Testing the GPL (from Wall Street Journal)

Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
>>Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.
>>Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
>
> Was this really reproduced (copied to this list) with permission of the
> copyright owner?

Understanding copyright and license agreements is not something mere mortals are
capable of doing, in fact, the explicit and implicit rights granted by such
agreements are not even clearly understood by the authors, licensors and
licensees of such agreements. To truly resolve these issues requires a lengthy
litigation process, which I am not interested in pursuing prior to my use of the
material. I will, however, claim that I thought sending it to this list was my
right under the "fair use" exception in section 1.d of the terms and conditions
(which I reproduce here, ... without permission yet with the same justification):

"d) You may create printouts of materials retrieved through the Products via
on-line printing, off-line printing, facsimile, or electronic mail. All
reproduction and distribution of such printouts, and all downloading and
electronic storage of materials retrieved through the Products shall be for your
own internal or personal use. Downloading of all or parts of the Products in a
systematic or regular manner so as to create a collection of materials
comprising all or part of the Products is strictly prohibited whether or not
such collection is in electronic or print form. Notwithstanding the above
restrictions, this paragraph shall not restrict your use of the materials under
the doctrines of “fair use” or “fair dealing” as defined under the laws of the
United States or England, respectively."

I will further argue that limited distribution of the Journal's fine articles
will help promote their publication and, assuming I do not delibrately
redistribute their material in any large quantity, I am doing them a service
rather than harm. I hope they would agree with me.

> By the way, I am working with SCO's PR agency to be able to review the
> source code evidence (for some more articles I'll be writing). Hopefully,
> this will happen soon.

Cool, good luck.

Austin