Re: Web application licenses
Brian Thomas Sniffen writes:
> It's not peculiar and dangerous; it's relatively common. Many HTTP
> proxies, for example, do this. What I'm trying to point out is that
> transformations happen along the way. Not all of them are strictly
> mechanical. This was meant to demonstrate the poor public policy of
> sweeping networked computer programs into the "public performance"
> category.
Almost by definition, computers perform mechanical transformations.
If you have software that can -- and does -- make creative changes to
data it processes, any number of people would be interested in it.
Otherwise, only people can make changes that alter copyrights. (I
ignore trivial changes, like discarding the entire data set, which
would eliminate any copyrighted content in the output.)
> In any case, let's look more closely at the router. It is, you
> assert, a public performance of the router code. So Cisco gets to
> charge him for this, and separately license this use of IOS? And
> maybe charge more for use with non-Cisco products? Hm.
Under my model, if they wanted to, they could try that. If they did,
they would probably find themselves losing market share to competitors
or facing anti-trust lawsuits.
> And Microsoft, they get to license performance of Word by providing
> its output over a network... oh, that isn't performance? Then why is
> it performance to provide Apache's output over a network?
Who runs the word processor to produce that output? If it is a member
of the public (relative to the person who owns the copy), I would
consider that public performance. If you own a copy of Word and run
it, that is very different from allowing me to run it, regardless of
what you do with the output from your use.
Your argument is a form of the long-discredited FUD about the Linux
kernel's GPL license contaminating applications that run on it.
Michael
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