Messages in this thread | | | From | "Grant R. Guenther" <> | Subject | Re: "legal" advice required | Date | Tue, 31 Dec 1996 10:34:20 -0500 (EST) |
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> This is a familiar problem, as I have encountered it while working on the > Xircom parallel ethernet adaptors.
Yes, I actually remember chatting with you about that.
> As a first port of call I would recomend that someone contacts the > manufacturer and asks for permission to use the byte sequence. A parallel > port CD-ROM drive is not exactly rocket science, with plenty of models on > the market, they won't be giving anything to the `competition'. In fact > they are gaining support for another OS for free.
All this makes sense, but I haven't been able to locate the manufacturer on the 'net, and I don't have an address for them either. A contact at one of the U.S. manufacturers of such devices told me they were in Berlin, but that's all I know. I think the guys at S.u.S.E. may follow up on this.
> A second method would be to require the device driver to be around at build > time.
An good idea, in the general case, but these devices are most often used for installations, so we're back to distributing that binary sequence on a boot floppy, or using some silly loader program. In the end, I decided that it wouldn't be a big deal for the installer program to prompt the user to insert the Freecom floppy ... And, if the user initialised the drive in DOS, even that isn't necessary (although I just realised that I neglected to provide a tool to determine if the drive is already initialised, but the verification logic is there in the loader, if anybody wants to extract it).
> [...] in the European Union, as I understand the law, the > byte sequence is not copyrightable as it is required for operating the device.
And this is what I was hoping someone would elaborate upon.
> For those who doubt the validity of the above statement the European Union > issued a directive that all member states will have implemented as law. The > purpose of the directive is to provide for fair competition and try and > prevent abuse of a monopoly position in the computer industry. The rough gist > of the directive is that anything required for a hardware-hardware, > hardware-software, software-software or software-user interface is excluded > from copyright protection (and possibly patents as well but I am not to sure > here; the draft directive did at least).
A number of people have posted replies based on US law, which really doesn't apply here: the product is made in Germany and distributed in the E.U., my driver was 'commissioned' by a German distributor, and I'm in Canada.
But the other issue is whether it is permitted - by the GPL - to include such binary sequences in the Linux source, even if the manufacturer approves.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------- Grant R. Guenther grant@torque.net --------------------------------------------------------------------------
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