Re: [PATCH] Blacklist binary-only modules lying about their license

Timothy Miller
2004-04-30T18:18:14Z

Marc Boucher wrote:
>
> Chris,
>
> people should, before insulting us publicly or make unsubstantiated
> claims that we "lie" or engage in "illegal" actions, perhaps consult a
> lawyer, and simultaneously use the opportunity to enquire about the
> meaning of "slander".
>
> I repeat, the \0 is purely a technical workaround, done without any
> mischievous intent.

Your intent only matters slightly. Consider how courts would deal with
you killing someone:

(a) If you intended to kill someone and killed them, you are convicted
of murder or manslaughter (depending on the nature of the intent, etc.)

(b) If you did NOT intend to kill someone but could have prevented it,
you get convicted of gross neglegence.

(c) If you did not intend to kill someone and there is no way you could
have prevented it, you are found not guilty.

In your case, it seems that you did not intend to break the law, but you
did, AND you should have known that this was an iffy thing to do, and
you could have done more research to find out that you should not do it.
That would qualify you for (b), neglegence.

So, the fact that you didn't MEAN to do anything wrong doesn't absolve
you of the crime. It just means that your crime is different (and less
severe) from what it would have been if you'd meant to break the law.

No one is arguing your intent. I, and probably many others, buy your
argument that you didn't MEAN to cause any harm. You can tell us how
much you didn't mean it until you're blue in the face, and that's not
going to change anything, because we already BELIEVE you.

What you don't seem to understand is that what you did was wrong ANYWAY.

Some other points you miss:

- There is nothing slanderous about what we're saying. What you did is
illegal. Period.

- We're not telling you to stop what you're doing in general. We're
only telling you to fix the one thing that you did wrong so that we can
all move on.

- The only reason people keep harping on you about this is because you
keep missing the point that what you did was a bad thing, regardless of
why you did it.

What you did is kinda like the situation where some kid uses Kazaa to
download songs, but he doesn't realize that it's illegal. He doesn't
understand or appreciate the harm he's causing, because he doesn't see
how copying something (without taking away the original) could be a
problem. He doesn't understand that there's a big different beween real
property and intellectual property. You seem to share a similar
difficulty in understanding the harm that you're causing because so much
of it is very abstract. To further the analogy, we on LKML are acting
like a "nice" version of the RIAA; a nice RIAA would find someone who is
pirating music, find out that they didn't realize it was wrong, educate
them, and ask them to please stop pirating. We are not telling you that
we want to have you convicted of copyright violation; we are telling you
that you are committing copyright violation, and we want you to please stop.

The fact that you didn't realize it wasn't wrong doesn't make it not
wrong for you to do it.