Re: Results for Debian's Position on the GFDL
Raul Miller writes:
> On 15 Mar 2006 00:11:11 -0500, Michael Poole <mdpoole@troilus.org> wrote:
> > > File permissions have little or nothing to do with enforcing copyright.
> > >
> > > File permissions are an all or nothing mechanism. You either have
> > > given a person a copy of the copyrighted material, or you have not.
> >
> > Things like the execute bit, not to mention ACLs like those supported
> > in AFS, NTFS, and other systems, make this claim transparently false.
>
> So don't do that.
So is it acceptable for the GFDL to prohibit me from performing these
two operations:
cp some-gfdl-licensed-document.txt ~/local-copy.txt
chmod 0700 ~/local-copy.txt
? If you accept that file permissions are technical measures, the
second step violates this provision of the GFDL: "You may not use
technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further
copying of the copies you make or distribute." I can even see an
argument that is a computer owner's responsibility to make every
GFDL-licensed package file on that computer world-readable, since the
owner (or his agent) copied the document into /usr/share/doc.
It would also be a violation of the GFDL for the computer's owner to
restrict any user to a chroot environment, which is a rather clear
violation of DFSG#9.
Michael Poole
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