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Re: Dumping RTL???


On Sunday, December 8, 2002, at 10:51  AM, Richard Kenner wrote:

BTW, if there is a legal argument that means such a scenario is impossible,
why not allow people to dump the RTL ?

A legal "argument" will not necessarily prevail in court since the opposing
side would have the opposite "argument". This is an area of copyright law
that has not been ligitated yet so nobody can say for certain which way it
would go.
I should add that especially in these times, it is not a time to be litigating controversial issues. Every decision lately seems to be of one extreme or another.



There is something subtle I must be missing here...

You're missing it, but it's not that subtle and has been said before: if the
copyright holder were to provide such an interface, it could be used to argue
that using that interface was *not* a violation of the copyright.
It couldn't ever be, unless you don't really mean "interface".
Use of one work as the basic materials (ie the ideas or actual physical materials from that work) to create another that does not include that work does not make a derivative (Fer instance, as an an example of physical materials, if I use copyrighted newspapers to make a paper mache dinosaur, i've not created a derivative work of those newspapers. Same thing with the ideas part. Ideas are specifically *not* protected). As long as one can clearly delineate interfaces as the idea, and the implementation as the expression, the interface is not protectible.


In other
words, our legal position is far stronger without such an interface because
the fact that we haven't provided the interface it makes it clear that we, as
the copyright holders,
I don't think you mean "we" (I slip sometimes too in gcc talk), since the FSF owns the copyright. :)
 do not view such activity as permissible.






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