Comment by o11c | Hacker News Reader

Comment by o11c | Hacker News Reader

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The GPL is quite conscious of the fact that several of its terms would be useless in a sensible copyright regime.

That said, although both are "broad" they are quite different concepts. The linked "interoperability" cases involve 3 works/parties A, B, and C, and the EFF's claim is that A should have no rights regarding B+C just because B+A existed first. OTOH, the GPL's relevants to linking is that A has rights regarding A+B.

The US definition of "derivative work" is quite broad, and seems to cover linking just fine.

The Berne Convention, however, doesn't mention "derivative works", only specific traditional examples thereof, so it's possible that countries other than the US may have implemented it in such a way that linking doesn't count as a derived work. TODO look up "compilation" (in the copyright sense) and "collective work", which might actually be more relevant for linking?

Edit: "GPL is MAD in the copyright cold war" is a good phrase to describe things.

> The US definition of "derivative work" is quite broad, and seems to cover linking just fine.

the problem is the GPL view seems doubtful and has not only bad implications for software copyright but copyright of... well literally anything else. I mean, remember what linking actually is (especially dynamic linking), you're basically just making references to certain things.

the analogy that I can best describe is this: if you're writing a paper on something whatever, and you link to a page number of a book, that doesn't make your paper a derivative work of that thing per se.

if I say in the middle of my novel new text on foobars and fozzinators, hey "book A page 32" has instructions for how to confabulate your fozzinator or "book B page 42" has the values needed to valienate your foobaz, referring to those things in general makes no sense to consider this originally authored book a derivative of A, B, or A and B.

or for a more concrete example, saying Microsoft should be the final authority on who can interoperate with their products or saying that the people who publish research are automatically derivative works of other peoples research[1] papers or people who write articles can't even REFER to other articles in such a way.

[1]: research itself may come from derivative ideas of course, but I'm talking about the copyrightable elements here; i.e. not the facts necessarily presented within, but rather how such facts are presented and laid out. copyright does not cover facts (true or false[2]), but your presentation of such facts are.

[2]: https://thowardlaw.com/2023/04/false-facts-denoted-as-actual...

Regardless of whether companies like Microsoft should be the final authority, it is indisputable that they try to be. So MAD only has one answer.

I would dispute that pretty heavily. They're not, and obviously have never, claimed copyright over the DLL you made or whatever, nor the entire concept of linking to Windows APIs (as an example).

Mostly because that's, like the GPL, currently a way to get laughed out of court.

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