Re: Blocking Gmail ads
On 24/05/2008, Douglas A. Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca> wrote:
> > Setting that aside, you bring up an interesting point. If I take GPLed
> > code, I modify it internally, and somehow it leaks outside, is the
> > person who takes it infringing copyright or not? I say they're not,
> > since the code isn't copyrighted to me even if I modified it. On the
> > other hand, they can't force me to distribute the source either, since
> > I didn't convey the code, right? It just got leaked somehow.
> >
> > Curious hypothetical situation.
>
> The person who "leaked" it is the one doing the distribution or
> "conveying".
So the person who leaks the modified GPL code is the one who has to
make sure the source is also available? That's.... weird. :-)
> They are guilty of misappropriating your code and of
> violating the license agreement.
Are they violating the GPL by distributing the code? The only way that
the GPL says you can't distribute anything is with its "liberty or
death" clause. It says that if you cannot distribute it under the
terms of the GPL (so that you would also need access to the source
code), then you can't distribute it at all. I guess that if you want
to leak the code, you have to leak all of it. Since Airbus doesn't
have copyright on the code they modified (the original authors who
GPLed it still have that copyright, under the interpretation of
derived works), they can't claim copyright infringement.
Anyways, it seems to me that at least in spirit, someone who manages
to distribute secretly-modified GPLed code is not doing any wrong.
Like we say in Spanish, "ladrón que roba a ladrón, tiene cien años de
perdón" (a thief who steals from another thief has a hundred years of
forgiveness).
- Jordi G. H.
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