[Lexicog] DDP and copyright

[billposer at ALUM.MIT.EDU]

Ron Moe writes:

>As far as I know there is no law that affects the use of
>software in producing a book.

There actually is such a law, namely ordinary copyright law.
The nexus is the situation in which text is inserted by a program.
This issue has arisen in the case of code generators such as
Bison, which generates LALR parsers for context-free languages.
It is the GNU project analogue of the proprietary Unix program yacc
("yet another compiler compiler"). For the most part Bison generates
code based on specifications provided by the user, but it also
copies into the generated program a standard parser which is
copyrighted and in principal subject to the same license as the
Bison program itself. Any program containing a parser generated
by Bison is therefore a derivative work of Bison and subject
to the license under which Bison is distributed, namely the
GNU General Public Licence (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt).
The result would be that any program containing a parser
generated by Bison would have to be distributed under the GPL.
In this particular case, the GNU project decided to allow Bison to
be used to generate non-free software and so added an exception
to the license for Bison. (This issue is discussed in the GPL FAQ:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#TOCCanIUseGPLToolsForNF.)

The upshot is that in general using a program to generate part or
all of a publication does not give the holders of the copyright
in the program any rights in the publication. However, if the
program inserts copyrighted material into the program, copyright
issues DO arise.

[I am not a lawyer. If you need real legal advice you should
consult a qualified attorney.]





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