video cards

[Adrian Griffis]

On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 2:36 PM, Luke -Jr <luke at dashjr.org> wrote:
> On Thursday 03 April 2008, Adrian Griffis wrote:
>  > fair use exceptions?
>
>  That's probably the only argument that I can see potentially being a defense.
>  Obviously, the GPL cannot prohibit something permitted by copyright law
>  itself.
>
>  Seeing as the "driver" is merely the same as a patch to Linux, however, this
>  would be a legal loophole that could easily be abused.
>

I think the driver, in this case, is a loadable module, which is not
at all the same
as a patch.

But, even if I concede, for the sake of argument, that it is like a patch and
that it causes a derivative work when applied, that would simply mean that
nVidia couldn't distribute the result of applying the patch.  That doesn't mean
they couldn't continue to distribute the patch, as long as the patch,
itself, is not
a derivative work.

Adrian