Bill Unruh <un...@physics.ubc.ca> wrote:
> > There is absolutely no problem with distributing mkisofs binaries that are
> > linked against CDDLd libs that are a "different work".
>
> Well, no, there is a problem. Whether that problem is due to a misreading of
> the law, differing laws (Under US, the concept of derivative work is a very
> important and strong concept. Publishers have been successfully sued for
> using less than
> .3% of another work in their work. It is a vague and broad concept, and at
> present in a situation like this all we have are legal theories, since courts
> have not ruled. Note that part of the SCO suit against IBM is precisely based
> on this concept of derivative work, and a broad interpretation thereof. Maybe
> that case will clarify the situation, but I doubt it.
The US courts seem to have strange ideas about the Copyright... I know of a case
where a US Lawyer did steal one of the major font collections of the world and
modified only 5% of the mesh-points from be Bezier splines that define the
fonts.
For almost all people, the resulting fonts look identical to the original fonts.
A US judge did see no Copyright violation in this case.
> From your comments, it appears that German copyright law does not contain that
> concept. Unfortunately all Linux distributions are world wide and have to
> worry about the law in many jurisdictions, especially the USA.
There are some basic concepts in the Berne convention that apply to all
countries that singed the Berne contract.
> Anyway, since the people in the Linux distributions clearly are worried about
> the legal situation for whatever reason, and since the dual licensing of
> libscg or the parts of libscg actually used by mkisofs would make them happy,
> and since the benefit to users of having your software available on the
> distributions would be great, I would ask you consider doing something like
> that.
I know that my theory applies to the European Copyright law and Eben Moglen did
confirm that the relevent parts also apply to the US law system. Isn't this
sufficient?
Jörg
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