On 7/19/05, Matthew Garrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [an assessment with which I agree almost 100%]
The game "GFingerPoken" (which I have played and really quite enjoy) is definitely a "derivative work" of its artwork. It's a complex work that integrally incorporates substantial portions of a previous (or contemporaneous) work, itself capable of standing alone as a work of authorship. That is, in fact, what "derivative work" does mean under copyright law (especially 17 USC), as opposed to all of the other things that the FSF claims it might mean. As I've written previously on d-l, "derivative works" are a particular subset of "works requiring authorization from the copyright holder on the original", defined in 17 USC 101 principally for the sake of the "derivative works" exceptions to the termination clauses in sections 203 and 304. The artwork in GFingerPoken bears precisely the relationship to the game that a song bears to a movie of which it forms part of the soundtrack, and that's the relationship that Congress had in mind as the principal application of those exceptions. Citations to the House Report and the appellate record at http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/06/msg00116.html . I think the usage of "source code" in the DFSG bears a closer resemblance to "the author's preferred form for modification" a la GPL than Matthew seems to. But while that might present a problem for the X.org nv driver, IMHO GFingerPoken is as he says in the clear. There exist perfectly good tools in main for creating alternate versions of the XPM artworks, and I find it quite implausible that recipients engaged in "bug fixing" would be any less able to do a good job using the XPMs than using the povray input. This is not like massaging the output of a non-free yacc variant instead of porting to bison -y. povray is not a parser generator, treating its output as part of the source tarball does not meaningfully impair the maintainability of the program, and it's stupid to exclude a program from main (i. e., from Debian) simply because upstream was unusually forthcoming about how he created artwork that doesn't look like my one-year-old drew it. Cheers, - Michael (IANADD, IANAL, TINLA)
