On Fri, Mar 16, 2001 at 02:52:57AM -0500, Dale Scheetz wrote: > I agree with everything you say, with one exception. Why should xpdf be a > tool for filtering objectionable authors? Apply the original patch. Filtering authors? That's something I do. Telling you the contents of the file (including permission bits) is perfectly within the scope of the program's function. > Joseph, if you want to know who is attempting to violate your copyrights > (Yes, people other than the copyright holder have rights under the > copyright law!) then write a little script that surveys your doc files and > makes a list of authors/creators who would wish to restrict your rights. > > Let's don't get our morals confused with technical usefulness. There is no > moral obligation on the part of xpdf to tell you anything about the > author's wishes WRT these bits. It's only obligation is to satisfy the > design, presenting the contents to the screen and to the printer at the > user's choice. There is nothing in the (non-existant) design spec that > says this product is supposed to act on anyone elses desires, not even > those of the author. The obligation of xpdf is to do what it is coded to do. The author chose to honor these copy control bits. I want it to instead tell me they're there and let me do what I want. This is the most likely solution to get included upstream and happens to be just ducky as far as I'm concerned. -- Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org> Free software developer <zarkov> "NT 5.0. All the bugs and ten times the code size!"
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