David Kastrup writes:
> I think that most countries will grant some right to the purchaser of a
> physical copy of copyrighted material. For example, I doubt there are
> countries where it is prohibited to read a book you have bought (via a
> channel authorized by the copyright holder) when it contains no explicit
> license granting you the right to read it.
I see two serious dis-analogies here:
How many users of msysgit purchase a physical copy of it? (I suspect
this is a relevant difference in the US due to its commerce codes, and
maybe in other common law countries; it probably is not so important
in civil law countries, where exchange of consideration is not a
requirement to form a contract.)
Reading a literary work is typically not a reserved right, either;
while it seems good to treat executing a computer program in the same
way as reading a book, all copyright regimes that I know of give
consideration to the copy that is made to RAM for most computers. (I
will ignore the implications for devices that have execute-in-place
non-volatile memory -- I am not a lawyer, and those devices are
probably too new to be addressed by courts yet.)
Michael Poole
[Also- The git list did not receive my previous mail and probably will
not receive this one either. vger.kernel.org issues a bogus bounce,
shown in part below. I apologize for hijacking the thread this way,
but mail to postmaster-at-vger bounces for the same reason.
Error in "rcvdfrom" envelope address:
75.145.205-121-BusName-sterling.va.richmond.hfc.comcastbusiness.net!^Q
^
^-illegal control character
\-Extraneous program text
.. where my mail host does not use that name for any reason; vger
seems to be doing a DNS PTR lookup, then mangling the response.]
