Re: Fwd: Copyright infringement in linux/drivers/usb/serial/keyspan*fw.h

["Adam J. Richter" <adam@yggdrasil.com>]

James Sutherland wrote:
>On Fri, 25 May 2001, Adam J. Richter wrote:
>> Larry McVoy wrote:
>> >On Fri, May 25, 2001 at 07:34:57PM -0700, Adam J. Richter wrote:

>> >It's also about the concept of boundaries - if you think that that
>> >concept is not a legal one then why aren't all programs which are run
>> >on top of a GPLed kernel then GPLed?
>>
>> 	Apparently Linus felt that that was a sufficiently
>> plausible gray area that he addressed it explicitly in
>> /usr/src/linux/COPYING:
>>
>> |   NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel
>> | services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use
>> | of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work".
>> | Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software
>> | Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux
>> | kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.

>Note the "derived work"; there is no way on this earth (or any other) that
>you could regard the device's firmware as being a "derived work" of the
>driver! AFAICS, the firmware is just a file served up to the device as
>needed - no more a derivative work from the kernel than my homepage is a
>derivative work of Apache.

	Nobody is arguing that it is illegal to copy the keyspan
firmware by itself.  What I think is clearly illegal is copying the
whole keyspan .o file, not because it infringes the firmware copyrights,
but because it infringes the GPL'ed material's copyrights.

Adam J. Richter     __     ______________   4880 Stevens Creek Blvd, Suite 104
adam@yggdrasil.com     \ /                  San Jose, California 95129-1034
+1 408 261-6630         | g g d r a s i l   United States of America
fax +1 408 261-6631      "Free Software For The Rest Of Us."