Re: "legal" advice required

Grant R. Guenther (grant@knot.torque.net)
Tue, 31 Dec 1996 10:34:20 -0500 (EST)


> 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.

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Grant R. Guenther grant@torque.net
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