Re: [gentoo-dev] Copyright issues (Was: udev-ng?)

["Petteri Räty" <betelgeuse@gentoo.org>]

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On 19.11.2012 18.33, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 11:10 AM, Peter Stuge <peter@stuge.se> wrote:
>> Anthony G. Basile wrote:
>>> The answer appears to be that a file is the unit
>>
>> I personally consider it to be smaller; a number of lines within
>> a file, or even a single line, all depending on things.
> 
> Yup - any creative expression is copyrightable.  Your two line email
> is completely copyrightable, and so is the one line you quoted.  That
> said, Anthony couldn't have used copyright to prevent you and I from
> quoting him, as it would almost certainly be considered fair use.
> That doesn't mean that his email wasn't copyrightable - only that
> copyright is not an impervious protection.
> 

Under Finnish law there's the concept threshold of originality and I
doubt you would get a court to accept a single line of email for that.
There's also a body creating precedent for it but I haven't investigated
their decisions. I tried googling but couldn't find a source for it but
I think FSF has also operated so that they haven't required copyright
assignment for single patches worth a couple lines. This is my memory
from talking to a GNU maintainer some years back.

Regards,
Petteri


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