8a3a8434dd
The last commit brought in text that categorically claims: "automatic
termination cannot be cured by obtaining additional copies from an
alternate supplier". While this position is by far the overwhelming
majority position among copyleft advocates, theorists, and legal
experts, the small minority dissenting opinion is simply too strongly
sourced to ignore.
Specifically, Till Jaeger's position was central to Harald Welte's
gpl-violations.org community-oriented GPL enforcement efforts.
Therefore, this tutorial must include his position when covering the
issue of automatic license reinstatement in this tutorial.
I have told Till that I can't believe his position is possibly correct.
(I understand that many other copyleft theorists and legal experts have
done so as well.) However, Till remains steadfast that this position is
correct, at least under German copyright law. Speaking for myself, I
have never met a legal expert as well-versed in both copyleft and German
copyright law as Till Jaeger is, and therefore I cannot in good
conscience allow this tutorial to remain silent regarding Till's
position, lest the tutorial propagate an inappropriate bias for the
majority belief.
That said, I still feel that a footnote is the right place for the
argument. It *is* a tiny minority position [0] among an overwhelming
consensus to the contrary, and therefore adding the point to the main
text would only serve to distract the tutorial reader.
[0] In particular, I am convinced Jaeger's argument, if true, is a
peculiarity of German law exclusively. For example, French lawyers
I've spoken with believe that the standard USA legal position on
this issue is also accurate under French copyright law. I therefore
conclude the minority position (if accurate) is unrelated to
differences between civil law and common law copyright regimes, and
is instead a unique peculiarity to German copyright law.
|
||
|---|---|---|
| Case-Study-Ethics | ||
| css | ||
| enforcement-case-studies_log-output | ||
| GPL-Business | ||
| GPL-LGPL | ||
| js | ||
| presentations/1hr-GPL | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| CC-By-SA-4.0.txt | ||
| compliance-guide.tex | ||
| comprehensive-gpl-guide.tex | ||
| enforcement-case-studies.tex | ||
| gpl-lgpl.tex | ||
| license-texts.tex | ||
| Makefile | ||
| no-numbers-on-table-of-contents.tex | ||
| README.md | ||
| tex4ht.usr | ||
| TODO.md | ||
| webhacks.cfg | ||
Copyleft and GPL Tutorial Materials
This repository contains various tutorial materials regarding the suite of GNU General Public Licenses and copyleft (as applied to software).
The primary item of interest is an omnibus book on copyleft that is built from the comprehensive-GPL-guide.tex file.
You can build this project with the following command:
$ make
HTML output will be in the public_html directory and a PDF file will be in comprehensive-gpl-guide.pdf.
You may need to first install texlive, tex4ht and a few other things. On Debian-based systems, this command may work as root:
# aptitude install texlive-full make tex4ht
You can also download a prebuilt PDF file.
Note the canonical repository for this project is on gitorious. Copies of this repository on other sites is for informational and backup purposes only.
Contributing
Patches to this project are welcome. Please submit a merge request on Gitorious. If you cannot use that, you can email patches directly to Bradley. You can find his email address in the commit logs.