It’s a blog, folks. You are the proofreaders.
Lord help us all if mishandling the MIT License notice becomes a thing. Even Google can’t follow the license’s simple instructions nor the jQuery Foundation’s specific quid pro quo.
Well the likelihood of Google or CloudFlare going down are far less than any private server (especially if you’re routing trough a CDN like CloudFlare anyway…), and it benefits the end user significantly as they don’t have to download the same library 100s of times a day.
So I’m afraid I disagree 
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@angusm Point makes sense but is purely douchey if someone has written that into their script. The entire concept of these technologies is that we benefit from others’ hard work if we just give props. You and your tools suck if you remove lines that are both ethically important to include & legal requirements; especially if you are an organisation whose business of late consists of wasting your members’ fees on suing people (they make a net loss on all these lawsuits).
When you are a crooked organisation who throws a tantrum about waning profits and responds by suing people and lobbying to fuck our fledgeling technology standards to include DRM, you better as hell obey the rules you’re suing other people over.
It’s the double standard that is ridiculous here.
Do you have proof of this? It is likely someone at some point make the choice to remove these lines.
Well, consider what has already been written:
You have a low bar for what counts as “proof”. Those things you copied are people’s unqualified opinions. They may be right but they may be wrong.
I work in the same industry as (I presume) some of those people and I have never accidentally left licensing comments out of my code. I do it deliberately sometimes though, when I don’t like the group whose stuff I am jacking/using. Why? Because of the plausible deniability and relative speed to correct the “mistake” means that even if caught, you can play innocent.
If it’s double standards you’re worried about, your DRM comment is irrelevant.
The vast majority of downloaders never get sued. The RIAA doesn’t enforce most copyright violations. They do enforce some. For the sake of argument, let’s just pretend that I download the odd movie, and yet I’ve never been sued. I’m sure many here can say the same. The ratio of RIAA enforcement to actual violations is miniscule. Once the RIAA engages in wholesale infringement of a commercial property without any enforcement actions being taken against them, to the extent they are being under-enforced relative to the enforcement efforts they engage in, then you have a true double standard.
Right now it’s simply an amusing “gotcha” story that does illustrate some problems with copyright and licensing in the digital age, but I don’t think it’s really comparable to willful infringement of commercially valuable goods (which has its own issues, to be sure).
You sound like a real quality guy.
And it’s nice how you reject the anecdotal evidence provided by other–apparently more scrupulous–programmers, yet you think that your personal practices somehow make it “likely” that someone intentionally chose to remove the copyright comments. I may have a low bar for proof, but if we’re judging by the number of anecdotes provided, my bar for proof is double your bar for proof.
I’m in the process of responding to your other nonsense. I didn’t say my anecdote was more relevant, I just said “I see your anecdote and raise you an anecdote”.
My comment included the possibility that this situation could be either deliberate misuse of jquery or a pure accident. You seem to have made up your mind already. Then you go ahead with the ad hominem because you don’t appreciate me picking holes in your meaningless contributions. Stay classy, guy.
If it’s double standards you’re worried about, your DRM comment is irrelevant.
O…K…
“We’re the RIAA and we demand that the artists we represent are given credit for their work. As we feel everyone is a potential pirate we insist on protections being built into evolving technologies that are used by all people, even ones who may well never spend a dollar on our products.”
They bend the system to their will and don’t play fair as they expect others to. How can’t you see the double standard?
This story relates to the MPAA, but there have been plenty of moments where these anti-piracy bodies get caught with their pants down, pirating or illegally using content: http://www.pedestrian.tv/entertainment/news/anti-piracy-movie-ads-caught-using-pirated-music/60075.htm
I don’t think it’s really comparable to wil_ful infringement of commercially valuable goods
You don’t have proof that they didn’t infringe on jquery wilfully and jquery is most certainly a commercially valuable good. Just because it’s offered for free use within the licensing terms doesn’t mean it has no commercial value.
If you worked in our industry, you’d know that the kind of minification we are discussing is usually automatically done by minification software for all the resources on the server and NOT a human editing the files. At least I’d hope you’d know that.
Secondly, very few developers are shady enough to intentionally remove copyright notices, especially from software that is free to use in any fashion you want in an unrestricted manner. There is ZERO motivation to remove these notices nefarious or otherwise.
Thirdly, any developer that shady would never be hired to work for a large organization like the RIAA. Large corporations are NOT using lone gunman coders jacking code from illicit sources, they have huge IT budgets and carefully managed technology choices and asset allocation and acquisition. These are teams of developers in departments that are managed and overseen by other people.
Fourthly, you are quick to make assumptions both about the qualifications of other commenter’s and the motives of the people being discussed in the article, all without a shred of a hint of evidence to back up your points other then your own anecdotal account of your own behavior and motives.
I have no love of the RIAA or any of their ilk, but I cannot abide such foolishness. cheers.
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Sweet… well I’m glad we’ve got a crack team of detectives on hand at all times for analysis. Go back through my comments and you’ll see that I’m not saying they definitely did it, I’m just saying that it could easily be either.
Surely the massive IT budgets of which you speak should mean that these guys, of everyone, should get it right.
In terms of your last comment: Welcome to the wild, wild west. Enjoy your stay. People pull things apart and reuse them. You’re silly if you do that for anything commercial but if it’s something non-commercial I really couldn’t give two fucks.
I see. Sorry for assuming that your anecdote was related to your assertion that it was “likely someone at some point make the choice to remove these lines.” My mistake.
You don’t have “proof” they wilfully infringed. What we do have is evidence that automatic minimizer automatically strip out comments. We also know there is no downside to leaving those comments in, and significant potential downside to stripping those comments out. On the other hand, you suggest that an unethical programmer is deliberately removing these comments (presumably after first altering the the comments so that they will not automatically be deleted by the minimizer). What seems more likely? Do you think it is reasonable to conclude that there was “likely” willful infringement from this?
How much does jQuery make from commercial sales of its code? How much do its competitors make from commercial sales of the functional equivalents of the exact same code (and that code alone) jQuery offers under the MIT license?
Has the RIAA undertaken any steps to break jQuery DRM? Have they lobbied against the use of DRM by jQuery, if jQuery wanted to use it to protect their IP?
You are confusing value and cost.
Here’s the double standard, explained in simpler terms:
RIAA: “You, obey licensing rules. Us, no obey rules”
You are confusing value and commercial value.
What do licensing rules have to do with DRM, in this context?
And hasn’t the RIAA acted to bring their code within the licensing rules since they were informed of the violation? Doesn’t jQuery retain the right to sue? It’s hardly the RIAA’s fault if they don’t. And like I said, the RIAA doesn’t sue every single copyright violator that is ever identified.
Disagree… If jquery was not a thing then developers would have a buttload more code to write. The products that people create using jquery are on-sold. Jquery forms part of that product which, without jquery, would either cost a lot more or not exist. If jquery doesn’t have commercial value on its own, it sure as hell does add to the commercial value of a LOT of people’s work.
DRM is to ensure that people abide by the licence conditions. This story is about the RIAA not abiding by licensing conditions.
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it doesn’t take crack detectives to state the obvious, anyone who works in the industry would immediately recognize this as a side effect of the minification that was clearly implemented.
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they didin’t pull jQuery apart or change it, or edit it, they ONLY ran it through automatic compression.
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jQuery isn’t a piece of software with a specific function that you’d need to modify in the way you describe, it is a javascript library that is used to make it easier to build other pieces of javascript code and work with the browser dom.
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jQuery is seldom pulled apart and modified in the way you describe, if you don’t like parts your override or extend the base jQuery.
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lone gunman is an industry standard term for a type of programmer.
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No, again, the issue being discussed was a side effect of some server software that ran automatically, and is not a reflection of ANY size IT budget, that wouldn’t be a factor. The large budget negates a certain type of coding behavior it does not negate a common side effect of of a large percentage of industry standard minification software.
I AM saying that it almost certainly was NOT removed intentionally and manually by a programmer and it most certainly is an unintended sideeffect of their minification software and that those facts are obvious from glancing at what happened.
My point is that you cannot base your arguments on assumptions that simply are not correct. Why do you think that all of us who work in the industry and who also have no love of the RIAA were immediately willing to conceded that this was obviously what it was? Because the evidence is right in front of our eyes and we’ve all seen it happen.
Fair points, sir. You obviously work with these things on a scale larger than I do. I still find it somewhat incredible that tools for compression knowingly or otherwise remove comment lines that could actually be legally required notices. Again maybe it’s a scale thing, but I strip out comment lines as components are completed or implemented cause I don’t want unhealthy code so I’d be massively pissed if an automated process strips out lines I had specifically left there. I suppose a relevant piece of evidence would be whether other licence notices or comment lines were also stripped out.
IRT your points
#3. I know that but how much extra coding would be required if you didn’t have their awesome free library? My point was supposed to be that without free libraries such as jquery there would be a lot more cost/coding to be done.
#4. My comment about pulling things apart was more about code and the web in general.
