Re: Web application licenses

[Måns Rullgård <mru@kth.se>]

Don Armstrong <don@donarmstrong.com> writes:

> On Wed, 18 Aug 2004, Måns Rullgård wrote:
>> Nobody has ever tried to extend the copyright of a program to
>> include output produced when running the program. 
>
> If no one has tried, it's because it's quite trivial to contruct a
> case where a program's output is copyrightable and covered by the
> copyright of the program.
>
> Consider a script that calls imagemagick to create an copyrightable
> image steming entirely from information contained in the script. Or a
> LaTeX "program" for that matter.

OK, I forgot to mention those cases where the program includes parts
of itself in the output.  However, there is no way an email sent
through postfix can be a work derived from the postfix code.  The same
reasons apply here as to compilers.  The copyright of object code
produced by a compiler is exactly the same as that of the source
file.  Compiling the source code is considered use of the compiler,
and the output is not a work derived from the compiler.

-- 
Måns Rullgård
mru@kth.se