On April 5, 2018, “Tianzhu”, the core developer of Egg.js, Alibaba’s open-source enterprise-level Node.js framework, published a post on Zhihu , “When Egg meets TypeScript, I harvest a tea egg” . After the article was published, the response was good, and the developers hoped that it could be directly integrated into the official documentation. Therefore, on April 16 of that year, Tianzhu also sent this to the official warehouse .
However, Tianzhu would not have thought that this move of his own would bring him a storm of public opinion more than four years later.
The “crusade” caused by an infringement notice letter
On May 26, the netizen “an168bang521” posted a post on V2EX titled “I want to ask the old buddies who understand the law, is it considered an infringement to extract the content of the technical documentation of Alibaba’s open source software Egg.js “, claiming that he received it. An email from a Zhihu user’s entrusted company was informed that its website had used Zhihu’s works without authorization, infringing Zhihu’s right to disseminate information on the Internet, and requested relevant remedial measures.
The picture comes from the party’s post on V2EX
At the same time, “an168bang521” said, “Members of the Egg.js group published the same content on Zhihu; now I use the article on Zhihu as the copyright owner, suing me for infringement as a person and requesting to delete the article .”
“an168bang521” replied, “Egg.js uses the MIT License, and the website articles are from the Github Egg.js repository and the Egg.js official website, which does not constitute infringement.” “But the other party replied that he did not report me as the Egg.js group, but as a member of the Egg.js group, and informed that the copyright owner of the content belongs to his personal account on Zhihu. (Also provided identity information for Prove he’s a member of the Egg.js group.)”
The picture comes from the party’s post on V2EX
However, “an168bang521” expressed anger at this:
What I am more angry about is that since the Ali Egg.js group has used the MIT License on Github, telling everyone that they can use it freely within the scope permitted by the agreement, then our users have this right; now the Ali Egg.js group has The member also sued me for infringement on the basis of the original content on the domestic Zhihu platform; the description received was: unauthorized use of his Zhihu account works, which seriously violated the right of information network dissemination and caused great harm to his legitimate rights and interests. damage. It feels disgusting to have two diametrically opposed behaviors.
“an168bang521” believes that Egg.js uses the MIT License, and they have informed the restrictions that can be used on Github, and they also operate under this agreement. According to his understanding, extensive use of the documentation in this repository complies with MIT’s “use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense and/or sell”.
Of course, he is not very sure about this. “an168bang521” said, assuming that Eggjs’s document was written by this old brother, then if he did this in his personal capacity, would it be to safeguard his legitimate rights? “If it belongs to his normal rights, then there is nothing to say. I can delete the article, and even I can write a special article and hang it on the homepage to apologize. These are not problems, and I don’t need to write this. Posted to ask.”
“an168bang521” proposed that he no longer uses Eggjs, and it is acceptable to delete or not use Egg.js. However, assuming that their personal works or the company’s commercial products are still in use, then if a member of the Eggjs group belongs to a certain piece of code or content of Eggjs as his personal output, he will use Eggs.js in the domestic court as a personal copyright. Is the company’s product protected by law?
In addition, he also proposed: “If Ali deliberately fished for law enforcement, put the MIT License on Github, allowing everyone to use it; behind the scenes, he would sue everyone for copyright infringement in a domestic court. What should we do in this case?”
“an168bang521” said that the reason for the post was that he didn’t know much about the specific rights and obligations of the MIT protocol, and there was no clear answer from online searches.
Debating discussion
Maybe everyone’s original intention was to learn more about open source copyright and the like, but the trend of events gradually deviated from the discussion, and there was a “crusade” against Tianzhu individuals in the reply area.
On the night the post was posted, “an168bang521” also sent a private message to Tianzhu to inquire and communicate. According to the description posted by Tianzhu, “I saw it in bed in the middle of the night, and then I was confused”, it is speculated that it may not know the infringement notice. According to “an168bang521”, on the morning of May 26, the two were still communicating about the matter, and nothing unpleasant happened during the process.
The picture comes from the description released by “Tianzhu” on Zhihu
However, Tianzhu was really troubled by the personal attacks on him in the V2EX reply area:
After reading that post by v2ex, I’m at a loss. . . Am I the villain and the clown?
Am I the villain? It was the article I wrote first in the column, which was merged into a GitHub MIT project a week later, and then a few years later, I maliciously complained that others did not authorize my article to be reproduced. . . I’m really guilty, and I should apologize to the world.
According to Tianzhu’s explanation post, he does not want to pursue infringement issues, but is more interested in how the industry handles such copyright issues. “The classmates in the circle want to reprint it to their public account. I have basically authorized it for free for so many years. The only requirement is: greet me in advance to obtain authorization, indicate the source of the original text, and do not destroy the structure of the article and add too. Lots of ads.”
The picture comes from the description released by “Tianzhu” on Zhihu
In this regard, “an168bang521” also said that the attack on the “Tianzhu” involved in the comments was unexpected. “The reason why Tianzhu’s article on Zhihu is included in the post is to better describe the current scene, and the original intention is not to target Tianzhu’s personal online violence.”
Because of this post, Tianzhu was attacked personally, not the thing itself. Because of the trouble this post has caused Tianzhu personally, I apologize and sincerely say sorry. I hope that everyone will just discuss the matter itself, and not attack Tianzhu personally.
On the evening of the 26th, Tianzhu released the ” Notes on My Personal “Malicious” Complaint about the Unauthorized Reprinting of Others “, which roughly described the incident and emphasized its own views and positions.
“Free authorization does not mean not defending your rights”
So, returning to the matter itself, Tianzhu first wrote articles on Zhihu and shared them, and then integrated them into official documents. Does it mean that the copyright is abandoned? The legal practitioner “Legal Shirui” replied on Zhihu: This is not to give up the copyright, but to allow others to try it for free, which has been authorized in the form of MIT. As long as the other party fulfills the MIT prerequisite “attach the MIT agreement file”, there is no problem.
The licensing conditions of the MIT license are relatively loose because it is widely used. However, “Legal Shi Rui” pointed out that MIT is actually a conditional license contract in law, and the premise of obtaining a license is that the above copyright notice and this license notice should be included in all copies or substantial components of the software.
In practice, the reprinter or user can no longer ask the developer for authorization, but MIT must fulfill the license conditions. If you do not comply with the conditions of the MIT License, you cannot obtain the license provided by the license. Therefore, if the conditions cannot be fulfilled, at least theoretically, the right holder can still file a lawsuit to defend his rights.
In addition, if the right holder adds other requirements in writing on top of the platform’s default MIT license (such as special requirements to mark the author, source and source), the code license needs to comply not only with MIT, but also with the author’s requirements.
“Legal Shi Rui” said that free authorization does not mean that it does not protect its rights. He suggested that rights holders accompany their work to inform the reprinter that the author, source and source of the text must be identified in appropriate places. “The simplest and clearest way of writing is to write a description on a platform such as github: please sign and attach the MIT protocol file when using the code of my project. Otherwise, legal responsibility can be pursued.”
“Legal Shirui” also mentioned that when he helped Zhihu build an infringement system a few years ago, he said: “If the text has been authorized to reprint by the original right holder (note that there must be a proof), it is a positive list, so it does not constitute a Infringement should not be dealt with”, which was also repeatedly emphasized in the subsequent one on one construction and review. At that time, Zhihu suggested that the author, source and source of the text should be identified in appropriate places. However, it is not known what the internal implementation will be.
Also, does the MIT license cover the text of an article in addition to code? “Legal Shirui” said that from the perspective of the article, it contains code and other explanatory text. The MIT here generally does not contain the text part. In the sense of copyright, the text part of the article is protected.
Regarding the copyright dispute of the document, You Yuxi posted in September last year, “Although the content of the document is open sourced under the MIT protocol, the document itself is copyrighted, and it is very disrespectful to deploy it without the approval of the official translation team. The act of translators’ labor.”
At that time, the Vue team found that some domestic users had deployed their Chinese documents under other domain names without communicating with them, and then asked the deployed website users to stop.
You Yuxi said that many times the reason why open source projects choose such an open protocol as MIT is essentially because they believe that programmers are generally high-quality people and know that some things are not authentic. However, on the other hand, some programmers believe in the absoluteness of the protocol to the extreme, thinking that as long as it is open source, the author will not even have the right to make a claim, and even ridicule the open source author for “don’t want to be prostituted for open source in the first place.” —— So in reality, there have indeed been some projects that were forced to change the agreement by such people. In fact, there is a paradox here: the purity and ideality of open source is based on the common goodwill of the participants. If everyone believes that the protocol is the only code of conduct, there will be people who will play the border ball between the protocol and the morality, which will eventually force everyone to adopt a more restrictive protocol, which will eventually erode the purity of the open source community.
Tianzhu said in a statement issued by Zhihu that his views were the same as those of You Yuxi. “Because we love open source, we basically default to MIT. If we really want to use it, we don’t seem to have much choice. If the three parties have excessive behavior, we can only force me to reconsider the open source protocol in subsequent open source projects. “
Related Links:
https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/520119900
https://www.zhihu.com/question/534636366/answer/2502414251
The text and pictures in this article are from InfoQ
This article is reprinted from https://www.techug.com/post/reprint-alibaba-open-source-framework-egg-js-document-was-informed-of-infringement-the-original-author-am-i-the- villain.html
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