Re: Epson 1280/ MIS Perpetual Color Ink

[Pete MacKenzie <petemackenzie@lineone.net>]

Have followed this thread with interest and throw in this analogy as a
possible illustration of the insidious effects of the control of copyright
that companies are applying.

The Eiffel Tower in Paris has long been a favourite subject for photography.
If you wish to photograph it commercially you are now limited to making
images during the day. The lights that illuminate it during the night were
recently replaced with a new and complex system of lighting and the company
that made and installed them jealously guards the rights to photograph the
effect that they create. As a tourist  or amateur you can continue to make
night-time pictures of the tower but as a professional you are unlikely to
be given those rights. Of course there is nothing to stop you taking
commercial pictures of the tower at night - as long as the lights are turned
off.

See any parallels with the software/profile debate?


Pete MacKenzie
petemackenzie@lineone.net





> From: Robert L Krawitz <rlk@alum.mit.edu>
> Reply-To: epson-inkjet@leben.com
> Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2002 19:36:54 -0400
> To: CDTobie@aol.com
> Cc: epson-inkjet@leben.com
> Subject: Re: Epson 1280/ MIS Perpetual Color Ink
> 
> From: CDTobie@aol.com
> Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2002 17:23:49 EDT
> 
> The licensing rights to control distribution of the software and
> derivatives thereof. If you open most any profile, you will find a
> tag bearing a copyright notification.
> 
> I guess I would wonder on what basis they claim copyright on data
> generated by the program.  That would seem equivalent to a compiler
> vendor claiming copyright on the assembly language output of a
> compiler, which generally seems nonsensical (I haven't even heard of
> Microsoft trying to do that).
> 
> I suppose that they might embed other copyrighted material in the
> profile.  For example, parsers generated by Bison (the GNU equivalent
> of yacc, a common UNIX tool for generating parsers) do embed some
> other code verbatim (bison.simple and/or bison.hairy), and *that* part
> of the code is covered by the GPL, although the FSF grants a special
> exception for that file.  However, if you were to elide that code from
> the generated parser, there would be no issue.  Is it possible to
> separate the (presumably) fixed, copyrighted part of the profile from
> the rest of the data, and replace it with something else?
> 
> -- 
> Robert Krawitz <rlk@alum.mit.edu>      http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/
> 
> Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
> Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@uunet.uu.net
> Project lead for Gimp Print/stp --  http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net
> 
> "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
> --Eric Crampton
> -
> Turn off HTML mail features. Keep quoted material short. Use accurate
> subject lines. http://www.leben.com/lists for list instructions.

-
Turn off HTML mail features. Keep quoted material short. Use accurate
subject lines. http://www.leben.com/lists for list instructions.