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A comment on AGPL != Awesome GPL. Parent comment

Re:AGPL != Awesome GPL by jrockway on Saturday February 20, 2010 @11:22PM (#1140107)
Yes, exactly. The license clause can only be enforced because of copyright law, and fair use is allowed for by the copyright law. The rights given to you by the law supersede anything a license says, because without that law, the license would be completely meaningless.

(In theory, the reason EULAs work is because when you run the program, you are copying it from disk to RAM. This is why they are believed to be very shaky, as copyright law does not specifically consider copying from disk to RAM inside a black box to be "copying".

The GPL is on firmer ground, because it covers copying for distribution to other people. That is a situation that copyright law is specific about.)

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Re:AGPL != Awesome GPL by davisp on Saturday February 20, 2010 @11:32PM (#1140129)
LOL, WHUT?

This is exactly why people like me get confused about such things. From the little reading I've done I tend toward the "copyrights sound like the solution, and everything else is a twisted interpretation of that" point of view, but I'm only well read enough to know that I'm not well read enough to have an actual opinion.

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