On Fri, Jan 28, 2005 at 09:49:08PM +0100, Frank K?ster wrote: > 1. The first is whether there are any established criteria by which the > creation of a derived work can be distinguished from mere aggregation. Literally 'no', but more practically 'kinda'. More precisely, there is a *vast* amount of precedent and case law on the subject of what does and does not constitute derivation in literature. It doesn't qualify as 'established criteria' because this is highly subjective. Courts try to be consistent but ultimately there are limits. Since software is usually classified as literature by law, we (and the courts) usually refer to this stuff when talking about derivation in software - there's far less case law about software directly, but the same ideas are applied. So it's kinda similar-in-reverse - because software is like literature, not the other way around. Music rather than literature, but here's a couple of crazy cases where something strangely was considered infringement via derivation: http://www.benedict.com/audio/harrison/harrison.aspx And where something equally strangely was not: http://www.benedict.com/audio/crew/crew.aspx You probably won't have much luck reconciling these two decisions on anything but a purely subjective basis. > But what if there are extensive references to specific parts of the > appendix in the text? What if it is a chapter in that book? You *really* want to feed that sort of thing to a lawyer of some kind. It's borderline so it's going to be driven by applicable case law, which means proper research. We can't really deal with that sort of thing. > 2. I fail to find the right technical or juridical terms here, but I > guess in most jurisdictions it is allowed to cite other texts, or to > publish a book that discusses some text in detail (like > interpretation of a poem, or detailed rebuttal of a scientific > paper). In such a case, the book would not exist without prior > existence of the original text. Would such a thing be regarded a > derived work, and would therefore a text published under GPL impose > restrictions that would not hold for a text published without a > license, simply in printed form? Citation (as used in research papers) is not derivation, nor is quotation (as used in literary criticism) for the purpose of commentary, because the research and literary lobbies have a moderate amount of weight. Anything more *might* be. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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