Clarification on a few points

Posted Jan 31, 2012 22:47 UTC (Tue) by RiotingPacifist (guest, #68160)
In reply to: Clarification on a few points by dlang
Parent article: Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Comparing any commit to a project, with Busybox's clear state as a derivative work based on earlier versions written by Bruce Perens doesn't really hold up.

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Clarification on a few points

Posted Jan 31, 2012 22:58 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

my problem is that this is interpreting "derived from" to mean something pretty close to "inspired by"

This is like classic car restoration. If you take a Ford Model T and replace every piece of it, is it still a Model T? or is only inspired by one. At some point the car becomes a kit car with some Model T parts bolted on, and then as those are replaced it becomes just a kit car.

Clarification on a few points

Posted Jan 31, 2012 23:32 UTC (Tue) by RiotingPacifist (guest, #68160) [Link] (1 responses)

If you took the "hybrid" out while you were changing parts over then the "hybrid" would certainly be a derivative of the Model T and the Kit-only car a derivative work of the "hybrid".

If you built your kit car while looking at the Model T and never depend on it for either structural integrity or functionality then it would be more complicated. And obviously if you went further still and only took the spec of the Model T and reimplemented it from that then it would be "inspired" and count as clean room reverse engineering.

The real problem is that this isn't a car and the term "derivative work" has real legal meaning and precedent in the world of copyright.

I'm not saying Bruce would have any claim on Toybox purely because Langley has seen Busybox, but I would be careful.

Translations share no lines, but original author has copyright

Posted Feb 1, 2012 11:37 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

If I translate a book from Dutch to English, my work won't contain any lines of the original work, but the author of the Dutch version will still have copyright.

Whether broad copyright is good or bad for us is another debate, but we have to acknowledge that it is today broader than just exact words.

Clarification on a few points

Posted Jan 31, 2012 23:37 UTC (Tue) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]

It's exactly the same argument SCO was making in the IBM case. "Our contribution can never be isolated, and thus can never be removed. It's an indelible essence that suffuses the text, between the lines. It's not based on copyright, on patent, on trademark, on trade secret, or on contract, but exists between all of those."

I used to refer to it as "SCO disease". For a couple years there, I got paid to help prove it wasn't true. This was shortly before you-know-who tried it.