[aur-general] Notification of GPL violation

[Daniel Berjón Díez]

Hi ente,

On Fri, 21 May 2021 at 19:11, ente via aur-general <
aur-general at lists.archlinux.org> wrote:

> In - broadly speaking - any other situation, you are copying. Copying
> is protected by the copyright. GPL grants you rights under certain
> conditions. If you don't fully comply with the restriction, you loose
> the rights.
>

As far as I know, GPL governs how you can modify and distribute the
modifications, it does not place any restrictions on what you may want to
do to the software for your own use. The AUR does not distribute any
modified version of the software, it merely provides a recipe for users to
freely use or not.


>
> There may be a fair use policy applying in certain situations. I am not
> aware, GPL grants any. As such: a patch file only containing 3 lines of
> the original is already copying. Writing those 3 lines "coincidently"
> is bullshit. Your purpose was never to be creative, your purpose was to
> write exactly those three lines.


Yes, but the volume of what you copy compared to the whole of the original
creation does matter in copyright law. Even in Oracle v. Google (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc.#Decision )
that consideration was one of the factors that led SCOTUS to rule that
copying the whole Java API was fair use, even if Google did it with a
prospect of profit. Those three lines by themselves serve absolutely no
meaningful purpose and can hardly be considered a copyright violation.

Daniel