Re: [future of drivers?] a proposal for binary drivers.

sean
2006-03-14T08:27:05Z

On Mon, 13 Mar 2006 13:57:40 -0800
"David Schwartz" <davids@webmaster.com> wrote:

> No, it does not. Copyright law only gives copyright owners the right to
> control the *creation* of derivative works. I very carefully worded my
> statement above so that it would talk about precisely the right people claim
> they have and precisely the right they do not have.
>
> In this case, the alleged derivative work is created under first sale, as
> part of normal use. It is impossible to normally use the 'kernel-devel'
> package without creating derivative works, and under first sale, normal use
> (and anything required for normal use) cannot be burdened. Once the
> derivative work is lawfully created, there is nothing in copyright law that
> requires the permission of the author of the original work to distribute the
> derived work to licensees of the original work.
>
> The GPL gets around this by imposing requirements on the creation of
> derivative works, under the assumption that you cannot get the right to
> create a derivative work any other way. But this is false, first sale grants
> the right to normal use, and normal use includes anything necessary for
> normal use. For a library or for the 'kernel-devel' package, normal use
> requires the creation of derivative works.
>

So i buy a book; clearly the reason it's written in english is so that I can
extend and alter it. So I rip out the last chapter and replace it with one
of my own. Now _clearly_ i can distribute this new work around the world
without any fear of being sued by the copyright holders because it's fair use.
NOT!

Now before you try to argue that altering copyrighted source code is fair
use but altering copyrighted books isn't; just stop. Please leave this
matter to the lawyers and off this list.

Sean