Re: New ways to evade copyright law (was Re: Vicarious liblity (was: KDE not in Debian?))
On Fri, Feb 04, 2000 at 01:30:50PM -0500, Brian Ristuccia wrote:
> Breaking a copyrighted work up into little bits and distributing them
> individually doesn't help you evade copyright. If you don't have
> permission to distribute, no matter how small you make the pieces
> you'll still be distributing a substantial amount of the work and thus
> infringing the copyright.
>
> Distributing two separate works for which you have authorization, on
> the other hand, is perfectly ok even if you don't have permission
> to distribute the combination of the two. Any combination of those
> works would be done by the end user. Only if the end user chooses to
> distribute the result would they (not you) be in violation of the
> copyright.
But the only reason you have permission to distribute a GPLed executable
is if you're distributing the source under appropriate terms (terms that
let you modify and redistribute that source code with no restrictions
beyond those imposed by the GPL). And that includes the source for any
needed modules.
Some people claimed that copyright law wouldn't cover the case where
the pieces were distributed independently. You apparently don't share
this belief, but instead [apparently] believe that Qt just plain isn't
relevant to any GPLed programs?
--
Raul
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