Wired Article on the GPL

[Justin Wells]

On Mon, Apr 03, 2000 at 02:57:34PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:

> Running the program is not part of the copyright rights-bundle: when you
> acquire the program sans EULA-style license, you are an owner of that copy, 
> and you can run it because that is analogous to reading a book that you own.

Usually, though, in order to run it you have to copy it into memory, and 
without a specific grant, you don't have the right to make that copy. I
thought there was a court decision in the US which determined that copying
into RAM was "fixation" in copyright law.

It's not clear to me that you are entitled to copy a program into
RAM just because you are the owner and have ordinary copy rights. It 
might be that there is some implicit right to copy a program into
RAM for the purpose of executing it, if you own the program.

Justin