video cards

[Leo Mauler]

--- Luke -Jr <luke at dashjr.org> wrote:

> On Tuesday 08 April 2008, you wrote:
> > *sigh*
> >
> > http://www.rosenlaw.com/lj19.htm
> >
> > Lawyers! Giving legal advice without money!  
> > Looks like they specialize in this stuff!
> > Sweet!
> 
> Interesting how they cite, but ignore this part:
>   A work consisting of editorial revisions,
>   annotations, elaborations, or other
>   modifications which, as a whole, represent an
>   original work of authorship, is a ''derivative 
>   work''.
> 
> How is a "plug-in" or "driver" any different from 
> an elaboration?

Look up "fair use" provisions in Copyright Law
sometime.  The basic premise of "fair use" is that a
work can use a small portion of another work without
requiring permission from the copyright holder.

The dinky bit of Linux header file code used to create
the nVidia driver wrapper is so small that it most
likely fits within the provisions of "fair use" and
thus device drivers aren't elaborations.

But in any case, Greg KH is not a lawyer.  These folks
are lawyers.  And they state that it is possible to
create a LEGAL closed-source kernel module:

"Derivative works are not going to encompass plug-ins
and device drivers that are designed to be linked from
other off-the-shelf, unmodified, programs.  If Linux
is designed to accept separately-designed plug-in
programs, you don’t create a derivative work by merely
running such a program under Linux, even if you have
to look at the Linux source code to learn how to do
so."

Greg KH says that lawyers have told Greg that
closed-source kernel modules are all illegal, but Greg
can't verify his statement".  These actual lawyers
state that Greg's claims about closed-source kernel
modules are WRONG.  Personally, I'll take the opinion
of the lawyer over the non-lawyer in matters of law.

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