Bob Young writes a letter to Darl
Posted Dec 12, 2003 4:58 UTC (Fri) by
iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to:
Bob Young writes a letter to Darl by danw6144
Parent article:
Bob Young writes a letter to Darl
After the judge reads section 1 of the GPL, the FSF should simply respond
that what DOE was not distribution of the work with permission, because
DOE didn't have permission to distribute the work, except if
"conspicuously and appropriately publish[ing] on each copy an appropriate
copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty". Section 5 is irrelevant
(and it essentially merely informational, since it essentially just
repeats copyright law). Just because the GPL grants you permission to do
one thing doesn't mean that it grants you permission to do whatever you
want.
Falling back to Copyright law, the owner of the copyright has the
exlusive right to distribute copies of the work and to authorize others
to distribute copies of the work. DOE has not been authorized to
distribute copies of the work, having failed to fit the pattern given in
section 1 of the GPL, and is therefore infringing.
For that matter, if the authorization to distribute copies of works is
automatically considered a contract, then by excluding contract law, DOE
has eliminated any possibility of not infringing the copyright, since
that would mean that only a contract would permit distribution.
However, it seems to me that current practice holds that a copyright
owner may authorize limited distribution without needing a signed
contract.
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