🚀 go-pugleaf

Erich S. Boleyn <erich@ee.pdx.edu> wrote:
>ensure you won't lose it easily.  Microsoft and other vendors are
>pushing the copyright thing even further...  there is lobbying from
>"intellectual property" groups going on right now to move this definition
>to count loading it into the machine at run-time as a "copy" of
>the software under legal terms, and yet more rumbling in the wings.

You are misinformed, since it *already* counts as copying when you
load software, for the perfectly good reason that it *is* copying.
There were basically two ways they could have handled loading software
when they revised the Copyright Act to deal with software.

1. They could have defined copying in such a way as to not include software
that is loaded to run.  This would have been a really dumb thing to do,
since whether or not something is a copy would depend on how it was being
used, rather than on intrinsic properties of the thing.

2. Instead, they took the sensible approach, and said that this particular
form of copying does not violate copyright.

--Tim Smith