Re: Blocking Gmail ads
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On 05/25/08 14:41, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> 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).
Airbus only have to make the source code available to it's
distributees: the purchasers of planes. It doesn't have to make the
SC available to anyone else.
Now as to whether misappropriating that source code is a crime is
beyond my knowledge. debian-legal would probably know.
- --
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA
ESPN makes baseball players better.
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