Alexandre Oliva wrote:
learn about the actual legal caselaw in the case things like books,
Since you appear to have done your homework, could you please help me
find any case in which a book was published containing an article
whose authors wrote something like 'I will only permit the publication
of this article if all the articles in the book, and the whole of the
book, are under a copyleft license', the book was published with of
non-copyleft material, and the author of the article sued for
copyright infringement?
Even if such a copyright existed, it would not resemble the GPL which
explicitly permits works with other terms to be aggregated (and probably
would trigger some anti-competitive laws if it tried to restrict that).
You'll note that printed combinations of different works do exist and
the terms under which each is included do not affect the others.
The GPL, for example, is a mere grant of permissions. It does not
require or prohibit anything, it just grants bounded permissions.
Whatever is forbidden even in the presence of the GPL is forbidden
because the law forbids such actions without a license that permits
them, not because the GPL prohibits them.
And thus it has no relationship to other things that might be carried in
the same container, regardless of the form of that container. Firmware
that happens to live in a vmlinuz container for a while is still no more
a part of the kernel than it would be if you had a bag of ROMs that you
had to insert yourself to get the same code loaded in your hardware.
The difference is just the convenience of the update mechanism. Perhaps
someone could write a non-GPL'd alternative loader that would install
the firmware and hardware initializers, then load the kernel just to
prove this point if they wanted to waste time like writing the fgmp
library once did to enable distribution of some less restricted code.
Nothing of the sort. I'm suggesting conventional interpretations of copyright
law might apply. The ones the lawyers seem to consider conventional
IIRC it says that modifying, distributing (including publishing) a
work requires permission from the copyright holder, and, in the
absence of such a permission, such acts are forbidden by law. Do you
even have a case here?
A case of what? Content is content, and firmware is just as much
separate and independent content whether it is installed on the fly or
already in ROM.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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