[Corpora-List] Licensing output of a GPL'd morphological analyser

[Raphael Mudge]

IANAL - but... from the GNU Licenses FAQ:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLOutput
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#CanIUseGPLToolsForNF

Is there some way that I can GPL the output people get from use of my  
program? For example, if my program is used to develop hardware  
designs, can I require that these designs must be free?
In general this is legally impossible; copyright law does not give you  
any say in the use of the output people make from their data using  
your program. If the user uses your program to enter or convert his  
own data, the copyright on the output belongs to him, not you. More  
generally, when a program translates its input into some other form,  
the copyright status of the output inherits that of the input it was  
generated from.

So the only way you have a say in the use of the output is if  
substantial parts of the output are copied (more or less) from text in  
your program. For instance, part of the output of Bison (see above)  
would be covered by the GNU GPL, if we had not made an exception in  
this specific case.

You could artificially make a program copy certain text into its  
output even if there is no technical reason to do so. But if that  
copied text serves no practical purpose, the user could simply delete  
that text from the output and use only the rest. Then he would not  
have to obey the conditions on redistribution of the copied text

Can I use GPL-covered editors such as GNU Emacs to develop non-free  
programs? Can I use GPL-covered tools such as GCC to compile them?
Yes, because the copyright on the editors and tools does not cover the  
code you write. Using them does not place any restrictions, legally,  
on the license you use for your code.

Some programs copy parts of themselves into the output for technical  
reasons—for example, Bison copies a standard parser program into its  
output file. In such cases, the copied text in the output is covered  
by the same license that covers it in the source code. Meanwhile, the  
part of the output which is derived from the program's input inherits  
the copyright status of the input.

As it happens, Bison can also be used to develop non-free programs.  
This is because we decided to explicitly permit the use of the Bison  
standard parser program in Bison output files without restriction. We  
made the decision because there were other tools comparable to Bison  
which already permitted use for non-free programs.




On Jan 15, 2010, at 8:31 AM, Adam Radziszewski wrote:

> Dear corpora users,
> we've got a formal problem with understanding of GPL licences when
> applied to a morphological analyser and its output. I'm sure someone
> before has dealt with a similar issue (and this may be of interest to
> others as well), so I'm asking for help here.
>
> Let's assume a morphological analyser is released under GPL. It
> consists of an extensive lexicon (which in binary form is compiled to
> a transducer) and the actual source code of the transducer and some
> interface. The analyser reads plain text, tokenises it and outputs a
> sequence of tokens with sets of tags attached (each word is assigned
> its entry from the underlying lexicon).
>
> The problem is: does the licence require that a corpus which is
> obtained by running the analyser must be released under a similar
> licence as well?
>
> Why yes: source code is "the preferred form of the work for making
> modifications to it [a work]" (www.gnu.org), thus in case of such an
> analyser, it should include the lexicon as well. What the analyser
> actually does is to systematically dump parts of its lexicon (thus its
> source code) and attach them to output. So the resulting corpus
> actually contains parts of the source code of the analyser.
>
> Why no: this situation resembles using the GNU compiler. When
> compiling some code, gcc outputs some parts of its components to
> generate the resulting object/binary. Yet nobody claims that any
> output of gcc automatically becomes GPL'd.
>
> Any ideas welcome.
>
> Regards,
> Adam Radziszewski
> Wrocław University of Technology
>
> _______________________________________________
> Corpora mailing list
> Corpora at uib.no
> http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora

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