Bruce Perens wrote at 14:38 (EDT) on Wednesday: > Yes, but most nations that don't have fair use doctrine recognize a de > minimus exception in art. The EU Copyright Directive explicitly allows > member nations to implement this.
BTW, IIUC, fair use in the USA is a defense against claims of copyright infringement, not an affirmative right. The main issue about putting GPL'd software in a movie, at least in the USA, is the fact that public performance of software is more or less "undefined" under USA copyright law: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#117 When designing the Affero GPL, we looked into using a public performance copyright control to make Affero GPL work, but there wasn't any obvious way to do that. Nevertheless, I've long supported the idea that copyleft licenses should say: "Should the public performance of a Work require permission under copyright law, then anyone who receives such a public performance shall be given an opportunity to receive Corresponding Source". (At least Affero GPL should say this, IMO. :) But, barring a public performance copyright control, people viewing a movie that films running copylefted software isn't receiving distribution, so they have no right to Corresponding Source. As someone else mentioned, merely running the program is also affirmatively unrestricted in GPL. I imagine that one could make a legitimate argument that distributing a filmed copy of some source code (or a binary) is conveying and/or distributing a non-source form of the Work, and thus GPLv2§3 and GPLv3§6 kick in, but I think we have a lot more meaningful GPL violations to chase other than these. :) -- -- bkuhn
