Re: Web application licenses

[Michael Poole <mdpoole@troilus.org>]

Brian Thomas Sniffen writes:

> > Yes, the person operating the router is publicly performing the
> > router's code.  However, because mechanical transformations are not
> > derivative works under copyright law, and because communications
> > providers are allowed to forward data on request[1], the router's
> > forwarding actions do not infringe any copyright on either the data or
> > programs that generate the data.
> 
> I wasn't talking about a purely mechanical transformation -- consider
> that I replace one out of every thousand packets with my own poetry.
> The license on the poetry then does matter.
>
> I suspect you may misunderstand the way in which "mechanical
> transformations are not derivative works" -- it's not that there's no
> copyright on the work after it's been transformed, but rather that
> it's exactly the same copyright as before transformation.

I understand that the copyright is the same as for the original form.
That is why the licenses don't affect each other.  For reasons that
apparently are not so obvious as I thought, I did not deal with such a
peculiar and legally dangerous operation as some network element
replacing data mid-stream.  Even if someone did that, I do not see why
it would avoid restrictions on public performance of a program.

Michael