On Fri, 15 Jun 2007, Rob Landley wrote: > > Technically what they're holding back is _trademark_ rights, which are a > different area of IP law and not addressed by the GPL. (I know you know > this, but just for the record...)
No, technically Red Hat really *does* have copyrights of their own. Red Hat owns the "compilation copyright" on their distribution. That means, for example, that even if they have _only_ open source programs on their DVD image, you still are not necessarily able (without their permission) to set up a "cheap-cd's" kind of operation, and sell their CD-ROM/DVD images for a lower price. So yes, they do own the Red Hat trademark too, but they fundamentally do own copyrights over and beyond those of the individual programs they distribute! Now, I think it so happens that the RHEL DVD's contains other programs than just open source, and that you couldn't legally copy them *anyway*, but that's a different issue. Also, happily, a lot of vendors do not *want* to exercise their copyright in the compilation, so you can go to cheapbytes.com, and you'll find Fedora CD's, OpenSuSE CD's, Ubuntu CD's, etc, and as far as I know, they're all perfectly legal. Exactly because open-source vendors usually don't want to look nasty by limiting the compilation, when they can't really limit the individual parts anyway. > The five main areas of IP law as I understand them are copyright, patent, > trademark, contract, and trade secret. I'd not put contract there, but fair enough. But what I was really trying to point out is that there are many different "levels" of copyright. So you can own a "copyright in the compilation" - which just means that you own the details of how you set it all together - _without_ actually necessarily owning the copyrights in any of the individual packages (although you obviously have to have a license to _make_ a compilation of them - but the GPLv2 is one such license). Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/