Re: Plugins, libraries, licenses and Debian

[Jeremy Hankins <nowan@nowan.org>]

Anthony DeRobertis <asd@suespammers.org> writes:
> On Dec 16, 2003, at 10:20, Brian T. Sniffen wrote:

>> I didn't say there's no copyright generated by the pairing -- just
>> that the pairing can't be separated from the writing of the plugin.
>> The plugin author, in the course of writing and testing his plugin,
>> must have assembled the combination of host+plugin in a persistent
>> form.
>
> If the author distributed it unpaired, then I re-pair it, that's not
> under the original author's copyright (if any) on that pairing.
>
> Debian pairing the plugin doesn't generate a copyright.

You may well be right, I can't really claim to know.  But you don't seem
to be answering Brian's point.

If I understand him, he's saying that the author of the plugin is doing
the work of pairing his code with the host (even if, in fact, it will be
paired many times and by many people) and that that's where copyright
subsists, and where a derivative work is created.  Arguably, the plugin
itself (sans host) is a derivative of the plugin+host which the author
created first.

But even if the courts don't take such a literalist view, I have trouble
accepting your claim that since the creative work and the pairing that
results from it are separated in space & time that there's no derivative
work.  Clearly the pairing was the purpose of the authors creative work
-- to argue about whether or not he actually paired it is to devolve
into philosophical hair splitting.

If I'm a radical artist and fire a cannon from miles away to land on a
sculpture, is the resulting "art" not a derivative of the original
sculpture because I wasn't there when it hit?  How about if it's a copy
rather than the original?

-- 
Jeremy Hankins <nowan@nowan.org>
PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333  9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03