On Thu, Jun 13, 2002 at 11:41:13AM -0700, Walter Landry wrote: > Steve Langasek <vorlon@netexpress.net> wrote: > > OTOH, "preferred form of the work for making modifications to it" is not > > always the same thing as "original source form of the work", because > > *preferences* are subjective. I may receive a copylefted document in > > LaTeX format, but because I'm not comfortable with working in that > > format, I use one of the many available tools to convert it to XML (or > > God forbid, PDF) before making my own changes to it. Should I then be > > obliged to redistribute the original LaTex document that I received > > under a copyleft license? > > Analogy in the coding world: if there's a particular function (C file, > > library, etc. -- whatever the basic unit is that we'd like to consider) > > that's being poorly optimized by the compiler, and I reimplement it in > > assembly because I know better, should I be required to distribute the > > original C source, or can I toss it? Personally, I think anyone who > > takes a piece of portable code and modifies it to be > > architecture-dependent is a jerk, but I'm not sure that opinion should > > have the force of law. > You have modified the original such that the preferred form for > modifications has changed. People do this all the time (e.g. recoding > a Perl project in Python). I don't think that there is any ambiguity > here. But whose preference are you going by? I don't think this is precise enough to prevent some pretty serious abuses, both by original authors and by modifiers of copylefted works. If I wrote the original document, and prefer LaTeX over XML so much that it remains my preferred form even when significant content and markup changes have been made to the XML version, do I have the right to demand access to the changes in LaTeX format? If not, what are my rights if someone else converts the document to a PS or PDF document and works with it that way? At which point, what recourse do I have if someone chooses PDF as a preferred form with obfuscation in mind? This "preferred form" rule has always bothered me somewhat for these reasons, particularly in the context of existing Debian packages containing docs distributed in a format other than the original. And maybe it's not reasonable for me to hope that the legalese can be made precise enough to address this, but there you have it. Steve Langasek psotmodern programmer
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