Don Armstrong <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Wed, 18 Aug 2004, Måns Rullgård wrote: >> Nobody has ever tried to extend the copyright of a program to >> include output produced when running the program. > > If no one has tried, it's because it's quite trivial to contruct a > case where a program's output is copyrightable and covered by the > copyright of the program. > > Consider a script that calls imagemagick to create an copyrightable > image steming entirely from information contained in the script. Or a > LaTeX "program" for that matter.
OK, I forgot to mention those cases where the program includes parts of itself in the output. However, there is no way an email sent through postfix can be a work derived from the postfix code. The same reasons apply here as to compilers. The copyright of object code produced by a compiler is exactly the same as that of the source file. Compiling the source code is considered use of the compiler, and the output is not a work derived from the compiler. -- Måns Rullgård [EMAIL PROTECTED]
