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Re: When is a GPL program which runs in a web site 'conveyed'?


From: Hyman Rosen
Subject: Re: When is a GPL program which runs in a web site 'conveyed'?
Date: Sun, 06 Jul 2008 00:36:50 -0400
User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 (Windows/20080421)

rjack wrote:
You're confusing *contract terms* with "scope of use" restrictions
on a copyright *grant of permissions* in a copyright contract.

Nope.

All copyright license are contracts. Within the contract are
limitations on the actual "uses" of the work (called the scope
of the license).

Nope.

"In light of their facts, those cases thus stand for the entirely unremarkable principle that “uses” that violate a license agreement
> constitute copyright infringement only when those uses would infringe
> in the absence of any license
agreement at all."; Storage Technology Corporation v.Custom Hardware Engineering & Consulting, Inc., 421 F.3d 1307 (CAFC) (2005)

Yep. Here's the entire decision,
<http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions/04-1462.pdf>,
so that everyone can see what you are so conveniently leaving out.

    "To succeed in a copyright action, “the copying must be beyond
     the scope of a license possessed by the defendant,” Stenograph,
     144 F.3d at 99, and the source of the copyright owner’s
     complaint must be grounded in a right protected by the
     Copyright Act, such as unlawful reproduction or distribution.
     See 17 U.S.C. § 106. In contrast, the rights granted by
     contract can be much broader."

So you see that there is a difference between license and contract,
and furthermore, the GPL acts just as the court says a license should
act, prohibiting unlawful reproduction or distribution as restricted
by copyright law.

And by the way, for anyone who doesn't feel like reading the case, it
was about a company bypassing restrictions on a device and its software
in order to perform maintenance and repair. The chance that any court
would apply this to the plain language of the GPL when someone is
distributing programs in obvious violation is nil.


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