IANAL and TINLA [LWN.net]

IANAL and TINLA

Posted Aug 18, 2004 17:02 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307)
In reply to: I disagree. by dwmw2
Parent article: IBM's summary judgment motion

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.

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