Alexander Terekhov wrote: > > Merijn de Weerd wrote: > > [... CONTAINS ***OR*** is DERIVED ...] > > Hey Merijn, drop an email to Professor Determann. > > http://www.usfca.edu/law/determann/softwarecombinations060403.pdf
and tell him that regarding ------ The first sentence of Section 2 of the GPL permits modifications to the GPLed program in reference to the defined term work based on the Program. The following sentences of Section 2 contain a number of license conditions and explanations and use a number of other terms to describe the result of modifications besides work based on the Program, including modified files,253 modified program,254 and modified work.255 The critical Subsection (b) refers to any work . . . that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof. Taken out of context, each of these terms seems to go well beyond the statutory definition of derivative works in the Copyright Act, because the statutory definition is not satisfied by every modification or any work that contains any part of another work, or that is derived from any part of another work. As discussed, under the Copyright Act, a combination of code with a GPLed program constitutes a derivative work of the GPLed program only if the combination (i) is sufficiently permanent, (ii) contains significant and creative portions of the GPLed program, (iii) is creative in its own right, and (iv) involves significant and creative internal changes to the GPLed program.256 In context, however, it appears that the drafters of the GPL randomly chose substitutes to the somewhat awkward term work based on the Program and used the substitute terms synonymously to improve the sentence flow and readability. This impression is confirmed throughout the document, which also uses other substitutes, including the derivative or collective works based on the Program257 and derivative works.258 Some of the explanations throughout the GPL as well as the Free Software Foundations FAQ259 and Lesser General Public License260 imply that the drafters of the GPL intended to cover software combinations that would not qualify as derivative works under the Copyright Act... ----- he might want to add a footnote to > > he must be missing the true meaning of "contains" (vs "mere > aggregate"). Same as the GPL author himself, by the way. > > http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/05/01/1052216&mode=nocomment > > "RMS: We have no say in what is considered a derivative work. That > is a matter of copyright law, decided by courts. When copyright > law holds that a certain thing is not a derivative of our work, > then our license for that work does not apply to it. Whatever our > licenses say, they are operative only for works that are > derivative of our code. > > A license can say that we will treat a certain kind of work as if > it were not derivative, even if the courts think it is. The Lesser > GPL does this in certain cases, in effect declining to use some > of the power that the courts would give us. But we cannot tell the > courts to treat a certain kind of work as if it were derivative, > if the courts think it is not." He might even acknowledge you! Must be good for a copyright law student. No? regards, alexander. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
