On Fri, 21 Dec 2001, Patrik Stridvall wrote: [...]
However, just because it doesn't combine to something normal doesn't mean that is doesn't combine.
And how does it combine exactly? Both the book and the
critic are
available independently.
You can still read the book independently from the critic so they are obviously two separate pieces of work, not a single one.
Or how do you define 'combine'?
I do not define combine in any general way. It depend on
what my intent
is and on the circumstances. I do not expect others to
nessarily define
combine in the same way either.
I would say that piece of work 1 combines with piece of work 2 if it alters piece of work 1 and results in an entity that a user would consider to be a single piece of work of the same type.
Now I believe this is a more restrictive and reasonable definition of 'combine' and should match general expectations better than your 'everything combines with everything if I decide so' definition.
What a user would consider a single piece of work depends on the user so it is very vague and unsuitable definition in a court of law.
[...]
So you agree that gratis, open-source and commercial
works are all
entitled to the same copyright protection. The last two
paragraphs of
your email seemed to imply differently to me.
Yes, it is entitled to the _same_ copyright protection.
Good. We agree on something! :-)
However since you give away your work gratis to the end user by your free choice, you have the right to stop doing this(1), if anything I sell to the end user bothers you.
Yes, or as the copyright owner I have another alternative: choose a license that restricts what you can do with my work. I can even choose to use multiple licenses and tell you to which one you must abide by depending on how much money you give me. And no matter how much or how little you pay me, you must abide by this license, this at least we agree on, so that's good. And if I say that you must not redistribute work based on mine then you must comply. And basically saying 'take his work and then apply my modifications' still has the same effect: the user magically gets a copy of your work which is clearly based on mine. So the end result is still that you are redistributing a work based on mine which is precisely was forbidden by the license agreement.
No, the license is not a contract, and even if it was it can't override the original contract that you implicitly made with society to get any copy protection at all.
The license can only be about the rights granted to you by society to your work and while you certainly can deny me, as normal commercial licenses do, that right do redistribute, you can only deny me the right to do derived works to the extent copyright law defines a derived work.
-
Patrik Stridvall