I fully agree that the benefit of libraries such as jQuery are invaluable!
The automated compression strips out anything unnecessary, whitespace, returns, comments, it even renames variables and functions to their shortest possible names, and more. It has no way of telling if a comment contains a note on the code, a copyright notice, or anything else, well no official way. There an unofficial convention to start comment blocks with copyright notices with an extra bang ! so instead of starting with /* they start with /*! This isnât an official way of doing it, but some groups and minifiers are adopting this to address this exact widespread problem.
I donât really think the RIAA should have to pay any fines because of this, that suggestion was kind of a joke, the world needs less of that kind of thinking not more.
I DO think that they should rethink their entire philosophy and business model, and use this as a wake up call that their heavy handed practices are unfair as there are a lot of grey areas and no one is infallible. Also if they benefit at all from the collective commons and good will of others they should really contribute in kind back to the communities they take from. BUT Iâm also not holding my breathâŚthis is the RIAA after all, the poster child for corporate heavy handedness and outdated business models.
It doesnât matter that the copyright notice got removed because that was the default setting on their minifier and that they couldnât be bothered to double-check it. Thatâs not an excuse at all. The copyright notice, by law, has to be there.
You can say âwho cares, who doesnât know that jQuery is open source?â Thatâs not the point either. I work for an open source company and make and use open source software. 1) I would be pissed if my small open source library got used by their code without any attribution/copyright notice at all, when itâs easy to include the attribution, and 2) any good developer ensures that those notices remain. In most of our projects we have a whole build-step ensuring that the licenses of various libraries get packaged into the final deployed product.
I just checked the source being used by BoingBoing and Discourse: jQueryâs link to itâs license is intact. It really doesnât take a rocket scientist to do this.
Obviously, peopleâs actual amount of caring when a website forgets this is pretty much nil, but when thereâs some blatant hypocrisy, why not point it out?
Iâm not disputing that things would be more costly if jQuery didnât exist. But it does exist, and it has been released for free. It has essentially become a public good, a [positive externality][2] that benefits everyone. A good example of this type of common good that everyone benefits from is news. Once published, news becomes available to everyone to use as they want. Obviously it would be expensive if every news outlet had to individually report on Snowden and gain access to his trove of NSA documents themselves. But in reality, everyone just relies on the reporting and document-access of Greenwald and Poitras; they donât need to have individual access. This doesnât mean that the already-disclosed Snowden documents are commercially valuable, however: once they have been released to the public for public use (whether by operation of law with fact-based news or by explicit license in the case of jQuery).
[2]: Externality - Wikipedia[quote=âteapot, post:38, topic:13317â]
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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The RIAAâs predictable response to this would be that if jQuery really wanted to protect its license they should have used DRM. Furthermore, if they used DRM and it was circumvented it would be pretty clear that this was not an innocent violation, but an intentional one.
As you say, the license requires the copyright identification be present. If jQuery is pissed that the license wasnât followed, they have clear recourse: they can sue the RIAA. If the had registered their copyright (which they should have) before the RIAAâs violation, they are entitled to statutory damages, which are quite high.
