On 2/3/2010 10:19 AM, Florian Weimer wrote:
the prevailing feeling right now is that dynamic linking already creates a derivative work.
"Feelings" don't count. Reading copyright law does. For a work to be a derivative work (in US law), there must be a significant auctorial transformation of an existing work. Then that author gains copyright in the transformed work (while the original author continues to have copyright in the transformed work as well). Linking, either dynamically or statically, does not constitute a significant auctorial transformation of an existing work, and therefore the person performing the link step does not gain copyright to a derivative work, since no such work is created. A statically linked program is a combined work, physically containing multiple components as an anthology contains a multitude of stories, and to copy and distribute such a work requires permission from the copyright holders of the components. A dynamically linked program does not contain any of the components which it will use at runtime, but rather contains references which will be used to determine how to interact with those components. This is more akin to a bibliography. Copying and distributing the program cannot infringe on the copyrights of the components because those components are not present when the program is being copied and distributed. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
