Fair use

Posted Jun 1, 2007 8:52 UTC (Fri) by forthy (guest, #1525)
In reply to: Fair use by xoddam
Parent article: A day at the Open Source Business Conference

> Your neighbours may complain about noise pollution, but that's
> a separate matter!

It's not. Public performances are controlled by copyright. If you intentionally give a public performance (i.e. not in your shower, unless you put the video on YouTube), you need the copyright holder's agreement.

Putting a program for everybody's use on a web server is probably the equivalent of "public performance". The law possibly doesn't say anything about "public performance" of programs (because literally, this would mean "read the source code out aloud" or something like that), so it's not a well-defined legal term. Therefore, the Affero license goes through the "modification" clause. After all, if you run an unmodified program, the source is available, anyway.