Re: xcdroast does no longer work with wodim: Who to blame?
Bill Unruh <unruh@physics.ubc.ca> wrote:
> >> Well, no, there is a problem. Whether that problem is due to a misreading of
> >> the law, differing laws (Under US, the concept of derivative work is a very
> >> important and strong concept. Publishers have been successfully sued for using less than
> >> .3% of another work in their work. It is a vague and broad concept, and at
...
> Yes, what is copyrightable and what not is a complete minefield. And the
> concept of derivative work is even more of one.
> Unfortunately one has to live and work within the confines of the legal system
> we actually have, not the one that might make sense.
With respect to mkisofs there is no such problem.
The European Copyright law as well as the US Copyright law (see a paper from
Eric Raymond's wife that explains why this also applies to US Copyright law)
knows a "minor contribution". Authors who did only contribute a minor amount of
work have authorship rights but are not allowed to control the kind of marketing
for the whole work. Such an author still needs to be payed according to his
amount of contribution but cannot control the project. For OSS this means that
he is payed nothing (as the project has no income) and that he does not have
the right to control the license that is decided on my the majority
contributors.
With repsect to mkisofs, there is nobody besides me who has the needed rights.
I am licensing the code and I am defining the rules. I tell you that there is
no problem with the code combination and for this reason, there is no license
problem.
If you have been following up lawsuits you should know what this means, there
is no way to sue distributors witout me....
Claiming that there is a risk of being sued is non-serious. The current lisense
situation exists since three years and large distributors like Sun support the
original source. If there really would be somebody who has the power to sue
distributors and who is unhappy with the current licensing, then this person
would have sued Sun or at least contected me or Sun. Note that I did contact
Debian less than 4 weeks after Debian introduced unlawful modifications in the
fork and I asked Debian to stop distributing the fork as long as it is in
violation with GPL and Copyright law.
As Debin knows that Debian might be sued for the fork and as no relevent
person showed that he is unhappy with the current license situation, it is
obvios that there is no risk for being sued for distributing the original
software.
The current situation is that Debian knows that there is a high risk for being
sued for distributing the fork and that there is nobody who shows interest for
suing besause of distributing the original.
If Debian does not distribute the original software because of so-called
license problems, Debian would need to immediately stop distributing the fork
in order to verify that Debian is doing decisions based license problems at
all.
> The answer would appear to be "no", it is not sufficient. Thus, for the sake
> of the users, not for the sake of the Debian people, but of the users, it
> would be really great if the that licensing issue with libscg and mkisofs
> could be brought to a place where it would satisfy the major theories of
> copyright law in dispute. That could either be through cross licensing or even
> extracting those parts of libscg which are actually used by mkisofs ( and it
> seems to be very little), including them in the source for mkisofs and making
> them GPL or LGPL. I realise that this is both a pain and an impostion, and it
> makes things messier with respect to the code. On the other hand, the current
> situation makes things much messier with respect to the users.
I am the author and you might have noticed that I am doing things in order to
make dure that the project is available to users for as long as possible.
I see no reason to do anything that could harm the project. Dual licensing
could massively harm the project and therefore dual licensing is not an option.
I am still very sure that nobody from Debian who claims that there is a license
problem believes his own claims. If there was a license problem, there would be
a real discussion on how to work around this putative problem. Note that there
would be plenty of better ways to go than dual licensing. For this reason, I
still believe that there is only a social problem in Debian.
Jörg
--
EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
js@cs.tu-berlin.de (uni)
joerg.schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
Reply to: