The independents are getting ripped off just as the the big corporations are. But instead of having a broad distribution and repurposing network for their intellectual property, the independent has much more limited resources, and a drop of income in licensing means bills don’t get paid.

The DMCA by itself, doesn’t provide any protection from repeat offender or inequitable reporting mechanisms.

The user of a user account on a network may have files he’s posted pulled from the posted message on the website. There is no recourse if this same user account is used minutes later to repost the files.

There is a specific process used for submitting a DMCA Takedown Notice to a provider. All and good if the same mechanism was used to post/validate the product to begin with.  Let me illustrate why this is inequitable.

A Meshbox artist created a model and texture set that a pirate took and reused portions from in a commercial product sold through the official store of Second Life. Although setting up a sales account is very easy to do, and posting a new model through that venue is something you can do in minutes on the internet; to have the stolen work pulled from the site required an official notice be faxed to Linden Labs. This was done, and the file was promptly removed the same day. However, what recourse is there concerning any sales of this stolen property?  There is no guarantee that the same file won’t be reposted minutes later. That the file was pulled and not challenged under DMCA provisions indicates that Linden Labs at least acknowledges that some wrong doing took place.

What makes this even worse is the collusive nature of internet advertising in this kind of piracy. Here is how it works.

A warez site is set up, and the owner gets a page view/click-through compensation account through an internet advertising company. The site receives heavy traffic, possibly benefiting in page ranking on Google to have the stolen IP appear even higher on Google searches than the original IP owner. The network owner isn’t selling the software, but he’s still making money by providing a venue for the theft to occur. The site owner ends up with a domain property worth something on the domain resale market, and an ongoing revenue stream.

What really gets me is Mike Masnick’s statement:

There is simply no reason for ACTA, at all. It is nothing but an attempt by the entertainment industry to put massive restrictions on the internet, place liability on lots of third parties, and do nothing to push themselves to adapt to a changing marketplace with new business models.

Okay Mike, this is not what I and many independents see going on. I think there are inequities in Big IP. When I bought a VHS tape of a movie years ago,  I didn’t sign on for it to  have a variable end-of-life depending on how cheaply made the tape was. To me, I should be able to enjoy that version of the movie – under a software like IP based EULA – perpetually.  I didn’t buy the Blu-Ray version, or the 20th anniversary version of the movie, both of which would naturally have derived but otherwise new original work in it. And I agree, it should be an enjoyment based license I can use on various devices.

Yes, I agree something needs to be changed there – but the often quoted Shakespeare comes to mind – “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport”.  You’d like to smack down Big IP, but you are entirely overlooking the real independent artist who doesn’t want their intellectual goods stolen freely off of their apple cart.

SQLite is a public domain database engine that was developed as a single user/single connection database; that is, SQLite was never intended to be a multi-user database engine with capabilities that optimize it for networked databases.

Bart’s question was:

What exactly makes a database “multiuser”, according to the license? RB Standard has a single-user license. If you make an application that lets two or three people use a client program that connects over a socket to a server application, like an RB web server made by the standard version and stores wiki-like entries in the database…is it single user because it’s only one database being used by one application, the server? Or is it multiuser because multiple people are using (non-database equipped) clients to communicate with the server application that does use the database?

This is an excellent question. What makes a database single user or multi-user?

In Valentina parlance, a single user database supports a single connection at a time and accepts no others until the first connection is released. The scope of this definition is the database components themselves, not the applications that may interact with the database. For example, you could have a local database that is utilized by several applications. Yet only a connection from one application would be accepted at a time. A single user database does not by definition preclude accessing the database over a network.

A multi-user database allows multiple, simultaneous connections – meaning, its effectively a database server, regardless if the database is accessed on the internet, across a closed network or somehow, multiple users in a shared, virtual environment.

Among other considerations in licensing database servers are if connections are effectively named seats. Some vendors require a connection to belong to a single seat or a single person. In an unnamed seat model, it doesn’t matter how many users there actually are of a database server – it only matters how many connections are supported by the database server.

In Valentina Developer Network, Valentina Embedded Server can be deployed royalty free and in unlimited quantities, and it supports five simultaneous, unnamed connections at the same time. VDN developers can buy and then resell to their users, additional connections or licenses for VDN Embedded Server Infinite. But since Valentina Embedded Server in its standard configuration already supports five unnamed connections, this can be effectively utilized in environments where there are many, many more than five users, because these five connections can be shared among any number of actual users. I’ve found that this is easily utilized by an office of 25 to 40 users, provided that the applications developed around it are economical in managing those connections.