> > To balance this out, there's also a concept of fair use. Most uses > > of the command line interface count as fair use.
On Fri, Nov 05, 1999 at 10:07:28AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > Is this an assumption, or do you have citations? [I should also mention that there's section 117 of title 17 usc. This basically says that copies made during normal operation of the computer are legal.] The citations are Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, and Galoob V. Nintendo. [These are both court cases where "fair use" won.] relevant urls include: http://www.lawsch.uga.edu/~jipl/vol1/samuelsn.html http://www.law.seattleu.edu/chonm/Cases/galoob2.html http://www.hrrc.org/betamax.html You can probably find more by doing your own web searches. I'd suggest buying a law student dinner if you want some help getting access to some of the case transcripts... > I mean, presumably use of statements in the BIOS, or microcode in the CPU > is fair use, too. Are there any references which distinguish between fair > use between this sort of interface, and regular dynamic linked libraries, > or, for that matter, the other cases of command line interface use? > > And even then, this doesn't feel overly relevant; it's very > American-centric. I'd be a little disappointed if we end up with > binaries being derivatives of dynamic libraries in some countries, > and not in others. :-/ Well, one of the most relevant issues is the license under which the software is distributed. Software which is designed for heavy duty re-use (BIOS, linking libraries, etc.) tends to be distributed under much more liberal licenses than software designed to tackle specific applications. -- Raul