Brian Thomas Sniffen writes: > > Yes, the person operating the router is publicly performing the > > router's code. However, because mechanical transformations are not > > derivative works under copyright law, and because communications > > providers are allowed to forward data on request[1], the router's > > forwarding actions do not infringe any copyright on either the data or > > programs that generate the data. > > I wasn't talking about a purely mechanical transformation -- consider > that I replace one out of every thousand packets with my own poetry. > The license on the poetry then does matter. > > I suspect you may misunderstand the way in which "mechanical > transformations are not derivative works" -- it's not that there's no > copyright on the work after it's been transformed, but rather that > it's exactly the same copyright as before transformation.
I understand that the copyright is the same as for the original form. That is why the licenses don't affect each other. For reasons that apparently are not so obvious as I thought, I did not deal with such a peculiar and legally dangerous operation as some network element replacing data mid-stream. Even if someone did that, I do not see why it would avoid restrictions on public performance of a program. Michael
