[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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