Re: GPL traitor !

[Alan Mackenzie]

In gnu.misc.discuss Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com> wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> > Does copyright law have any notion of "a complete program"?  ;-)

> No. Copyright law has the notion of a collective work, which is
>     <http://www.copyright.gov/title17/circ92.pdf>
>     a work, such as a periodical issue, anthology, or encyclopedia,
>     in which a number of contributions, constituting separate and
>     independent works in themselves, are assembled into a collective
>     whole.

Ah, it's context-snipping time, is it?  Let me put the context back
again for you:

[Hyman Rosen]:
>> "Mere aggregation" is the placing of multiple separate programs onto a
>> single medium for convenience in distribution. It is not the linking
>> together of multiple components into a single binary file to form a
>> complete program.

In the above paragraph, you have used the notion of a "complete program"
to distinguish it from a "mere aggregation".  I agree with you here.
Yet a bit higher up, you answered "No" to the legal existence of a
"complete program".

You seem to be being inconsistent, here.  Would you care to resolve this
inconsistency?  Does copyright law recognise the concept of a "complete
program" or doesn't it, or is it a bit squidgy?

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).