Re: Vicarious liblity (was: KDE not in Debian?)
On Fri, Feb 04, 2000 at 03:52:31PM +0100, Marc van Leeuwen wrote:
> If your point is that a distribution that in itself is not infringing on
> anybody's copyright, could be considered vicariously liable of such
> infringement because, after tweaking the makefile a bit, and then using it to
> create an executable that is essentially different from anything present in
> the original distribution, recipients could infringe copyright by distributing
> that executable, then I must say this interpretation of vicarious liability
> seems unacceptable to me.
Of course, that particular example is only relevant in the context of
the GPL, it's not relevant for copyrights in general.
> By the same token distributing source code of a very plain GPL-ed C
> program would be vicariously liable of copyright infringement, because
> (even without changing the makefile) users could compile and link it
> on a platform with a proprietary libc, to create an executable, whose
> distribution would not only violate the GPL of the C source, but the
> copyright of the author of the libc as well.
No, because that would be a different program which contains different
elements.
> (The point I think should be clear: creating and running the
> executable is fine, distributing it is not.) The fact that the GPL
> grants you permission to modify and redistribute under certain
> conditions does not mean you are allowed to do so if that is illegal
> for other reasons.
Certainly.
However, this particular change does *not* alter the source code, or
the introduce any new components which would not already be present.
It just alters their form.
The fact is: when kghostscript is running, it contains QPL and GPLed code.
Pretending that that's not what's happening is a fraud.
The -static example is merely an illustration.
--
Raul
Reply to: