[H-GEN] GPL question
Trent Waddington
s337240 at student.uq.edu.au
Tue Jan 6 17:38:07 EST 2004
David Starkoff wrote:
All hail the lawyer! :)
> When a program on disk is run in a computer, a copy of the computer
> program (or at least a partial copy) is copied into RAM. Absent a
> licence, this is an infringement of copyright. (There's case law on
> this in Australia: Microsoft Corporation v Business Boost Pty Ltd
> [2000] FCA 1651,
> <http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/federal_ct/2000/1651.html>.)
This is contradictory to what Eben Moglen has said about users being
required to have a license to run software. Apparently all those
recently additions to copyright law that we all know and hate have
contributed something useful, in the form of a clause that says
"incidental copies" such as copying the program into RAM are not
classified as copies for the purpose of copyright law. So if I get
WinXP preinstalled on my harddrive I don't require a license with
Microsoft to run it, only to copy/distribute it. I'd love to send you a
link to where I Eben Moglen wrote this, but it was in the FSF newsletter
last year that I only received on dead trees.
Trent
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