On Wed, Jun 27, 2001 at 08:58:17PM -0700, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes:
> > FooCorp doesn't do any linking with GPLed code in these
> > scenarios. Further, the linking is only done on the users machine, in
> > a manner explicitly allowed by the copyright holders of both pieces
> > of code (the GPL allows you to do pretty much whatever if you don't
> > distribute; and we can presume FooCorp doesn't mind you linking with A
> > in the hypothetical).
> The set {FooCorp,WhiteNight} however, *is* doing an illegal copy.
Proof by assertion, I love it.
> Suppose I get a whole bunch of people. Each of them will copy one
> sentence of a novel and put it in a review; each copies a different
> sentence. That's allowed. They grant all readers of their reviews
> the rights to copy the reviews freely.
They don't have copyright to the portions they quoted, so they can't
grant readers of their reviews the right to copy those.
> Each reviewer embeds a number in the first sentence of his review.
> ("This is the second book I read this month!" "All 5345 people in my
> neighborhood loved it"--that sort of thing.) They arrange that the
> review with the Nth sentence of the novel has the number N in its
> first sentence.
Further, fair use (or, in .au the explicit allowance to use quotes for
purposes of criticism) only applies if you're really doing criticism.
Having a whole bunch of reviews that were automatically parse-able
would almost certainly not satisfy the requirements for that exception,
so even if they were never put together there'd still be a copyright
infringement here.
> Now for a single reviewer to do these things is legal.
Only within the context of criticism and review: with fair use, intentions
can reasonably come into play.
> But suppose they do this in cahoots, and they arrange to publish their
> reviews online, and they also distribute a product that collects a set
> of essays, looks for cited sentences, and prints out the quoted
> sentences of the novel in order.
> That program, in isolation, is also a legal program.
Actually, under modern copyright laws, it could well be a circumvention
device.
> To sum up the general case:
> If it is illegal (or violates civil law) for a person to do act X,
> then it is also illegal (or violates civil law) for a group of people
> acting in cahoots to do act X, no matter how they divide up the parts
> of the action among themselves.
The scenario we're (I'm) considering explicitly has Debian and FooCorp
*not* acting in cahoots. Debian's distributing libA because it's useful
on its own, or because other GPLed software (C, D, E) needs it. Debian
has no intention or interest in particularly helping out FooCorp.
> You gave several alternate scenarios. The way to analyze those
> scenarios in each case is to consider the *entire* action,
You should look up the word "analyze". It means break it down into
parts.
> and see
> whether that action would violate the copyright or the permissory
> licenses.
I'm not sure that makes sense.
If I point out specific clauses from a public license that grants each
actor explicit permission to do what they do, how can the entire play
possibly be in violation of the license?
To take the review example and replace "fair use" with something permitted
by a license, we might have the initial license of the book be
"You may include up to twenty lines of this book and include it in a
review; you may not sublicense."
In which case all the reviews would be legal, both cumulatively
and individually, (although the license on the reviews would be a
misrepresentation, if they claimed to sublicense the original book which
they weren't allowed to do) but the act of running the program over
them to put them all together would neither be fair use, nor permitted
by the book's license, and the "reviewers" and the program author could
possibly be got for contributory infringement.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``_Any_ increase in interface difficulty, in exchange for a benefit you
do not understand, cannot perceive, or don't care about, is too much.''
-- John S. Novak, III (The Humblest Man on the Net)
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