> > GPL violators appear to face several potential penalties: > On 7/28/05, Michael Poole <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Potential penalties are irrelevant to my question. You assume a > priori that such linking is a violation of the GPL. My question was > why that assumption is valid. As I explained above, his citation of > case law does not fit the facts.
Ok, granted -- I didn't really answer your question. You seem to be asking "what is it about copyright law that means that the creative efforts represented in a program are protected as opposed to the mechanical trivia". But, ok, you didn't really ask that question either. What you literally asked was "What statute or case law supports this position?" There isn't much case law covering copyright in the context of computers. And there's not muce statutory law, either. For an interesting exercise, try to determine why it could be legal to view a plain text document (let's assume it's not a plain text document which represents a program) on a computer (given that viewing that document requires the reader make copies of it. That said, copyright law has a very strong element of protecting creative expression and practically no element of protecting technical processes. -- Raul
