I disagree. [LWN.net]

I disagree.

Posted Aug 18, 2004 15:27 UTC (Wed) by dwmw2 (subscriber, #2063)
In reply to: I disagree. by hummassa
Parent article: IBM's summary judgment motion

One contradiction: " The GPL does not mention linking at all, except in passing in the final paragraph. " The fact is: the GPL mentions linking, in its last paragraph. It's the last paragraph of the "postamble", it's true, but it mentions it in a very authoritative way.

The final paragraph looks like just an advert for the LGPL to me:

This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into
proprietary programs.  If your program is a subroutine library, you may
consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the
library.  If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Library General
Public License instead of this License.

It is restating a restriction. I certainly can't see any support for your claim that it "exempts non-linking works from being considered derivative works".

I disagree with your assertion that the 'mere aggregation on a volume of a storage or distribution medium' clause contradicts the part about collective works. The GPL clearly intends to make a distinction between the act of collecting a handful of software packages onto a CD for distribution, and the act of producing a coherent work which is based in part on the GPL'd work.

Not only is it clear that this is what is intended, it is also clear that the author of the GPL'd code in question has the right to do so -- it's perfectly within the rights of the author to state that the work may only be redistributed as part of a larger work if certain conditions are met.

One last comment on _why_ I think the "mere aggregation" clause encompasses _all_ anthology works: if it doesn't, you fall in the "slippery slope" thing.

That sounds more like a reason why you think the "mere aggregation on a volume of a storage or distribution medium" clause should encompass all anthology works; not a reason why it does. The GPL clearly makes a distinction between what we shall abbreviate to "mere aggregation" and the production of a more coherent collective work. The precise boundary between those two may indeed be a grey area, but it is not for us to declare that this means it doesn't exist.

(Log in to post comments)

IANAL and TINLA

Posted Aug 18, 2004 17:02 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

I am just a (now-working-in-another-field) paralegal, but I am pretty sure my research is valid, at least WRT Brazilian Law; I am very certain that my arguments hold in other jurisdictions, too, because basically all copyright law are some "translation" of the Geneva convention. That said,

" The final paragraph looks like just an advert for the LGPL to me "... but it's part of a section name "how to apply this terms to your program", denouncing the intentions behind the license.

" I certainly can't see any support for your claim that it "exempts non-linking works from being considered derivative works" "... my claim is: *nothing* that is *not* a (non-automatic-,intelectually-novel-) transformation is a derivative work. the GPL specifically uses the "links to" property as a means of attributing some transformation over the works, that I think does not exist. is main(){printf("hello, world\n");} derivative of glibc? I don't think so.

Now, one can argue that when the last para of the GPL attributes derivation to works that link with GPL'd works AND the section 2 attribute derivation to works containing the original work or parts or translations of it except in the case of mere aggregation, it exempts the rest of the universe of works from being derivative. When you try to define what colors are blue, you are implicitly defining that the other colors aren't.

" The GPL clearly intends to make a distinction between the act of collecting a handful of software packages onto a CD for distribution, and the act of producing a coherent work which is based in part on the GPL'd work. "... this I can believe if it comes from Eben Morglen, but in any case, the distinction is not a very practical one. Debian, to me, is a coherent work that functions as a whole, not just the aggregation of separated parts. But who does this distinction? Copyrights law. And copyrights law makes dispositions about the division of copyrights when works are derivative and separation of copyrights when works are anthologies (=collections, =mere-aggregations)

" The GPL clearly makes a distinction between what we shall abbreviate to "mere aggregation" and the production of a more coherent collective work. The precise boundary between those two may indeed be a grey area, but it is not for us to declare that this means it doesn't exist. "... My argument is precisely the opposite. The precise boundary exists, it's defined in the copyright law, and that is what has to be used. Abstraction, filtration, comparison.