uddeborg@chalmers.UUCP (G|ran Uddeborg) (12/18/86)
In article <3@kuling.UUCP> christer@kuling.UUCP (Christer Johansson) writes: >Sweden doesn't have the broken copyright laws that the US has, so we don't >need such things as gnu licenses. The swedish copyrigt law only applies to >programs if they're works of art. (In a lawsuit recently visicalc was found not >to be a work of art. The same would probably hold for emacs). Disregarding any implied opinions, this is not the whole story about what happended. To prevent any misunderstandings, this is what happened: A person had been copying large amount of programs. He had been advertising his services in magazines, so it was obviously not "for personal use" only. Some program distributors sued him in an attempt to get a precedent. The courts descision: "business programs", like Visicalc, can not be considered to be a work of art, and are not protected by law. "game programs" on the other hand ARE works of art, and ARE protected by law. Some comments I have seen claims that this was a way for the court to say that no clear rules existed. A way to say "We don't know!" if you wish. We are certainly still waiting for a precedent from our "supreme court". I hope this information is accurate, but I might have missed or forgotten some details. If anybody has better information, please correct me. -- "For me, UNIX is a (way of) being." G|ran Uddeborg uddeborg@chalmers.{UUCP,CSNET}