Looking Forward to It [LWN.net]

Looking Forward to It

Posted Sep 6, 2026 22:21 UTC (Sun) by parodper (guest, #179096)
In reply to: Looking Forward to It by muase
Parent article: An ongoing 3D-printer AGPL violation

For example, how would it legally differ from a bundled CLI that is executed and communicates via stdin/stdout? I mean, I know the in-memory/process-space argument; but e.g. according to our company lawyer, this is a technical detail that doesn’t really translate into different legal concepts – she would be really surprised if courts would be willing to see a difference here (at least in Germany/EU, because that’s her area of expertise).

This seems to be different in the EU: I don't think the US has an equivalent to recitals 10 and 15 of Directive EC 2009/24, which, according to the EUPL drafters means strong-copyleft licenses can't exist in the EU.

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Looking Forward to It

Posted Sep 7, 2026 8:15 UTC (Mon) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]

> This seems to be different in the EU: I don't think the US has an equivalent to recitals 10 and 15 of Directive EC 2009/24, which, according to the EUPL drafters means strong-copyleft licenses can't exist in the EU.

Recitals aren't operational, they just merely serve to explain the articles. They're probably relying on Article 1(2).

> Article 1(2): [...] Ideas and principles which underlie any element of a computer program, including those which underlie its *interfaces*, are not protected by copyright under this Directive.

If interfaces are not copyrightable, the argument goes, then anything merely using the interface can't be copying any protected expression.

The main issue is that a lot of (online) discussion uses terms like "derivative work" which is not a thing in EU copyright law. The question is: has protected expression from one work has been incorporated into another? That's fundamentally a case-by-case issue. But it seems likely that by using libreadline your program is copying some protected expression from the library. But IANAL.