Adrian Colomitchi <acolomit...@gmail.com> writes: > On Tue, 2013-07-23 at 23:09 +1000, Ben Finney wrote: > > I've shown that “because the copyright holder decrees that this work > > won't be used as anything but a document” is not a justification for > > those restrictions. > The way I see the things: the protection of the copyright are supporting > the restrictions imposed by the author *only when* the work is used as a > document(ation), and not *because* the author decrees it has to be used > as a documentation.
Then the FDL is a terrible tool for that, because it applies to the work no matter how the recipient wants to interpret the work. This is support for avoiding such restrictive licenses (such as FDL), and sticking to licenses (such as GPL) that maintain all the software freedoms for the work regardless how the work is interpreted by the recipient. > But any other works derived from the said documentation that are used > *for other purposes* won't be restricted by copyright law, no matter > the license under which the original documentation is published. That seems flatly false. Copyright applies (or does not apply) to a work regardless of the purpose the recipient has for it. If you receive a work under the FDL, it applies whether you want to use it as documentation or music or a program or whatever. So if the FDL is too restrictive for some valid interpretations of *any* work, then restricting any work that way is unjust because it's unjust for the copyright holder to rule out otherwise valid interpretations of the work. > The copyright law will not protect the original documentation again a > whole heap of actions. One can freely: All these examples don't seem relevant to the point I was making, so I don't know why you raise them in response. > Now, you may say the above examples are far fetched and quite distant > from scenarios in which the freedom of the reader is *unfairly* > constrained, and you are likely to be right (except maybe points a. and > b.). In each of your examples, either the action is restricted by copyright law and those restrictions should be considered for software freedom; or they don't and the action is neutral for this consideration. The copyright holders in a work have, under the law, unilateral and superior power to any recipient. What matters for software freedom is whether that power is used to unjustly restrict, through choice of license terms, the freedom of any recipient of the work. If the choice of license terms restricts freedoms based on how the work is to be interpreted, I'm arguing that is an unjust use of the power of the copyright holder. -- \ “Software patents provide one more means of controlling access | `\ to information. They are the tool of choice for the internet | _o__) highwayman.” —Anthony Taylor | Ben Finney _______________________________________________ Free-software-melb mailing list Free-software-melb@lists.softwarefreedom.com.au http://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/free-software-melb Free Software Melbourne home page: http://www.freesoftware.asn.au/melb/
