too twitter; didn't read: there's apparently OBS code evident in the decompiled app, and other GPL code as well, and OBS found out independently and are working to resolve it
Without even installing it, opening the setup files showed some immediate red flags, notably the "GameDetour64.dll", "Inject64.exe" and "MediaSDKGetWinDXOffset64.exe" look awfully similar to the way the OBS Studio game capture hooks work with our "graphics-hook64.dll", "inject-helper64.exe" and "get-graphics-offsets64.exe". I don't jump straight in to disassembling everything I come across, but when it's this obvious it begs further investigation, and after some disassembly I was able to confirm that OBS code was present in their binaries.
Not masking the names further makes me wonder if whoever actually implemented this may not have been aware of the repercussions.
I challenged him on it and he played dumb.
Thanks for reading my blog :)
who uses tabs? o.O
What has OBS to resolve there? They could send a letter with an offer for a special license for one million dollars. If all open source contributors agree on thqt and have worked out how to share the fee.
[0] https://thenewstack.io/the-open-source-lesson-of-the-linksys...
Only when you distribute the GPLv2-using binaries to third parties comes the license in play: you must provide also the source code to those third parties.
What happens is that it's a breach of contract (licenses are contracts) which lead to an termination that contract (1) (license) which grants the usage rights (copyright) for the software.
Which leads a company to (roughly) following choices:
- start complying with the license in time "before" the license gets invalidated
- buy a proprietary license from the license holder
- stop using the software, and pay damages for previous usage/contract violation/copyright infringement(1)
This means you are not ever forced by law to release your software under GPL, but you might be forced by economics to do so, as you might not be able to afford not doing so (or it's just simply cheaper).
(1): The topic how/when the contract becomes invalid and for which terms you can sue is tricky, and depends on the country in question.
EDIT: Also even if GPL would work like that, there is no reason why e.g. their non-OBS boundled apps or infrastructure should be affected.
If it's violated before notification, then option 1 is not possible, and option 2 is at the discretion of OBS, so option 3 is the only real legal outcome.
But if it's violated after notification, it seems like the optimal strategy for any company using GPL software is to not comply, until they are notified of violation, which apparently is not that common unless you're already a major product.
> There is no provision in the Copyright Act to require distribution of infringing work on altered terms. What copyright plaintiffs are entitled to, under the Act, are damages, injunctions to prevent infringing distribution, and--where appropriate--attorneys' fees. A defendant found to have wrongfully included GPL'd code in its own proprietary work can be mulcted in damages for the distribution that has already occurred, and prevented from distributing its product further. That's a sufficient disincentive to make wrongful use of GPL'd program code. And it is all that the Copyright Act permits.
Mulct: extract money via tax or fine.
Not necessarily. The Conservancy chose not to ask for monetary damages, but that doesn't mean their legal theory inherently precludes asking for them; a troll could still do so. Though (IANAL) it seems like it might be hard as a TV buyer to prove that you were damaged in any significant monetary amount.
Depending on the situation a 3rd party beneficiary might have a easier time to lay out the damages and the amount of damages then the first party.
Through not sure how far that would work.
But I mean it is a contract, you are a 3rd party beneficiary and the contract is breached. So it might work.
Anyway that still isn't useful for trolls because they don't lose out on anything as they tend to not produce anything.
> But if it's violated after notification
It's violated from the get to go, but it might only get terminated after notification (and a potential grace period) which can have all kinds of stage effects, like a different court being responsible or laws with "less bite" then copyright laws being the relevant laws. There was an interesting case where this happened in France not to long ago (but I forgot the name, it also seem to had other complications).
Though right now it's kind of an unintended assist
Copyright applies to creative expressions. Purely functional expressions are not copyrightable.
Regardless of license, only creative expressions within the work are protected. That said, what portions of the work are creative?
Currently, precedent is on the side of code being copyrightable.
What if I lift a minor function? What if I study yours and base mine off of it? What if I type it all except for three lines I pasted from yours? The whole idea that a recipe can be owned is fascinating.
Actual recipes, btw, are not considered copyrightable.
"2+2=4" is a computer program as much as "Hello world" is a literary work: you need to use better strawmen.
> I’d further that any program in a CS101 textbook is equally uncopyrightable.
Are you suggesting that the computer program that is the subject of this thread has the same creativity level as "2+2=4" or that of "any program in a CS101 textbook"?
Also, notice that your opinion on whether something is creative enough or not is pretty much irrelevant as far as copyright law is concerned.
> Purely functional expressions are not copyrightable, regardless of the creative effort to derive them.
Ok, so now you only need to demonstrate that the thing we are talking about (and not some other arbitrary hypothetical example) is a "purely functional expression" and not a "creative expression". Good luck with that.
Oracle tried to hang Google with copied code for max(x,y), which returned the greater of two parameters. That’s what you get when every single byte of software is a “literary work” worthy of independent copyright protection. Bullshit.
The issue is when does an expression of creativity manifested in code become uniquely copyrightable?
The issue of whether something is creative enough to warrant authorship rights or any other type of IP rights can be, as you know, murky, and sometimes has to be decided in court. Taking your example, if Google literally copied the code verbatim (rather than re-writing it themselves), then... technically... I guess it is a copyright violation (though not something serious).
The thing is... when you have something trivial that can be efficiently implemented in a very limited (and trivial) set of ways (e.g. 2+2=4, the definition of max(x,y)), it's easy to argue that it is plausible that you didn't copy the code (i.e. that you just independently reimplemented it yourself and it accidentally ended up looking exactly like someone else's implementation). On the other hand, when you have a large codebase, it becomes much harder to argue that (unless you use some obscene levels of obfuscation... and, even then...).
Are you really trying to argue that TikTok didn't just blatantly take large pieces of code from this opensource project? I didn't look into it too hard, but it seems like OBS might have a case here, unless we're assuming that this codebase has the complexity level of "2+2=4" and that TikTok just accidentally it.
Have a nice day.
As to how it works now? I agree with you.
But listen to the argument you’re making: The otherwise uncopyrightable functional code expression becomes copyrightable if and only if it is copied by another. The exact same expression, still uncopyrightable, is only free to use if independently created and only by those that created the expression, who may then restrict or license the uncopyrightable expression as they wish.
That’s where we are.
They show one URL in one installer script with an obsproject.com domain and conclude, from the presence of that URL alone, that the entire project is a whole cloth copy of OBS.
That URL is nothing but a 302 redirect to the directx runtime at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Download/confirmation.aspx?i...
The linked tweet tells us nothing except that TikTok is essentially using obsproject.com's web server as a URL shortener.
Is made up of smaller teams composed of individuals who may or may not take shortcuts and make good decisions on behalf of their company. If the choice is between "executive said 'hey use this open source in secret'" or "programmer took shortcut," my bet is on the latter.
That is a straw man argument. It doesn't matter what percent of the infringing product uses GPL-licensed code.
[1]https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/copyright-infringement-an...
Truly this is the strongest possible interpretation of this circumstantial evidence and does not make you look like an idiot (re idiocy) at all. You would rather write this comment than simply navigate to the OBS github and find the copy of this installer script in there.