[ILUG] The old CD thread again {RHEL this time}

[Paul Jakma]

For the benefit of Moen (i couldn't resist looking at the 
online archives):

"Of course, as stressed elsewhere in this thread, Red Hat, Inc. can 
speak _only_ to the licensing of properties it _owns_, an elementary 
aspect of copyright law that seems to elude Paul."

I suggest Rick considers that collective works (like an ISO) can have 
their own distinct copyright from works which comprise it. You can 
sort of get a feel for this by, eg, reading RedHat's RHEL licencing 
docs - their lawyers obviously did consider it.

"I've already explained -- as has Red Hat, Inc., for that matter -- 
the company's _conditioning_ of its licence for two RPMs' contents on
observance of the company's trademark policy. "

The text of Rick's which I responded to claimed that RedHat were 
intermingling the contents of those two non-GPL packages which are 
not licenced under the GPL grant for the collective work either, into 
other packages "during compilation" (i presume he meant compilation 
of the ISO, not of the packages themselves - latter doesnt make sense 
given the packages are seperate). My understanding is that this 
simply not the case, either way.

Further, even if it is the case, and RedHat do stuff images into GPL 
packages which are trade-marked, there still isn't /yet/ a problem. 
If there is a problem, it likely would be RedHat's rather than those 
of Free Software world, simply because of trade-mark dilution issues. 
Because trade-marks simply are a completely different thing to 
copyright which just do not affect distribution, nor does the GPL 
condition its grants upon the right to be able to take any marks in a 
work and be able to use those marks outside of the usage of the work 
concerned.

I could remove Rick from my kill-file, and we could have a 
long-winded debate about it, with lots of straw-men diversionary 
tactics, but I won't, instead I'd suggest Rick go and google for 
"trademark gpl issues".

regards,
-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie	paul at jakma.org	Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:
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After all, everyone knows a bargain dog never bites!