Re: Eclipse 3.0 Running ILLEGALY on Kaffe
On Thu, 13 Jan 2005 18:21:52 -0500, Brian Thomas Sniffen
<bts@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> "Michael K. Edwards" <m.k.edwards@gmail.com> writes:
[snip]
> > As is the creation of a critical essay on libc. But that's not a
> > derivative work either.
>
> But an annotated edition of libc is. A program seems far more similar
> to an annotated edition than to a critical essay -- since it includes
> a copy of the library, after all, and pointers into it.
A creatively human-annotated edition of the libc source code is
certainly a derivative work if the source code has any expressive
content at all (which I, NAL, think a court would certainly rule that
it does). A creatively annotated edition of its header files may or
may not be, to the extent that it can be defended as having used those
header files entirely according to their functional aspect. A program
that uses a libc binary through its published functional interface
isn't, no matter what mechanical details of compiling against header
files, linking statically or dynamically, etc. may be involved. At
most it creates an uncopyrightable combination of the two.
Copyright law protects expression, not function. It isn't even really
the right tool to protect a software publisher's ownership right in
binaries, which is one reason why most commercial software tries to
force you to accept a license in order to use it. But even to the
extent that binaries are copyrightable, and that copying and using a
binary of libc requires a license under copyright, that's about libc
itself and not a derivative work of libc.
Cheers,
- Michael
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