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Re: The GPL and Patents: ROFL


From: Hyman Rosen
Subject: Re: The GPL and Patents: ROFL
Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2010 16:00:16 -0000
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100802 Thunderbird/3.1.2

On 8/19/2010 6:04 PM, RJack wrote:
On 8/19/2010 5:18 PM, Hyman Rosen wrote:
The GPL is a copyright license, granting additional rights

Are those additional rights that the GPL grants "In Personam" (contract
rights) or "In Rem" (property rights)? I thought Article I, Section 8,
Clause 8 of the United States Constitution gave Congress the power to
grant new copyrights.

"New copyrights" would mean extra restrictions. The GPL grants
extra permissions. No, the preemption clause still has nothing
to do with the GPL.

to a work beyond those permitted by copyright law. When someone
distributes their work under the GPL, they agree to waive

Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen claim that you don't "agree" to
the GPL since it is not a contact, so how can licensees agree to waive
rights?

The GPL is a license, not a contract. You don't "agree" to the
GPL, you "accept" the terms of the GPL when you copy and distribute
GPL-covered code whose rights you do not own. As part of "accepting"
the GPL, you "agree", i.e., promise, not to claim your patent rights
if they are embodied in the GPL-covered software you are copying and
distributing when it is further used, copied, or distributed under
the terms of the GPL.

I don't know what you mean by the GPL "affecting ideas".

affect
af·fect
1. to act on; produce an effect or change in: Cold weather affected the
crops.

By this definition the GPL does not "affect" ideas embodied
in GPL-covered code.


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