On Mon, 08 Sep 2003, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > Don Armstrong <don@donarmstrong.com> writes: >> Sure, but we're generally not talking about sale or transfer of >> ownership in the context of free software licenses, because the >> license limits what you can do with your copy. That is, I often can't >> take my copy, modify it, and resell the binary to someone else like I >> could do with any other tangible copyrighted work. > > Free software licenses cannot restrict things which are not already > restricted by copyright. In the case you describe, if you really got > rid of your copy, then what you did is ok (provided it was actually > something you could do with any other tangible copyrighted work). If I was sold the work, sure. But most software isn't sold, it's leased or licensed. If what I did was ok, then you could trivially circumvent most (if not all) copyleft licenses, simply by purchasing a copy (downloading it from the original offerer), modifying the copy, compiling the copy, and selling the copy [commensurate with the destruction of your copy.] Now, granted, this is a slow way to go about it, but you could pretty easily setup a few systems that did this automatically. I'd argue that in the terms of a lease, you couldn't do the above. Whether software is sold are leased is somewhat of an open question... and some days I wish it were sold, and other days I'm glad that it's leased. [Hrm. My bias is creeping in there a bit...] Anyway, I'm getting widely off topic here and into realms which I haven't taken enough law school to talk authoritatively on. Please feel free at any time to cite sources that will force me to reconsider my notions. Don Armstrong -- Personally, I think my choice in the mostest-superlative-computer wars has to be the HP-48 series of calculators. They'll run almost anything. And if they can't, while I'll just plug a Linux box into the serial port and load up the HP-48 VT-100 emulator. -- Jeff Dege, jdege@winternet.com http://www.donarmstrong.com http://www.anylevel.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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