David B Harris said: > On Sat, 24 May 2003 19:19:50 -0400 > Richard Stallman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> A political essay is (typically) written by certain persons to >> persuade the public of a certain position. If it is modified, it does >> not do its job. So it makes sense, socially, to say that these cannot >> be modified. > > Just to nitpick here, the original essay may not do its job either. You > may wish to "persuade" people to the same view, but you have a > different audience than the original author targetted.
This brings up an interesting scenario: I'd like to translate a GNU FDL-licensed document into Elbonian. This is clearly creating a derived work under US copyright laws. In order to do this, I must maintain the invariant sections. These invariant sections (written in English) are unreadable to the Elbonians. I could also translate the invariant section to Elbonian, but as "everyone" knows, a lot gets lost in translation. (For example, there is no Elbonian word for Free as in Freedom, so I had to translate Free Software as "no-cost computer instructions") And, of course I mark my translation as invariant, since it's a political statement... --Joe
