On Fri, Feb 04, 2000 at 03:52:31PM +0100, Marc van Leeuwen wrote: > If your point is that a distribution that in itself is not infringing on > anybody's copyright, could be considered vicariously liable of such > infringement because, after tweaking the makefile a bit, and then using it to > create an executable that is essentially different from anything present in > the original distribution, recipients could infringe copyright by distributing > that executable, then I must say this interpretation of vicarious liability > seems unacceptable to me.
Of course, that particular example is only relevant in the context of the GPL, it's not relevant for copyrights in general. > By the same token distributing source code of a very plain GPL-ed C > program would be vicariously liable of copyright infringement, because > (even without changing the makefile) users could compile and link it > on a platform with a proprietary libc, to create an executable, whose > distribution would not only violate the GPL of the C source, but the > copyright of the author of the libc as well. No, because that would be a different program which contains different elements. > (The point I think should be clear: creating and running the > executable is fine, distributing it is not.) The fact that the GPL > grants you permission to modify and redistribute under certain > conditions does not mean you are allowed to do so if that is illegal > for other reasons. Certainly. However, this particular change does *not* alter the source code, or the introduce any new components which would not already be present. It just alters their form. The fact is: when kghostscript is running, it contains QPL and GPLed code. Pretending that that's not what's happening is a fraud. The -static example is merely an illustration. -- Raul
