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Re: Hey Terekhov: Wallace lost. Who'd guess.... ;)


From: David Kastrup
Subject: Re: Hey Terekhov: Wallace lost. Who'd guess.... ;)
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2006 12:53:29 +0200
User-agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.0.50 (gnu/linux)

Alexander Terekhov <terekhov@web.de> writes:

> "Alfred M. Szmidt" wrote:
>> 
>>    > Why doesn't Daniel attack OpenBSD? Or Dragonfly BSD? Or FreeBSD?
>> 
>>    He doesn't attack the BSD because the BSD license terms don't
>>    contain any price-fixing provisions.
>> 
>> Neither does the GNU GPL; infact, it contains terms that protect the
>> right to charge a fee.  From Section 1:
>> 
>>      You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy,
>
> -----
> Here, the defendants attempt to conflate the definition of intangible
> copyright assets with the physical media in which a work is embodied:
> “Ownership of a copyright, or of any of the exclusive rights under a
> copyright, is distinct from ownership of any material object in which
> the work is embodied. ..”;17 USC sec. 202.
>
> The present claim is for price fixing in the relevant market of
> intangible intellectual property assets in computer programs (the Linux
> operating system) and not an action concerning tangible media or
> “physical acts” involving the distribution of tangible media in which a
> copyrighted work may be fixed. 
> -----

But RedHat does not sell its copyright, it merely licenses copies of
the copyrighted material.  The "intangible intellectual property
assets" remain in the possession of RedHat.  You can, at best, claim
that RedHat wilfully devalues its own property by licensing copies
under cost.  But devaluing one's property does not "fix the price" of
it.  And anyway, RedHat's operating system business is operating at a
profit, and _exactly_ because of the advertising they make via the
freely available Fedora.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum


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