To those relieved that Facebook open source discussions will no longer be dominated by PATENTS file discussion, I just would point out, is was exactly the persistent complaints which motivated Facebook to make this change. So I would say thank you to everyone who complained about the language in the original grant. It shows exactly what is possible when a determined group persists in vocalizing their grievances.
Today it's Facebook PATENTS, tomorrow maybe it's nation-wide automatic license plate tracking. One thing is for sure, staying silent never changed anything.
It's a ridiculous comparison, I know, but never underestimate the ability of a small group of determined rabble-rousers to make a difference. A small incident with some tea in a large body of water comes to mind.
I'm not a lawyer, so I can't comment on the validity of people's concerns about the previous license terms. However, I will point out that just because there was persistent complaining which led to Facebook changing the terms does not imply that the complaining was valid or proportional.
I think the GP was pointing out that it was effective. Sometimes validity (or even reasonableness) has nothing to do with it (cf. influence of special interest groups in politics).
Could you make a compromise and agree that the terms were ambiguous enough to make people feel uncomfortable or uncertain about whether or not it was safe (or felt safe) to architect an application on top of software whose license could be revoked without wrongdoing? That would not require the terms be legally enforceable, thus a debate on validity could be considered moot.
I truly have no idea, but I'll default to charitable interpretations of both sides and assume that people had genuine concerns and that Facebook didn't intend anything nefarious.
In which case the change to the PATENTS file is a net win for everyone: Facebook can now clarify that they had no nefarious intentions, and everyone else has peace of mind.
Good point and I'll concede that the overReaction had a real positive impact (that wouldn't have been possible if it had only been a few pedantic open source law geeks). It's really cool to see developers taking an interest in these issues, and in a bottom-up approach to reforming the patent system. I just hope people agree that explicit, well-designed defensive patent licenses (like Facebook's new language and the Apache 2.0 license) are a step forward.
Actually, a big part of the problem is that Facebook decided to be -- and have remained -- a snowflake in the world of licensing.
I'm sure they have what they think are good reasons not to use the Apache 2 license. But that doesn't change the fact that legal departments all over the world are just walking backwards muttering "nope nope nope".
> Today it's Facebook PATENTS, tomorrow maybe it's nation-wide automatic license plate tracking. One thing is for sure, staying silent never changed anything.
On political issues, the three-letter-agency-mandated bots/shills in the comments of mainstream news outlets and on mainstream social media sites (twitter/reddit) will always be louder and more numerous than us.
It's only on issues that the powerful don't really care about that democratic change is possible.
EDIT: To the downvoters: may I know why you are downvoting me? Maybe you believe I'm a tinfoil hatter? Maybe you think governments, who have been controlling media "narratives" for as long as media has been a thing, don't care about social media even though it is dead easy to manipulate? Maybe you don't know that this has been heavily documented for a while, and is really happening on a large scale, all the time?
Plot twist: Elected officials are realistically unable to exert power or influence over our federal agencies. These quasi-judicial, quasi-executive governmental machines are largely autonomous, developing their own policies to execute their mission. And they process offenders of their own policies, instead of reaching out to other government agencies to enforce law compliance.
If senators or representatives don't vote to fund agencies, it's career suicide. There are so many of these causes that martyrs would be burned up too quickly -- it would be dumb to sacrifice yourself for one of these causes, when there are hundreds up for vote each year. You'd just be replaced by someone with fewer morals.
On one side, it's the same issue as dealing with paid restaurant reviews on review sites; you have to wait for a large enough critical mass of comments/information outlets for true snippets to slip out.
On the other side, it's not like people are being killed. When they come for the Socialists, and these people start disappearing from our society, I will speak out. But this is not happening yet. So many Chickens Little, so few Eggheads Jr.
I'm not the original poster, but I do believe that astroturfing of social media is a reality of our world. The only real source I can provide is http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-31070114
And point out the fact that many companies hire social media people. I can also point out old cases like https://i.imgur.com/LY5suhh.jpg
I'm not sure I'm as paranoid as op, but if you think that no agency has at least seriously experimented with this stuff (instigating flame wars etc.) then remember how you felt reading the few people saying "they're recording everything you're doing on the internet".
I really don't like this, because I fear that from now on all these debates will be dominated by various interest groups hoping to get their petty little issues resolved.
This was never an issue that mattered and yet it dominated the debates every single time something on the frontpage had to do with react. For those of us who are actually interested in the technology this sucks.
I was perplexed by the uproar on HN about the original patent language (in the thread announcing the release of React Native [1]). This kind of open-source patent license--which, in effect, allows Facebook to use its patents against users of React defensively but not offensively--is exactly what we need more of in the open source world. Why did people think that their defensive patent license was somehow worse than the industry standard (the MIT or BSD copyright license with no patent license, which made patent rights murky at best)?
But this new language eliminates the major limitation on the original language, which was that the license would be terminated if you attempted to invalidate one of Facebook's patents or defensively argued that it was invalid or unenforceable (or even, according to a strict though implausible reading of the language, if you publicly stated that the patent was invalid).
Glad to see Facebook paying attention, even if the original complaint was overblown.
The problem was that under the original license, Facebook could sue you (as an initial aggressor) for an unrelated patent infringement, and if you claimed that the unrelated patent was invalid, you would lose your license/patent grant to i.e React. It did not just discourage you from suing Facebook, it made you defenseless if Facebook sued you.
This appears to remove that language and creates the much more desirable balanced situation you are talking about (IANAL).
I agree, and that's what I was saying in the second paragraph (I've edited it a bit to try to make that clearer). This is definitely an improvement from that original language.
But I don't see how the original license was somehow worse than the open source projects that use the MIT or BSD licenses without any patent license, thus potentially allowing the patent owner to use patents against you offensively or defensively. (As far as I know, it is still unresolved whether the MIT or BSD licenses include an implied grant of patent rights, but at the very least there would be serious legal uncertainty.)
For one example, see the license on this Google project: https://github.com/google/trace-viewer/blob/master/LICENSE. No mention of patent rights, and unless you could successfully argue that there was an implied license, Google could sue a user for patent infringement for using this software (not that Google has ever used patents offensively, to my knowledge). So it confused me to see a Google employee complaining in the other thread that they weren't allowed to use Facebook open source software due to the limited patent grant. I'd be really interested to know more about this policy.
Some lawyers appear to think that such an implied license exists. I'm not a lawyer and I'm not qualified to speculate on how accurate that is, but see these examples:
I don't know what happened with trace-viewer; perhaps you could ask the developers?
In some cases, Google uses a BSD-style license with a separate PATENTS file. For example, here are the PATENTS files for Go [1] and Dart [2]. Apache 2 is also common and it includes a patent grant.
"(As far as I know, it is still unresolved whether the MIT or BSD licenses include an implied grant of patent rights, but at the very least there would be serious legal uncertainty.)"
It's not really unresolved. There are dreamers who believe it's not the case. For everyone else, it's clearly the case until proven otherwise. There is a ton of case law on implied licenses. To believe it would simply not apply to software when it applies to every other area in which there are patents, for some magical unknown reason is ... strange and weird legal thinking?
The difference between the two situations is that without the facebook patent grant they could come after you for patents you infringed upon. With their patent grant you were no longer allowed to use react when they come after you for patents utterly unrelated to react.
I think everyone, including those who agitated against Facebook's original patent license, understands and agrees that patent licenses are important and should be encouraged.
Where the original patent license was perhaps "worse", in an ethical if not legal way, than no license at all, was that its limitations were non-obvious, and there was a feeling, right or wrong, that Facebook were attempting to restrict developers' rights by stealth. Licenses without any patent grant are problematic and uncertain, but they are at least problematic and uncertain in an obvious way, if that makes sense.
The original patent license felt akin to the Microsoft's early attempts at "shared source" versions of their libraries and frameworks, where just reading the source code could theoretically curtail developers' ability to work on open source implementations.
I think it's natural that people will react more negatively and forcibly to these kind of apparent bad-faith actions than to simple omissions. Furthermore, taking an aggressive stand against these sort of license tripwires hopefully makes it much less likely that others will attempt to insert similar clauses in future.
> which, in effect, allows Facebook to use its patents against users of React defensively but not offensively
> the original language, which was that the license would be terminated if you attempted to invalidate one of Facebook's patents
That clause is the exact reason many of us saw the old patent terms as being offensive rather than defensive. Why would it be valuable to Facebook to prevent people from arguing that their patents are invalid, if they weren't planning to sue for infringement of those patents? Facebook's calling the new terms "clearer" but the clause that they removed seemed pretty unambiguous in its intent.
But what if you have a legitimate patent claim against Facebook that doesn't relate to usage of react? It sounds like if you pursue that, then as a result, you can no longer use react. Or perhaps I'm missing something?
That seems entirely reasonable to me. If you want a free license to Facebook's patents, you have to implicitly give them a free license to yours as well. If you want to get money from them for patent violations, you should be prepared to then have to pay to use their patents.
Facebook only grants you patent license related to React, but you have to pay with every patent license your company have.
It's like saying Facebook can use all Google's patent, from search engines, Androids, Google car, etc. All because Google use React in a single presentation page.
It's even more viral than GPL. At least with GPL, your code only becomes infected with GPL in derived works.
But Facebook has all access to even your unrelated patents.
But what about if you're a large company with a large patent portfolio, you don't intend to abuse silly software patents, but it would be irresponsible to de facto grant Facebook free license to all your patents?
If I'm doing a startup, this clause is no issue. If I actually have patent assets, this seems like a non-starter still.
I was among the people who warned about the unfairness of the previous license. I am a Free Software advocate, so I have no problem with allowing Facebook to use any patents I might later obtain, as long as using React (and similarly-licensed software) does not leave me defenseless against a FB lawsuit.
Also try to understand that a lot of software engineers, like myself, would rather that the source code license not implicate or involve patents at all.
Let the lawyers argue about the patents; I don't want to accidentally hobble the ones on my side or arm the ones on the other side, I don't want to accidentally harm other open-source contributors, I'd rather not be involved at all.
(In the BSD vs GPL debate I'm pro-GPL, but not GPLv3, because it involves the patents...)
I'm a developer as well. And I am politically opposed to software patents and would prefer that software not be patentable.
But I'm confused by your statement that you want the license not to mention patents because you want to leave patent issues to the lawyers. The license isn't software code, it's legal code--it's what the lawyers are arguing about!
If the license doesn't mention patents (and doesn't imply a particular grant of patent rights, which like I said is an open issue), then you haven't chosen "nothing." You've chosen the default: the patent holder retains all rights.
That's right, the default. (but also, see teraflop's comment about ambiguous implied patent license)
It seems that any variation either hurts my defense or comes off as aggressive (which is what happened to facebook).
In a hypothetical situation where the patent language matters, it's total war. Multiple concurrent lawsuits in opposite directions, ITC injunction requests, etc. Maximum pain to make the opponent capitulate. None of these patents are really valid anyway, it's either math or implementation detail. There's no reason or logic here.
Better to make no statement, leave the default unsaid, and stick your head in the sand, it may keep you under the radar of involvement.
The problem is, if you bury your head in the sand and leave the patents to the lawyers there's a good chance the lawyers will come after you eventually. Hostile ones, that is.
As an illustrative example of what can happen when some third-party profiteers file for patents on your software while re-selling it themselves, read up on the JMRI project's legal troubles:
in effect, allows Facebook to use its patents against users of React defensively but not offensively
Was there any language in the license that bound Facebook to defensive use only and not offensive? Because otherwise this seems to be reading a lot of good intent into a place where none might be deserved.
Yes! This isn't legal advice, but, speaking loosely, the license gave you an irrevocable patent license to use React (that's the first sentence). That license only terminated when you brought a claim against Facebook (or a related party; check out the old license [1] for the details) for patent infringement or claimed that one of their patents was invalid.
Two important limitations--the original license terminated if you argued that a Facebook patent was invalid or tried to use patents defensively against them (this has been fixed in the new license, as far as I can tell), and Facebook can still sue you for patent infringement for something other than using React.
You would (probably) only do this defensively against an aggression by Facebook. People don't generally have an interest in alleging patents are invalid, unless they are being sued for infringement of those patents.
Some people do! Check out the top story on HN right now, which is about EFF invalidating a patent held by a patent troll: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9356767. Nobody was suing EFF (admittedly, that's almost a technicality since the patent holder was suing others, but EFF was trying to advance the public interest).
Still, it means that, if Facebook sue you with stupidly-obvious-invalid patent on entirely unrelated product, say a patent that car must have a glass windows, then you can't even defend that such patent is invalid.
what about the Apache license? this seems to be the go-to for this particular issue, and is widely used by Google and MS as well as about a billion other projects. it directly addresses this issue. to me the biggest red flag initially was just the fact that they decided to create a new 'variant' for no obvious reason:
IANAL but Section 3. definitely seems to cover exactly the same thing, with quite clear, and moreover long established language:
> 3. Grant of Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of
this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual,
worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable
(except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made,
use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work,
where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable
by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their
Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s)
with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If You
institute patent litigation against any entity (including a
cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work
or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct
or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses
granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate
as of the date such litigation is filed.
This is a very good point: with FLOSS it is generally wise to be wary of corporations that insist on custom drafted license text instead of established and well understood licenses; the corporate lawyers are always going to draft something that protects their corporation from any harm, hypothetical or not, but they don't necessarily have any motivation to ensure that the same protection applies to third parties.
I'm very glad Facebook was willing to take a step back here, evaluate people's concerns, and update the grant to address them. Most companies, when placed in the same position, would simply double down and tell people to go pound sand.
The fact that they didn't, and in fact, actually talked with folks and addressed this head on, speaks volumes about them as a company.
They actually kept a large part of the previous license. The new license will terminate if you initiate: "any Patent Assertion [...] (iii) against any party relating to the Software".
So if you sue any React user for infringing any patent, even unrelated to React usage, your license for React will terminate. On the other hand, if Facebook uses your Apache 2.0 software, their license to your patents terminates only if they sue people for using your software. Isn't that asymmetric?
/end edit
Isn't there a loop-hole though? With the new license, if a FB affiliate sues you, you can only countersue the affiliate. So if FB asks an affiliate to sue you (maybe they sell the affiliate a couple of patents for instance), you can't counterclaim against FB, you can only counterclaim against the affiliate, which may not have a product.
Is that correct?
Thanks for raising awareness about the previous license. The new one definitely seems better.
It is asymmetric vs Apache 2.0, but that's like saying GPLv3 is asymmetric vs BSD.
Past that, to be honest, there are always "loopholes" in all of these licenses related to transferring patents to entities/etc. Given any open source license, i can come up with a valid legal way for an entity to sue you over patents in it. But at some point, you have to trust that isn't the spirit/goal of the license, because if it is, you are kind f*cked anyway. That point, has, IMHO, been reached here now.
Otherwise, it's generally not a sane problem to solve in licenses. It's an insanely complex area due to the ways it can happen. You generally don't want to try to shove all that in one document, it'll be a mess, and you'll never be able to update it for ambiguities discovered or change it with the times as law changes (OSS already has a large enough problem rev'ing licenses)
Things like transfer problems are better solved by things like http://www.lotnet.com/, et al, which have specific, well thought out and targeted agreements.
Yes, it makes it harder to tell your likelihood to get screwed, in the sense that you have to know not only the actual license, but whether they are a member of LOT or whatever, but i honestly can't see a good way around this.
Thanks a lot for your answer. The part about loopholes explains a lot. But I don't quite agree about the asymmetry.
If you use React, doesn't it basically mean that you de facto license all your patents to Facebook whereas Facebook licenses those required strictly for React? With Apache 2.0 or GPLv3, you would only de facto license patent covering the software and the author would de jure license theirs. With BSD, there is no de facto licensing from you, as termination doesn't relate to patent suits. If so, the new grant is okay for people who don't have patents but it seems unsuitable for those who do. Less patent suits overall would certainly be a good thing but this condition seems very one-sided.
"If you use React, doesn't it basically mean that you de facto license all your patents to Facebook whereas Facebook licenses those required strictly for React?"
No.
The only patent grants you give are through CLA's.
Otherwise, i'm not sure i follow the concern?
Say you use React and own patents. If you ever sue someone over patents, it may terminate your React license in the case where the defendant uses React. You may not even know it and keep using React happily after termination. Later, you can't sue Facebook without them countering that your use of React has been unlicensed since termination. Is this a valid concern?
While rereading the grant, I even wonder: (1) does the termination in the grant mean termination of the copyright license as well? (2) asserting any patent against "any party relating to the Software" could include end users since they receive the same license and grant.
This is what true commitment to open source looks like. Many companies may have remained silent about this and never address it. Their projects where already popular enough that they didn't really need to address the concerns that many had about them.
But they did. And I'm sure it wasn't a trivial effort from whoever worked on getting this amended. So I applaud Facebook and the people that worked to address the communities concerns.
I think the key bit is Notwithstanding the foregoing, if Facebook or any of its subsidiaries or corporate affiliates files a lawsuit alleging patent infringement against you in the first instance, and you respond by filing a patent infringement counterclaim in that lawsuit against that party that is unrelated to the Software, the license granted hereunder will not terminate under section (i) of this paragraph due to such counterclaim.
In other words, it's an explicitly defensive capability they are reserving - to revoke your patent grant iff you are the one to initiate a patent suit against them. If every open source project included such a statement, it could potentially do a lot to end software patent wars.
I don't think I follow the logic. Most of the "bad" patent lawsuits are from companies that don't make any software. Not being able to use React (or even Linux, let's say) would hardly be a problem for them.
I'm glad that facebook fixed this solely for the fact that facebook open source software discussions will not be dominated by the contents of the PATENTS file.
Or possibly to increase the uptake of their projects at other large corporates: thereby increasing mindshare/developer goodwill. Don't tell me that Fb doesn't want to put up IBMs logo on the "who uses React" page
I'd much rather spend my energy supporting an idea or effort than having to state objections for why it might be bad - as would I hope most who are inventors and wanting to improve the world around them.
Can anyone comment on whether corporate M&A departments are concerned with this license? An aquirer would either have to rewrite much of the code of their newly acquired startup, or they would lose the ability to initiate a patent suit. According to [1], Google is not able to use React. How much of a concern is this when considering a new aquisition? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9271246
The scenario I'm worried about may still be a valid concern under the new license.
Here is the scenario:
1. Google decides to buy my company in 2016.
2. They ask me to purge my codebase of React, so I switch to Angular.
3. Some years later, Google decides to sue Facebook over a blimp route optimization algorithm.
4. Facebook responds: "Well Google, one of your subsidiaries used React back in 2015 before you bought them, and now that you're suing us, that grant is no longer valid, so you're now liable for infringements on our React patents."
So with that scenario in mind, Google chooses to pass on buying my company, leaving some smaller acquirers, and maybe Facebook as possible buyers.
Please tell me this is not how it works. I would love to use React, but I can't bet the farm on this without more assurance.
IANAL, but my understanding is the termination is not retroactive. You would only be liable if you continued to use React after your patent grant was terminated.
INALIDEPLT: That is not how it works - a termination of the licences means your license is no longer valid, much like you can have any other agreement terminate but that doesn't mean it wasn't valid in the past. It would essentially be the same as if you had a license that was purchased for X years - you can't use it more than X years, but that doesn't mean you can't use it during that period.
This is philosophical, really. You're extremely likely to be infringing patents already. If Google sues Facebook over a patent, the likelihood that Facebook can counter-sue over patent infringements is extremely high whether Google uses React or not.
It's called mutually assured destruction for a reason. Stockpiling patents as deterence is the most reasonable thing you can do in a system that allows software patents. It's the only thing likely to keep others from suing you over bullshit patents.
Waiting for some Lawyer to explain why they think this is or isn't great. But mostly out of interest. The old patent grant never prevented me from using their projects.
What does this whole patent thing mean? I'm not well-versed at all about licenses and patents and the technical jargon of the file is mostly non-sense to me. Would someone care to simply explain what this implies?
Most popular open source licenses (except GPLv3 and Apache) only give you a copyright license to the code, they do not give you a patent license. In theory, somebody could create some software, get a patent for it, release it under the BSD license or equivalent, and then sue everybody who uses the software for patent infringement.
However, some lawyers believe that the BSD and similar licenses give you an implicit patent grant. The licenses say you have a license to use the software. Since you cannot use the software without a patent license, then giving somebody a license to use the software automatically includes patent rights.
The inclusion of an explicit patent grant means that the implicit patent grant is no longer necessary and therefore no longer exists. So you had armchair lawyers divided into two camps. The first weren't so sure about that implicit license thing, so Facebook's inclusion of an explicit grant was a good thing. The second camp noticed a few problems with the explicit grant, and complained loudly that the explicit grant was worse than the previous implicit grant.
With these changes, Facebook addresses the criticisms of the second camp.
From what I can understand from [1][2][3], is the previous patent clause meant that if you and Facebook got into patent litigation, any open source software you used that was written by Facebook would be revoked (opening you up to a license breach). This was scary because Facebook owns a ton of patents and if Zuckerberg woke up on the wrong side of the bed one morning and decided to sue everyone with their portfolio of patents, it would be impossible to countersue if you used any Facebook code. The other posts go into how companies like Google and Facebook use patents as a way of ensuring mutually assured destruction, and if Google had used Facebook code under the license it would be like Google disarming all their nuclear bombs against facebook.
IANAL, but it seems the new license is a bit more GPL-esque in its restrictions by saying if you use this software than you cannot sue Facebook, its subsidiaries, and your parent weapon of choice can't be based off Facebook software (or else you lose the software license). However if Facebook sues you, then you don't lose the license and you are free to counter sue facebook with your nuclear arsenal of patents.
The reason I call it GPL-esque is it seems to introduce restrictions on how you can legally use the software once you've incorporated it (like how the GPL prevents you from not redistributed the source code), the Facebook license seems to prevent you from launching patent claims that are built off Facebook software. My guess is that if enough people used this license it would be difficult to litigate anyone else without revoking some of your software licenses.
Finally, I never took a law class a day in my life and the closest domain knowledge is an intro to econ class I took in freshman year of college so I could 100% wrong.
I think this is an upgrade. The patent as worded before made it seem like if Facebook sued you, you couldn't both defend yourself and keep your license. In this version, it seems, that you only lose your license if you are the first actor in a lawsuit.
I don't see how this makes everything okay to use now? To me it basically means, if I sue Facebook for any reason involving patents, I would have to give up using its code. I invent a time machine, Facebook can infringe on my patent and I can't sue unless I stop using their code. Please tell me I am wrong.
The patent language in the previous FB license seemed pretty similar to the patent language in Apache 2.0. Can anybody comment or link to a discussion of why the FB language was undesirable? And why not change Apache 2.0 in the same way? (Confused)
Can you sue Facebook for patent infringement and still use React.js?
What I mean by that is... do you actually need this patent grant to use React.js? Since React.js is BSD licensed, can you distribute a fork of React.js that does not include this file?
Without an explicit patents grant, you're not granted any patents and therefore could be sued for patent infringement if the software is covered by any patents owned by Facebook.
Also, I think the "license" (in the legal sense) for React consists of both the LICENSE and the PATENTS file, so in order to re-distribute the project you'd still personally need to obey its terms.
There's also the problem that the requirements for a "derived work" (which could be distributed with your own license) are more complex than "change a bunch of files", so if you simply slap a new license on someone else's project the new license is not necessarily enforcible and you may be infringing their copyright.
Basically, IP law can not easily be gamed (case in point: legally speaking there's nothing wrong or unexpected about patent trolls).
> A "Patent Assertion" is any lawsuit or other action alleging direct, indirect, or contributory infringement or inducement to infringe any patent, including a cross-claim or counterclaim.
Does "action" has any special legal meaning here? It almost seems that you can't write a blog post about facebook infringing on any patents.
Yes it has special meaning that lawyers tend to forget confuses laypeople. A legal action is a term of art that means a legal proceeding such as a lawsuit or a petition at a gov't agency. From Black's Law Dictionary:
Lawful pursuit for justice or decision under the law, typically leading to proceeding within the jurisdiction’s court system. An entity accuses another for a unlawful action, to protect an entity’s rights from violation
This may not have been an important issue for you, but many of us actually have to pay attention to licenses. There are components out there that I would very much like to use, but can't for licensing reasons. Having Facebook respond and make changes is quite welcome.
Today it's Facebook PATENTS, tomorrow maybe it's nation-wide automatic license plate tracking. One thing is for sure, staying silent never changed anything.
It's a ridiculous comparison, I know, but never underestimate the ability of a small group of determined rabble-rousers to make a difference. A small incident with some tea in a large body of water comes to mind.