Quoting John Cowan ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > It's settled that a binary is a derivative work of > its source. It's obvious that a source tarball is a mere > collective work, or "aggregation" as the GPL calls it. What, > then, is the status of a binary compiled from the tarball? > It evidently is a derivative of the collection; is it a > derivative of the source works as well? > > Larry says (in effect) no; Eben says yes. Infinite are the arguments > of mages.
The view you attribute to Prof. Moglen strikes me as very bizarre. How could merely compiling a work change its ownership title? I suspect you might be overinterpreting something he said about modifications to a GPLed codebase that are _not_ sufficently an "original work of authorship" to give the creator title in the first place. I just had a bizarre mental image of someone saying "Nobody can safely write songs about mad dogs and Englishmen any more, because one never knows when the heirs of Noel Coward[1] might bring a lawsuit on a theory of derivative work." Can we talk fundamentals for a moment? How does a programmer _ever_ know that his work isn't a derivative work, but rather an "original work of authorship", thus meriting copyright title? He knows it because he wrote something substantive having reasonably distinct existence, and documented his having done so in order to be able to better assert his rights later. The reason he can rest comfortably, assured of his copyright title about as much as one can be of anything in law, is that neither he nor other coders in similar circumstances have had their copyright titles denied by any court (over fifty-odd years of electronic computing) merely because they or anyone else merely combined their work with someone else's -- interpreted, compiled, or just sitting there. For purposes of that question, the licensing of that other work is completely immaterial: Either what you, the concerned programmer, wrote was an "original work of authorship" (in which case you own copyright), or it wasn't (in which case you have no property interest). Yes, it would be nice if the concept of derivative work were further clarified (in the software context) by our courts. But I can't see why running it through a compiler would affect anyone's ownership. [1] Because of http://www.esl-lounge.com/songs/songmaddogs.shtml[2] , you see. [2] Not that my daydreams actually have footnotes in them. Honest. -- Cheers, "A raccoon tangled with a 23,000 volt line, today. The results Rick Moen blacked out 1400 homes and, of course, one raccoon." [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Steel City News -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3