On Sat, Oct 30, 1999 at 10:16:38PM -0400, Raul Miller wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 30, 1999 at 12:16:40PM -0700, Bruce Perens wrote:
> > Well, I'd like the law to agree with you, actually. The problem is
> > that copyright law does not consider _reference_ a form of derivation.
> > This would give us problem with dynamic libraries, too, except that
> > the headers get copied into the application.
> The difference between mere reference and derivation, in this case, is
> the difference between treating the computer program as a static work
> (like a book) and a dynamic work (like a screen play or music score).
This analogy doesn't really hold up, though: I don't know of any scores
that as well as requiring royalties for perfomance or duplication forbid
you to perform them with other songs.
In particular, if you have a script that has some dialogue followed by
``now do the scene from foo, where Bar bazzes'' sure, you have to get
permission to perform `foo', but that's it.
This is as opposed to if the script writer had merely cut and pasted the
words directly from foo, which would be a copyright violation.
And we already have permission to use both dpkg and the Corel frontend.
Just because you only use dpkg when Corel tells you too, well, so what?
(As I understand it, the `you can't dynamic link against GPLed libraries
from non-GPL programs' is more a case of `you can't #include GPLed
header files in non-GPLed programs', which is a very different scenario
(involving copying copyrighted works, rather than merely linking them))
Hmmm. I also suspect that the performance of a play would constitute
a derived work, whereas I can't quite imagine how the execution of a
program could. Odd.
IANAL.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred.
``The thing is: trying to be too generic is EVIL. It's stupid, it
results in slower code, and it results in more bugs.''
-- Linus Torvalds
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