Re: [tlug] Apple owns CUPS

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

Attila Kinali writes:

 > Oops... I didn't know that the US copyright law is defined this
 > way. The Swiss copyright law[1] is very strict what a copyright
 > holder may do after he sold/gave away his art work.

So is the U.S. law.  What is called the "first sale doctrine" (in
patents it goes by the name "exhaustion doctrine") says that once you
sell a copy the user may do (almost) anything he wants with it: burn
it, eat it, sell it, read it.  (In the case of the exhaustion
doctrine, this includes repairing a good embodying a patented
technology, where "repair" in some cases means complete refurbishment
from the ground up so that none of the original physical parts
remain.)  There are restrictions on public display or performance in
some cases, as with Swiss law.

But granting a *license to copy* is not the same as giving away the
copyright, or giving away the physical media containing the original,
for that matter.  Picasso can sell his paintings without selling the
copyright, so you can own the original of Guernica without controlling
the right to print books containing photographs of the painting.

The point in U.S. law is that copyright is intangible property, and it
simply defines to what that property right extends, ie, the "rights"
that are reserved in "All Rights Reserved".  After that, everything is
treated pretty much the same as any other personal property (ie, that
which is not real property aka buildings and land).  So licensing
copying is basically the same as lending your car.  The law doesn't
care that making a copy does not deprive the holder of the original of
its use, unlike lending a car.

So while Swiss law may in fact be different from U.S. law in this
matter, nothing you've said so far demonstrates that.  The examples
you've given all seem to be about a particular embodyment of a
copyrighted work, not the act of copying.