On Sep 10, 2004, at 18:13, Raul Miller wrote:
On Fri, Sep 10, 2004 at 02:46:52PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:Why? The plain-English meaning of the phrase "accompanies the executable" would imply no such thing, and would in fact appear to be contrary to the intent of this part of the license.Under copyright law, the precise details of how the copy arrives doesn'tmatter.
Yes it does. Consider the difference between a copy of Windows arriving by being downloaded from Kazaa and by being purchased from Microsoft.
What matters is that the copy arrives. If many people are getting copies of some work then that's a copyright issue.
Millions of people have a copy of the linux kernel, yet there is no copyright issue.
Copyright holders _OFTEN_ allow certain methods of making & distributing copies and disallow others. It can be "only if you give me $$$", "only if you distribute source code as well", etc.
We must therefor analyze the actions involved in the copying, as some may be allowed by fair use, some by licenses, etc.
If more than one person is involved in making those copies the individualswho contributed towards making those copies can still be nailed for contributory infringement.
Assuming there was infringement, etc.
Now, ok, if even though you're distributing Emacs linked against OpenSSL,no one is winding up with copies of Emacs + OpenSSL, that wouldn't be infringing.
And if they are, it isn't infringing either --- the GPL explicitly allows this. As long as you didn't distribute them both alongside each other.