[H-GEN] GPL question

[Paul Gearon]

Anthony Towns wrote:

> In Australia, there's an exception for copies that aren't "in material
> form", which may apply to this, but can't be relied upon (and which
> might be ruled out by the above case history); and there're some explicit
> exceptions for running programs.

I'm surprised that there isn't some argument about copies which can't
exist independently of the source.  This is the case when you run a
program (as mentioned in the case David cited), as the copy in memory
can't be separated from the copy on disk.  To be clearer... when running
a program, it is not possible to remove the disk from the system without
causing damage (either physical damage in the extreme case, or data
corruption where a drive is manually removed while the program on it is
still being accessed).

I concede that this argument would still be at odds with the judgement
of Microsoft Corp v Business Boost.  However, I found the definition
that the judge used to be at odds with the finding of Dyason v Autodesk
Inc (1990) (cited by the judge in the MS case).  According to the
criteria of the judgement, I fail to see how Dyason could fail to
consider the transfer of a program into RAM to be a "reproduction or
adaptation".

I don't know where to find cases like this, so I don't know what
definitions the judge used in the Dyason case, nor why the operation of
a program should be considered differently to the simple copying of it
into RAM.

This is probably getting too far away from the H-GEN charter now...  :-)

-- 
Regards,
Paul Gearon

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