Mirko Zeibig <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> On Wed, Sep 15, 1999 at 05:01:06PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> If that's how it works in the United States, that's probably also how
>> it works in other countries. If that's not how it works in other
>> countries, that's probably not how it works in the United States.
>> Except for a few weird exceptions, mostly not related to software,
>> copyright law is fairly effectively international under the Berne
>> Convention.
> Well, if I go to my local book-store and buy a book, I understand that I
> am not allowed to sell copies of that book. On the other hand, I may
> scribble tons of comments into the book, rip out some pages I am
> actually interested in, correct errors I find etc. and have not seen any
> disclaimers which would not allow me to do so.
> I guess (not a lawyer), the same is true with software, regarding the
> single copy I have.
This is a very interesting question, but I don't believe it is the same
with software. There's a very odd explanation for that.
Most of us think of "copying software" as distributing it, but the law
doesn't actually define it that way. Copying is making any copy, whether
internal to your computer or not. Running a program requires copying it.
You're given an explicit exemption in the law to make any copies that
"occur normally as part of the process of using the software" or something
roughly equivalent to that.
If you *modify* the software, however, you're creating a derivative work.
In order to create that derivative work, you're actually copying the
software (by loading it into your editor and by writing it out to disk
again). As near as I can tell from reading the actual law, this appears
to be a violation of the copyright at least in the United States.
I think this all sounds completely demented from the perspective that most
of us bring to computer software, but as near as I can tell that's how the
laws are written. The laws do *not* take into account the idea of easily
copied works, having been written for print and film and the like, and
therefore have a lot of implicit assumptions about how frequently
something is copied and how much work it represents, and those assumptions
appear to be applied wholesale to software except for a few back-patched
exceptions to try to make the result not completely illogical.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
