Re: Copyright Digression (Was: Re: [tlug] linux in Japanese schools)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Jean-Christophe Helary writes:

 > Ok, the wording is clumsy. I consider the work to be more than  
 > recycled electrons on your machine. I consider it to be owned by an  
 > author and specifying or not how it can be used. That is what a work  
 > is for me. Something that exists only on one machine with the only  
 > purpose of staying on that machine without interacting with anything  
 > else but that machine is not a work.

That's not what Curt said, though.  He didn't mention the purpose or
the number or location of copies.

 > It does not exist for the purpose of our discussion.

It does for the purpose of the discussion I wish to participate in;
that's precisely how I understand Curt's point, too.  It's the same
work, authored by the same person, and governed in the same way by
copyright law (eg, it is owned by the same person).  There might be
one copy (as of my current post before I send it and before XEmacs
decides to autosave :-), or there might be hundreds of thousands.
Only the presence or absence of a license to copy, display, or perform
for those who have the misfortune to not be Curt has changed.  (For
the complexities of existence of a license, consider the case of
qmail[1].)

Now, you can define "work" any way you like, but the description
you've posted pretty clearly has little to do with the definition used
by U.S. copyright law (which as far as I know is fundamentally the
same in all jurisdictions participating in the relevant international
conventions).

Footnotes: 
[1]  Cf. http://www.linuxmafix.com/~rick/faq/#djb, IIRC.