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Comment by herge | Hacker News Reader

How can a license allow modification without redistribution?

It's sometimes hard to believe, but our current laws seems to allow that you can be forbidden from modifying a piece of software even for your own personal use.

I think where it would come into legal question is a situation more like "modifying our software, running the modified version on a server, and making a profit from the service that server provides." In other words, modifying for commercial use.

Even more interesting: copyright laws seems to indicate that playing/singing a song that someone else wrote, even in the shower, may be infringement.

Um, no. You have to publish or perform it publicly to be infringing. If you sign it at home, or record yourself singing it at home, or record a copy of the original at home, you're still not infringing as long as you don't attempt to distribute it.

Unless your shower is located on a stage and you charge admission for people to listen to you sing in the shower, but I'm pretty sure that's not what you meant.

Why do you have to redistribute something in order to modify it? Just modify it for your own personal use.

I can't think of a single use case where I would want to hack on a 32 year old OS without distributing it.

Not quite the same, but it may be good enough for you: I guess you can distribute a patch, combined with a URL to the original download.

Since when do you need a license to modify something for your own personal use? If they've given me access to the source, I can just start editing to my heart's content...

Practically, yes, but legally, you may not have the rights to.

That's why it's explicitly listed as part of Freedom 1 of the four freedoms of software: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

DVD players.

So you can't publish a modified version.

But can you publish a diff, which someone could use to recreate your modified version?

FWIW, the ROM community does this sometimes.

There are SueprMarioBros. edits where they only distribute the patching file and the patcher program... just not the original ROM itself. They leave that for you to find somewhere...

If it were to avoid a patent infringement then it could still be considered contributory infringement - ie you [knowingly] provided the necessary parts, methods, information that enables someone else to perform the infringement.

That's not going to be the case here as the code is too old to be patent encumbered.

Things are certainly moving towards there being a wide definition of contributory copyright infringement, eg cases against torrent file sites that don't store copyright works. It would be pretty asinine and regressive to punish someone for publishing instruction on a copyright work could be modified, IMO, but the law isn't known for always making sense.

https://ilt.eff.org/index.php/Copyright:_Infringement_Issues...

If you paid for a license to something and they provide the source with purchase, but don't want the source shared or modifications to it shared either.

In reality, if redistribution of source is forbidden, restricting unreleased modifications of source is hard to enforce.

How can a license do anything? They write the license, the government enforces it.

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