Fedora Freedom and linux-libre

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Jun 18, 2008, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:

> You can build a box to contain some odd-shaped thing, but you can't
> support a general claim that the box is derived from the contents.

I didn't make this claim, ever.  If you misunderstood it as such,
that explains why you go in tangents every time we approach the
relevant point.

What I'm saying is more like that the box and the odd-shaped thing are
offered as a single package.  You don't get to go to a shop and
purchase only the object that's inside the box, or just the box.  They
won't give you a discount just because you don't want them both.  It's
a single package, even if it's possible to separate them and throw
away the part you're not interested in with some effort.

Of course, if you have to rip the box open to take the object out, and
what you wanted was the box, without the rip, then you won't end up
with that, even if the box and the object are distinguishable objects.

> What specifically distinguishes if as a single work' as opposed to a
> container of some unrelated bits?

Mainly the fact that they were put together to work together in a way
that involved a creative process rather than some mechanical process.

>> I didn't mean that, but I agree it's correct.  But this has ZERO to do
>> with whether the movie in the DVD is a single work.  Surely the song
>> whose snippets play during the movie are not mere aggregation, they're
>> an integral part of the creative work.

> I think you are overgeneralizing.  The songs in "South Pacific" were
> creatively part of the work, but "Saturday Night Fever" just played
> songs that were already hits and happened to fit in the scenes.

So what?  Saturday Night Fever remains a separate, independent work,
but that doesn't prevent a copy of it from being an integral part of a
copy of another copyrightable work.  But then again, whether it
amounts to mere aggregation (say, a copy of a radio station
transmission while they played a random selection of songs for some
period of time) or a creative process (say, recording on a K7 tape a
radio show that selected songs about a certain theme to evoke certain
emotions).

Movies are seldom the former case.  But even when they are, the
copyright holders of the movie still require permission from the
copyright holders of the songs to be able to distribute it.

>>> Yes, the representation does not affect the underlying creative works.

>> I think this is enough to show that you're seriously missing
>> information as to how copyright works, and it's become clear that you
>> have no interest in obtaining such knowledge.

> I'm very interested in anything you have to support your theory that
> combining two sections in the same file makes a difference
> copyright-wise compared to two separate files.

How does this have anything to do with the above?

You said the above in response to the ironical proposition that "a
movie is a mere aggregation of separate pictures".

Agreeing with this sets aside the entire creative process involved in
creating the expression of the idea conveyed through not the messages
individually, but by their exposition in a certain order at a certain
pace with a certain accompanying audio (or not).

This process is precisely what makes the whole a copyrightable work.

Thus, you don't understand what copyright is about, even if
"representation does not affect the underlying creative works" is
true.  And, to some extent, it is, but not in a way that supports the
claim I proposed as reductio ad absurdum.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}