding removal of youtube-dl, which was released and distributed via GitHub under a liberal FOSS license. In the notice, the RIAA cites DMCA Section 1201 (the removing digital restrictions section) as justification for youtube-dl's removal.
We believe that youtube-dl has substantial non-infringing uses. There are many, but to name a few, youtube-dl has the following important features:
We realize Microsoft, a paying member of the RIAA, has left themselves stuck between their industry association's abuses of the law and the needs of FOSS projects for which they provide infrastructure. While under current law (which we object to), complying with the takedown notice is admittedly the fastest way to limit Microsoft's liability, we view Microsoft's membership in the RIAA as a much bigger liability to our community, now that Microsoft controls GitHub. We call on Microsoft to resign from the RIAA and remove their conflict of interest in this matter. This is an important opportunity for Microsoft to stand up for the values of software freedom.
If you work at Microsoft (including for its GitHub subsidiary), we call on you to petition your employer to resign immediately from the RIAA. We suggest that you raise these concerns directly with your manager or other management, or (even better) by starting an internal email petition with other employees.
To build a strong community of FOSS developers, we need confidence that our software hosting platforms will fight for our rights. While we'd prefer that Microsoft would simply refuse to kowtow to institutions like the RIAA and reject their DMCA requests, we believe in the alternative Microsoft can take the easy first step of resigning from RIAA in protest. We similarly call on all RIAA members who value FOSS to also resign.
by on January 9, 2020
In starting the new year, I am reminded of what we accomplished last year, but also of what we urgently need to get done this year. What I do at Conservancy is relatively unique, not just within Conservancy, but within software freedom non-profits as a whole. My primary focus is ensuring that organizations comply with the GPL so that people like you can continue to enjoy the freedom that the GPL and other copyleft licenses guarantee. Although it's a small part of what we do at Conservancy percentage-wise (partly due to funding constraints), GPL compliance and enforcement is crucial to the future of software freedom.
Your donations so far have allowed us to check numerous companies' source releases this year, each time getting us a bit closer to the goal of fully compliant releases of the GPLed software they use. While this is certainly important, it is frankly the bare minimum that we need to do in order to prevent the GPL from being treated as a permissive license that companies simply use to proprietarize all the code they use. We don't want to see your freedom taken away, and we need to keeping fighting to avoid that future.
We are at a turning point for software freedom. As our lives rely more and more on software embedded in the ever-expanding set of devices we use, it is more and more critical that we control the software they run. Companies need to see that not only is it straight-forward to comply with copyleft licenses, but that copyleft compliance is in fact a feature that their customers are specifically looking for (most companies do not comply with the GPL - we need both carrots and sticks to fix this). We have a project underway that we hope will solidify this in companies' minds, and with continued funding we plan to build and release substantial parts of it this year.
Persistent GPL enforcement has begun to change the software and hardware industry norms in our favour. However, we are at risk of losing all we have accomplished so far unless we are able to both continue our work in the fields that we are familiar with, but also, and even more importantly, to recognize and respond to new threats to our freedom as our digital world changes, demanding new software freedom licensing strategies and enforcement methods.
We often call on the community to help us with compliance work, but it is no exaggeration when I tell you that our ability to ensure your software freedom is a direct result of donations from individuals. The deadline for having your contributions to Conservancy doubled is next week and we have a ways to go to make our match challenge, so if you'd like to increase your donation or get your friends to support us, don't delay! You can find the full match details and donation info here.
by on October 30, 2019
It has been many years since we started working with Tesla to help them resolve their ongoing GPL violations. However, Tesla has still not provided the necessary source code for their cars (a benefit of ownership enshrined in the GPL, which Tesla chooses to use) and the incomplete versions of source they have released are more than 17 months old (at the time of this writing), despite new firmware being continuously delivered to Tesla vehicles. There have even been several updates within the past month. We know Tesla owners that care about software freedom are frustrated that they cannot exercise theirs.
We are looking for new ways to approach this issue. In particular, we are hoping to engage with interested Tesla owners to determine how we can work together and collectively improve the situation.
If you own a Tesla Model S, Model X, or Model 3, or know someone who does (especially in Canada, where I live) and would be interested in joining a discussion with Conservancy and other Tesla owners about this issue, please email us indicating your interest in the Tesla discussion. We'll get back to you in a day or two with details on how to join the conversation.
Please spread the word. Help us continue our work to bring meaningful software freedom to new classes of hardware, one manufacturer at a time.
by on October 2, 2019
Our Executive Director, Karen Sandler, has warned for years about the dangers of lawsuits between two for-profit companies engaged in a legal dispute in which the GPL is tangentially featured. Unlike Conservancy, companies don't use legal action as the last resort, and they don't select their cases, as we do, focused on what's best for the software freedom of users. Nevertheless, these cases happen, and the GPL gets caught in the crossfire. With the assistance of our legal counsel, Pam Chestek, Conservancy has been carefully following the case of Ubiquiti Networks, Inc. v. Cambium Networks, Inc.
Cambium and Ubiquiti have been engaged in this lawsuit with each other for a little over a year now. Ubiquiti sued Cambium, claiming that Cambium violated RICO, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Digitial Millennium Copyright Act, and the Copyright Act, along with other causes of action. Cambium responded alleging that the Ubiquiti products included code under the GNU General Public Licenses and Cambium's own use of the portions of the Ubiquiti code subject to the GPL would not be an infringement. The case is still in very early stages.
As experts in GPL compliance, we carefully investigated the situation with each company. Ubiquiti was already known to us as we had received independent GPL violation reports from the public regarding their behavior. (The suit itself brought Cambium to our attention.) We have found that neither company complies properly with the GPL. Specifically, in our analysis of the facts, we have found that both Cambium and Ubiquiti fail to provide any source code for their respective routers and access points, even when we repeatedly asked over the course of several weeks, starting more than 30 days ago. This is not an issue of incomplete source or partial source; we have received no source code at all to review. Furthermore, even if we do receive some source code, the firmware images currently available indicate that there may be additional serious, overarching GPL compliance problems that are not easily resolved.
As for-profit GPL violators, these companies financially benefit from GPL non-compliance by for-profit companies. Their litigation around GPL is a distraction from the bigger issue of companies' repeated violations of the GPL. We lament the irony that two companies have begun a fight regarding GPL compliance (and deployed immense legal resources in the process), yet neither complies with GPL's most basic provisions. Because of this, it's unlikely this suit will yield GPL compliance by either party, and makes the suit another example of how for-profit legal disputes inevitably fail to prioritize the software freedom of users. In essence, we believe their dispute is not about empowering their users with the ability to augment their devices by improving and upgrading the software on them, but rather is about who is able to keep more of their code proprietary.
Conservancy will not stand by while this occurs. As such, we have today opened (at this point, non-litigation) GPL enforcement actions against both companies. We are informing the public of this situation in this blog post, since we gave both companies the industry-accepted standard amount of time to comply, and since the two companies have already made their violations public through the lawsuit filings. We call on both companies to immediately comply with the requirements of Linux's license, GPLv2.