How To Break The GPL

[Justin Wells]

On Mon, Mar 06, 2000 at 02:26:00PM -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> What breach?  Bob is, from Trent's viewpoint, modifying Trent's
> work for his own use, which the GPL permits, using Alice's
> proprietary additions.

I wonder if the "Digital Millenium Copyright Act", with all its attendent
evil, would actually be of some use here. 

It forbids the creation of a computer program whose sole purpose is to
infringe on copyrights. I'm not clear on the details. Maybe Alice's 
instructions would form such a program (say it was a patch or Make script)
and therefore be illegal.

Or maybe not, I don't know. If there would otherwise have been no 
infringement it may not matter.

Viral opensource licenses should require publication upon the creation
of a derivitive work, rather than upon the distribution. Or is that 
also impossible?

Justin