Re: Web application licenses

[Brian Thomas Sniffen <bts@alum.mit.edu>]

Michael Poole <mdpoole@troilus.org> writes:

> 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.

It's not peculiar and dangerous; it's relatively common.  Many HTTP
proxies, for example, do this.  What I'm trying to point out is that
transformations happen along the way.  Not all of them are strictly
mechanical.  This was meant to demonstrate the poor public policy of
sweeping networked computer programs into the "public performance"
category.

In any case, let's look more closely at the router.  It is, you
assert, a public performance of the router code.  So Cisco gets to
charge him for this, and separately license this use of IOS?  And
maybe charge more for use with non-Cisco products?  Hm.

And Microsoft, they get to license performance of Word by providing
its output over a network... oh, that isn't performance?  Then why is
it performance to provide Apache's output over a network?

Now I'm all confused again.  How can I tell whether some use of
software is a public performance of it, since copyright law doesn't
tell me?  All it says is stuff about remote public performances
involving images and sounds.

-Brian

-- 
Brian Sniffen                                       bts@alum.mit.edu