full-disclosure - Cisco's stolen code

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Message-ID: <20040527051014.GC27118@positivism.org>
From: seth at tautology.org (Seth Alan Woolley)
Subject: Cisco's stolen code

On Thu, May 27, 2004 at 08:41:27AM +1000, Brad Griffin wrote:
> Now that this code is stolen, anyone who has a copy of that code is a
> suspected thief until such time as they show that they did not steal
> it, or that they are not an accomplice or have not received stolen
> property. Holders of the code must (if necessary) show that they are
> holding the code legitimately.

Innocent until proven guilty is a foreign concept to you?

What's this meaningless "must (if necessary)" banter mean?  You were
accusing me of being the lawyer, remember?

> Copyright has three parts of stuff all to do with stealing property and
> does *not* apply here (not where I come from at least). 

Words are not property.  I refer:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#TOCIntellectualProperty

Citizens have a "right" to employment under the Full Employment Acts of
1964, 1978, etc. in the US, too.  There's a lot of stolen property in
that case, under Greenspan's desk.

> That's called Receiving Stolen Property.

No, it is not.  Nobody ever took their temporary, state-enforced
monopoly right to control duplication by receiving a copy of something
after it has been duplicated already.  Somebody else received that
right.  I already posted the USC on the subject.  The court can mandate
that the code from a particular infringement be destroyed, and that's
the extent of it.

I pity all the purchasers of MS-DOS 6.0 and 6.2.  The stolen "rights" from
Stac Electronics should brand them all pirates!

Personally, I wouldn't touch the CISCO code with one of those
aforementioned ten foot barge poles.  However, auditors, if they so
choose and plan how they receive the code well, can hold themselves
harmless under US law for disclosing security flaws.  Tough break for
CISCO, and that ends up being a security implication: combine Kerckhoffs
Principle with the poorer security of security by obscurity, and soon
there shall be a fallout from the forthcoming flaws auditors are sure to
find.  The beauty of it all is that CISCO can't do a damned thing about
it, despite the wishes of WIPO.

-- 
Seth Alan Woolley [seth at positivism.org], SPAM/UCE is unauthorized
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Security Team Leader Source Mage GNU/Linux http://www.sourcemage.org
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