You forgot that the end user still need to legally get hold of
the work somehow. For normal commercial stuff this involves
paying for it and the author will get payed just like he did in
the old non-digital world for _each_ copy.
I did not forget that.
Good because this is _very_ important.
But I still do not think a book author would
allow you to publish a patch that would modify the last chapter to
provide a different ending.
Why, if people like the alternative ending and recomend it to other
he might get increase sales because presumeable they want to
read the begining.
Anyway, we a talking about what is legal and what is not, so that
doesn't matter.
The point is that whatever way you use to distribute your
modifications, they are specific to the original work, alter it and
combines with it to provide a single new work. And these are the
criteria I would use to define a 'derived piece of work'.
And since
derived pieces of work reuse the original work it seems only fair that
they can only do so if they respect the license of the original work.
I might sound good from a open source perspective but it nearly
isn't as attrative applied to normal commercial works.
Let's take a couple of common sense examples and assume that the
original work is a book.
- a bottle of black ink is not a derived piece of work. Obviously you
can alter the book quite a bit by dropping its content on it
and the ink
will definitely merge with the book. But just as obviously the ink is
not specific to your book.
(computer science equivalent: a file compression utility)
First of all since we have a physical object we defintively in addition
have the doctrine of first sale so inkstaining your book and reselling
it is specifically allowed by law. By selling it the author lost control
over that copy.
- a critic's book about the original is not a derived piece
of work. It
is clearly specific to the original book but does not modify it and
clearly does not combine with it to form a single piece of work.
(no real equivalent to this one, closest thing would be an
application/script that uses another, like a script that calls 'ls')
This is not all clear IMHO. What a single piece of work is not
well defined. Sure a combined work will not be a book since a book
normally is something that can be read in linear order and combining
with the critisism will not likely form a normal linear book.
However, just because it doesn't combine to something normal
doesn't mean that is doesn't combine.
- as long as you have the right to sell the original book, you should
have the right to sell it bundled with other books. The reason is that
this does not alter the original book and that it does not form a
combined piece of work.
(linux distributions)
Again, you seem to miss that just because thing does not combine in
normal ways it doesn't mean that they don't combine.
- but leaflet that replaces the last chapter of the book to provide a
different ending is a derived piece of work. The reason is that it is
specific to the original book, alters the story (the original work of
which the physical book is nothing but a printed
representation) told by
the book, and combines with it to form a new work (a new story with a
different ending). Thus you can only distribute it with permission of
the original author, even if you do not distribute the original book
with your leaflet.
(that's your patch example)
Here it combines in a linear readable way.
In short:
Everything combines with everything else is some way,
so unless you define some exact criteria on where the
legal border talking about what can combine is rather pointless.
The only trend, in your examples, I can see is that you wish to
give work that combine in linear readble way more protection,
for some, not mentioned, reason. Can you please explain why?
No particular problem,
except that some companies might be greedy and want more,
but hey, do you really wish to give them more?
I did not express any wishes and in any case they are irrelevant: I
do not have the power to give companies more or less. Now, when I'm
world-dictator for life... :-)
:-)
Open source is more problematic since the end user legally can
get hold of the work for free and thus any distribution
restrictions is meaningless since the end user doesn't distribute.
From my point of view open-source is not any different from any
commercial work. Obviously there are legal means to obtain
the original
work in both cases (whether you have to pay for it is irrelevant).
Otherwise the point is moot.
But saying that open-source is different would mean that
because you
are not making a direct profit from this work, you are not entitled to
any protection under copyright law. You can't mean that, can you?
But you _have_ protection from copyright, everybody that _distribute_ your
work must fullfill the license otherwise you can sue them.
Francois Gouget
Patrik Stridvall