On Mon, Oct 16, 2006 at 10:07:45PM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote: > Note also that even if copyright law works that way in jurisdictions > you are familiar with, there's no guarantee it works that way in every > jurisdiction. Better safe than sorry. IMO, at least.
Copyright law is largely harmonised by the Berne convention and later various other WIPO conventions, which is usually the context in which we discuss these things. Convention vests all copy-rights for a derivative work with the owner of the original copyrights (from which the work was derived) unless the owner explictly disclaims them. Even, if this were not the case, the very first paragraph of the RSA license tells us all we need to know; "All rights reserved." which would likely trump any copy + derivability = copyable derivative theory in any court. It is possible to have a license which allows from the creation of non-distributable derivatives - while still allowing you to distribute copies of the original - in some countries the so-called artistic rights can play a role here too. (An artist might let you sell prints of their painting, but you're not allowed distribute modified versions - for reasons of artistic integrity, but you may be allowed to create modified versions for promotional purposes). But then all sorts of jurisdictions have other various "rights". In Europe, it's common for there to be only a very limited right to reverse engineer or study for the purpose of interoperability. If we were to go down the road of insisting everything iterate every possble limited right accross all jurisdictions, it could get very messy very quickly. So it probably would be ever so slightly pedantically more correct to have an explicit term allowing the distribution of derivatives, but from here it's hard to see why we should care, RSA sure don't. This code has been in there over a decade, is published in RFC1320 and it was clearly intended to be liberally licensed, what on earth possible damages could there be for this theoritical infringement? In other words, when you intersect this kind of anal technical and theoritical problem with the real world, it becomes non-existant. What's the actual threat? I hate these damn things, alerting us to these stupid nits only causes any theoritical infringement to become willful and over time worsens our code-base. Anyway, our time would probably be better spent just asking RSA for a slightly modified license. -- Colm MacCárthaigh Public Key: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
