Re: On interpreting licences (was: KDE not in Debian?)
On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Marc van Leeuwen wrote:
> Scripsit Lynn Winebarger <owinebar@free-expression.org>
>
> > There's a difference. You'd have to do some work to show me that in all
> > cases a function call is equivalent to a footnote - footnotes you don't need
> > to see to understand the text, a non-standard API I need to know at least
> > the documentation for the library implementation (which probably describes,
> > but not defines, the API).
>
> Uh? Where does copyright law talk about meaning and understanding? If I write
> a book about (say) The Rolling Stones or Microsoft Windows one can't really
> understand the text without accessing (or having had access to) their music
> respectively software, but that does not give them any copyrights to my book!
>
Well, let's look at the case of fiction. If you use a character from a
copyrighted text, your work may be derivative of that. Why? Because
you're relying on the work of the author of the first text to provide the
meaning/context for this character in your book. You're not just using
the name as a reference. The question is not whether copyright law
explicitly says "<such and such> will constitute being derivative", the
question is what will a judge/jury decide after seeing the two texts.
Yes, I know software isn't fiction. But fiction does set the stage
for an argument based on meaning and context. In nonfiction, generally a
reference is given not to provide meaning to a statement, but to provide
extra detail concerning a statement. With software, the reference is the
statement, and is meaningless without knowing the function's code or
documentation.
And no, I don't think you need access to the Rolling Stones music or
MS Windows in order to read and understand a book about them (this may
depend on the quality of the text).
> So portable code is unaffected by any implementation's copyrights but
> non-portable code is affected? This would be quite interesting (and absurd).
Depends on what you mean by portable and non-portable. Using
readline, for example, doesn't make your code non-portable, though it does
make it derivative of the readline library.
While it may be absurd from a technical viewpoint, I don't believe it
is so if you're looking at the code solely as a form of expression (as the
copyright has 0 to do with any functionality it may have).
There may, of course, be restrictions on how an OS vendor may apply
any copyright interest they may have in application from antitrust law.
> An example that you might be more familiar with is the WWW. Think of what it
> would mean if linking to a webpage would give the (intellectual) owner of that
> page copyrights over that page containing the link. And of course by extension
> to any page linking to that page, etc. Well I'm pretty sure it would mean I
> have copyrights over the entire WWW (and so would you). Yet it remains even
> more true than for function calls that one cannot determine the meaning of a
> weblink without following it.
Nonsense. A link is simply a reference - there is no need to look at
it for the referring page to be completely meaningful.
Lynn
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