Zeo Developer Terms of Use

[Chris Travers]

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 12:08 PM, John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
> Chris Travers scripsit:
>

> Like most vendors of proprietary libraries, Microsoft allows you to use
> its libraries in programs under any license, though perhaps only on Windows,
> so running OO.ofW under Wine might be problematic.  Not that anyone would.
>
I guess where I differ is that I don't see this as something that
Microsoft could probably restrict using only copyright law even if
they wanted to.  At very least they would have to add technological
measures for access control and then hide behind the access control
portion of the DMCA.

The only cases where anything like this has been done have involved
more complex cases, such as mod chips designed to circumvent access
controls on specific software (such as games) which could then be
copied, etc. in violation of the DMCA.  The only cases that I am aware
of which have covered interoperability (Galoob v. Nintendo, Static
Control v. Lexmark, and so forth) where specific vanilla copyright law
was at issue (i.e. not access control under the DMCA), the US courts
have always found functional interoperability of software to be
noninfringing.  Indeed the only case I can think of that went the
other way involved the question of whether software that altered the
audiovisual output of a game infringed on derivative works protections
on the basis that the new output was a derivative work of the old
output, and that's not remotely the same question.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers