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Re: GPL traitor !


From: Hyman Rosen
Subject: Re: GPL traitor !
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 10:49:38 -0400
User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.21 (Windows/20090302)

Alexander Terekhov wrote:
Hyman, to begin with, you misunderstand what is a collective work as far
as copyright is concerned. Imagine a compilation (the term compilation
includes collective works, see 17 USC 101) consisting from works A1,
A2... An. The copyright in the compilation covers only the *selection*
of its components and doesn't cover any expression from the components.

No, I understand it just fine, thank you. But the copyright owned on
the collective work by its compiler is irrelevant. The relevant fact
is that to make copies of a collective work requires permission from
the copyright holders of the components, and permission to be copied
as part of a collective work is separate from any other permission
that may have been granted by those copyright holders - allowing a
publisher to publish a story in isolation does not automatically
grant the publisher rights to publish it in an anthology.

    <http://www.copyright.gov/title17/circ92.pdf>
    § 201 · Ownership of copyright
    ...
    (c) Contributions to Collective Works.—
    ... In the absence of an express transfer of the copyright or of
    any rights under it, the owner of copyright in the collective work
    is presumed to have acquired only the privilege of reproducing and
    distributing the contribution as part of that particular collective
    work, any revision of that collective work, and any later collective
    work in the same series.

Thus, copyright holders of GPLed components grant permission for their
works to be copied as part of a collective work only if the work as a
whole is distributed under the GPL. And this applies best when the
collective work is a statically linked executable, since it is then
that the components must be copied. It does not apply at all when the
new work is copied as source code, or as a dynamically linked binary
without its GPLed components accompanying. It may apply when the new
work and its GPLed components are shipped on the same distribution
medium in a way which applies that they are meant to be a collective
work.

In Wallace v. FSF, the plaintiff claimed that the GPL covers collective
works as you suggest...

I disagree that Wallace's claim was about collective works as I suggest.
Please post the portions of Wallace's claim that you believe support your
contention.

and professional lawyers hired to defend the FSF's ass vehemently disagreed:
http://www.terekhov.de/Wallace_v_FSF_37.pdf
"In fact, the GPL itself rejects any automatic aggregation of software
copyrights under the GPL simply because one program licensed under the
GPL is distributed together with another program that is not licensed
under the GPL

And I vehemently disagree that the FSF lawyers were talking about the
collective works as I suggest. They were talking about mere aggregation
in the same sense that I am talking about it, the shipping of separate
programs on a distribution medium, with their common property being
simply that they are programs meant to be run on a particular operating
system, namely Linux.


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