On Thu, Dec 12, 2002 at 11:38:25AM -0500, Jim Penny wrote: > A) Upstream produces some set of tables that it claims are compatible > with unicodeData.txt, but not derived from them. > B) Upstream has a tool that mechanically takes unicodeData.txt, > extracts, and reformats data for use in its program. This tool is run > by upstream, and is not rerun at build time. > C) Upstream has a tool that mechanically takes unicodeData.txt, > extracts, and reformats data for use in its program. This tool is run > as a part of every build. > I think that if the question was ever brought up before a court of law, > B and C would be held to be equivalent; that is, that if under the DSFG > "contract", C places a package in contrib; then B also would. This is > NOT a question of copyright law, but only of the DSFG "contract". Careful; the Social Contract (and the DFSG it references) is not a legally-binding contract, it is a set of guidelines. Therefore, there is no grounds for ever bringing this question before a court of law: the highest court governing the application of the DFSG is the debian-legal mailing list, together with the judgement of the ftpmasters and others who would bear the responsibility of any actual infringement. Moreover, the DFSG has *never* concerned itself with the tools used by authors in the creation of their free software; if B) above is a non-free dependency, then so is BitKeeper, so the Linux kernel has to go to contrib; so is the POSIX spec, so any code written that references that spec has to go to contrib. > Programs using strategy A are probably DSFG free, assuming that there is > no evidence of fraud. But, given the complexity and magnitude of the > unicode standard, and that the totality of facts embodied in > unicodeData.txt is not available in the rest of the unicode standard: > if an interested party ever brought this before a judge then > copyright infringement would be proved. Proving that A) is a copyright infringement would require showing both that these tables are a derived work, and that the derivation is not permitted by the license on unicodeData.txt. I don't see how you would successfully argue that in court; permission to "extract data from the file" would include extracting *all* of the data from the file, AFAICT. Once extracted, you can do anything you want with that data, including assembling it into a new table, because copyright only covers the *expression*, not the data itself. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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