Tollef Fog Heen <[email protected]> writes: > No.
> #! /bin/sh > echo hello world > is not a work. It is not copyrightable. It does not bring anything new > and original into the world. Norwegian copyright law talks about «work > threshold» as in a bar you need to clear for something to be > copyrightable. > I believe this is what Russ is talking about. (Russ, please correct me > if I'm wrong here.) Correct, that's what I'm getting at, but I ran out of words to try to find a good way to explain it. Maybe an analogy works better. Suppose that I have a hugely complex Perl program. I modify the first line of that Perl program from #!/usr/bin/perl to #!/usr/local/bin/perl. That modification itself is not copyrightable. It doesn't contain any creative or original work in the sense of copyright law. Is the result a derivative work? My argument, and I think Paul's, is that it's not a *derivative* work. It's still the *original* work, with a trivial modification. The word "derivative" is defined fairly uniformly in the legal bits I was reading as being a transformation, performance, or other substantive modification of an original work that adds original creative content or interpretation. I believe that means that, to be a derivative work, it has to bring new copyrightable material to the table, not just trivial changes. Another analogy: a novel is clearly a creative, original work. If I take that novel and repaginate it mechanically, is that a derivative work of the original novel? Or is it just the same novel, repaginated? Normally this doesn't matter at all, since all normal free software licenses give people all of the same rights on the original work as on derivative works (except that some additional requirements may be placed on derivative works, such as documentation of changes). However, the CC-BY-2.0 license is fairly unique in that you can do things with derivative works that you're not (at least obviously) allowed to do with the original work. Another general principle of law, as I understand it, is that there is a bias, in interpreting contracts, towards having all the words of the contract mean something. In other words, one should generally assume word choice is for a reason. It would have been easy for CC-BY-2.0 to let you relicense the original work or any derivative work, but that's not what the license said. That seems to imply that some distinction was being drawn, and if the original work is trivially also a derivative work, that destroys that distinction. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
