News What do you think about Japan's new anti-terrorism law?

Your post doesn't make sense no matter how I interpret it. There is no such thing as an open source corporation (what would that even mean?), and software can't be proprietary and open source at the same time. But several companies pay their employees to develop libre software; Linux, especially. Google, Intel, IBM, Red Hat, Apple, and even Microsoft are examples. It's so common that the hard task would be to find a company that doesn't contribute to libre software.

Yes a program can be proprietary and open source at the same time. Proprietary simply means ownership or being a proprietor of property. I'm simply saying that if a company hired a software company to write proprietary software for them said company would be extremely upset if the code was made open source since it may hold trade secrets in the code.

RolandtheHeadless said:

Hard to say what the new law means from here. If someone can post the actual provisions of the new law that are worrisome, it might help.

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It's late and I don't want to look it up, but it wasn't the copyright infringement for me, though the notion of jail time for downloading American/Canadian/British TV that you have no legal access to in Japan is pretty uncomfortable. It's that the main point of the law is planning a crime is a crime. That's nutty thought-police stuff. Japan is a fan of vague laws. What does planning entail? If you want a real law, it would define things, like procuring resources, making deals, establishing things and so on. But it's vague, it's planning crimes.

There's a law in Japan that foreigners can't affect the political system or they will be deported (I have the article about it, by a foreign law professor in Kyoto, can find it if need be). It's basically never used, but if the country needs to get you out, it's a flimsy, vaguely worded way to do so (this post may be used as evidence if the country desires to prove I'm an unwanted immigrant). Likewise, this 'planning a crime' thing is way too similar. There's a reason why Japan had its largest protests in decades over it, why world rights groups contested it, and why the government steamrolled it through. It's garbage, and just a way for the government to keep citizens in line. I'm not in favor of crime, but there's crime and there's CRIME.

This bill is to help police spy on domestic, minor crimes, and was passed under the blanket term "anti-terrorism". That's scary. Japan's a great, peaceful, safe country. I don't want it a police state. They included mountain mushroom picking in the law. Do you think mountain mushroom picking is in any way a source of terrorism funding?

Sounds like thought police to me. I think they should be more direct in what planning means. Certainly if there are messages, i.e. emails, phone calls, text messages, detailing an attack I think something like that should be dealt with appropriately. However something vague like planning doesn't narrow it down enough for me to think it would be concrete enough to enforce the same way each time. If I buy the right combination of household items I could be considered as "planning" because those items happen to match ingredients that could be used in bomb making for example. It certainly sounds like a very dangerous law.

OoTmaster said:

Yes a program can be proprietary and open source at the same time. Proprietary simply means ownership or being a proprietor of property.

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"Proprietary" in the field of software is a jargon term that means something very specific. It is software which is developed in a particular way that involves keeping source code away from the user and denying the user the right to copy, a business model pioneered by IBM in response to antitrust lawsuits (before then, all software was typically in the public domain with full source code available). By this definition (and this is the definition everyone uses), it's impossible for a program to be both proprietary and open source at the same time. Open source and libre software describe roughly the same software, with roughly the same license terms. The main difference between the two is philosophical.

OoTmaster said:

I'm simply saying that if a company hired a software company to write proprietary software for them said company would be extremely upset if the code was made open source since it may hold trade secrets in the code.

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This is just a misunderstanding of what libre software is. It doesn't mean that the software is published. A program is libre software for you, the user, if you have the four essential freedoms, outlined here. If a program has only one user, which is what you are talking about, and that user has the copyright to the program, then it's libre in a trivial sense: all 1 users have the four freedoms.

This also has absolutely nothing, whatsoever, to do with copyright. So I don't know why you are bringing this up. The business model of developing custom software is exactly the same with or without copyright.

(Any chance a mod could split this discussion about copyright into another thread, by the way? It's a topic that interests me, so it's not likely to end any time soon, but it's basically unrelated to this topic.)