Assistance/advice in choosing a license for POV-Ray 4.0

[Rod Dixon, J.D., LL.M.]

Yes. The case, of course, was about the right of display and that may make 
a difference to a different court, but your conclusion about how  the 
court's finding might apply to linking  seems to point in the right 
direction to me.

Rod

------------
Rod Dixon
www.cyberspaces.org

...... Original Message .......
On Mon, 14 Nov 2005 19:52:04 +1100 Chris Cason <ccosilist at povray.org> wrote:
>Rod Dixon, J.D., LL.M. wrote:
>> For reference: take a look at a couple of cases like  Lewis Galoob Toys
>> v. Nintendo and/or Microstar v. Formgen.
>
>The latter has a particularly interesting statement:
>
> http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/DVD/cases/Micro_Star_v_Formgen.html
>
>  "... we have developed certain criteria a work must satisfy in order to
>   qualify as a derivative work. One of these is that a derivative work
>   must exist in a "concrete or permanent form, ..."
>
>Presuming that a work that exists only whilst it remains in RAM would not
>be considered 'concrete or permanent', it would follow that at least in
>the USA loading a shared library could not create a derivative work. Of
>course there may be case law that makes my above presumption invalid, in
>which case I'd be interesting in knowing of it.
>
>On a tangential subject, and thinking of my prior statement that it may
>not be possible to protect against misuse of code that is dynamically
>loaded without use of a linker (per se), something just occurred to me.
>
>I seem to recall that a number of years ago, there was a case (perhaps in
>Australia, if not elsewhere as well) where a court was called upon to
>decide whether or not the act of loading a program into memory from a
>storage medium could be considered a copyright infringement, given the
>fact that doing so by necessity requires that the program be 'copied'.
>My recollection is that the court found that it was not a violation
>because by its nature it was necessary to load it into RAM to be able to
>use it.
>
>What I am hazy on is whether or not the decision to allow this was based
>on whether or not the user already had the right to use the program. If
>they did then certainly loading it into memory would be logical (though
>if they did have the right to use it then I'm not sure what the case
>would have been about ...)
>
>Does anyone recall what/where this case was ? And/or does anyone have any
>opinion on whether or not the act of loading a module into memory - where
>no license is held for use of that module - would be accepted by e.g. USA
>courts as 'making a copy' ?
>
>-- Chris
>
>
>